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Coetzee mines jewels of Dutch poetry Small book of translations stands tall as collection of little-known treasures Reviewed by Cynthia Haven |
Sunday, February 22, 2004
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Landscape With Rowers Poetry from the Netherlands Translated and introduced by J.M. Coetzee PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS; 105 PAGES; $19.95
Psychologically, geographically, climatologically -- the Netherlands stands at the opposite pole from J.M. Coetzee's native South Africa, in the same way a wall-size landscape canvas differs from a perfectly executed miniature. Nobel Award-winning novelist Coetzee points out in his introduction to "Landscape With Rowers" that Dutch literature is in a minor language that fully embraces its minor status. It "deprecates itself to a degree puzzling to an outsider like myself, brought up on another Netherlandic literature -- Afrikaans -- that has not been shy to flaunt its modest achievements." Coetzee would be its champion, apparently. And it needs one: There's little else moving and shaking the box of contemporary Dutch literature. Is the box worth moving and shaking? Well, yes. Even in translation, some of these poems are likely to stick to your ribs for some time to come. Gerrit Achterberg's dark, involute, alternately wrenching and ecstatic "Ballad of the Gasfitter" comes to mind, with its wandering sense of "I," a whistle from a man "so far gone that I pray to God." In one of his stanzas he envisions the death, by carbon monoxide poisoning, of the gasfitter and the landlady: "She lay prostrate, one hand stretched out in falling./ In it was clutched a letter that began,/ However wide the world I come again./ It seems that she was overcome while reading." This is a cryptic, troubling work, even if you don't know that Achterberg (1905-62) eventually went mad, living out his life in psychiatric institutions after killing the Utrecht landlady who spurned him. Coetzee neglects the biographical details, neutrally stating that Achterberg's oeuvre is "dominated by a single, highly personal myth: the search for the beloved who has departed and left him bend, a search that takes him on forays into the land of the dead. " Out of the small collection (only six poets are included), novelist and travel writer Cees Nooteboom, born in 1933 in The Hague, is perhaps the most recognizable name. The 70-year-old poet was much honored in the past few years, with the P.C. Hooft Prize, the Dutch language's most prestigious award; the Hansischer Goethe Prize; the Austrian National Prize for European Literature; and the golden medal from the CÌrculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. The erudite Nooteboom, educated by Franciscan and Augustinian monks, makes a single contribution to this volume, his four-part "Basho." It's a rather sly choice of subject for a man best known as a travel writer -- Basho's diary helped popularize the idea of recreational travel in 16th century Japan. "Out of the world you cut an image that bears your name," Nooteboom writes. His observations also include: "We know poetic poetry the common dangers of moonstruckness, bel canto. Embalsamed air, that is all, unless you turn it into pebbles that flash and hurt." Coetzee wrote of Nooteboom's "peculiar misfortune as writer" seven years ago: "He is too intelligent, too sophisticated, too cool ... yet too little anguished by this fate -- this expulsion from the imaginative world of the heartfelt -- to work it up into a tragedy of its own." Nevertheless, Coetzee gambles that Nooteboom's poetry will win him more lasting laurels even than his "delicately crafted, scrupulously self-conscious works of fiction." Other readers may be more intrigued by Sybren Polet's hypnotically experimental "Self-Repeating Poem," or Hugo Claus' "Ten Ways of Looking at P.B. Shelley." The versatile Belgian writer Claus, by the way, is the only Flemish poet included in this volume. In addition to writing novels, dramas, short stories, screenplays, essays and translations, Claus has also directed plays and films -- and achieved a dubious kind of immortality as a former husband of actress Sylvia Kristel, of soft-porn "Emmanuelle" fame. Also included in the volume are Hans Faverey and psychiatrist Rutger Kopland. Selections, in all but Faverey's case, are limited to one per author -- too little to give one an idea of the scope of their voice, interests, range. Some more quibbles: Coetzee attaches no dates to poems, so we don't get a sense of where they fit into the poets' chronologies. A few footnotes might have been helpful, too -- for example, to explain some of the references to the career of the worldly Basho, which may not be generally known. Although the book may serve the function of drawing our attention to these notable poets, it also, of course, draws our attention to Coetzee. In fact, without his name as a draw, this very short (42 pages, once you subtract the facing pages in the original Dutch and illustrations) university press book would be very unlikely to get much notice. Coetzee's own varied life -- as a computer programmer with a doctorate in computer-generated language, as a polyglot "post-structuralist linguist," as an essayist and literary critic, as a world-renowned novelist -- rivals that of the most eclectic of the poets he's translated. Way back before the novels that earned him an unprecedented two Booker Prizes, however, he cherished his own hopes of becoming a poet. Clearly, with his faithful translation from the Dutch and his shrewd assessment of this little-known body of literature, Coetzee's earliest ambition is now yielding a surprising late harvest. Cynthia Haven has written most recently for the Times Literary Supplement of London and Commonweal. |
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