Miriam Van Hee – a political poet?

In 2017 Flemish poet Miriam Van Hee won the Ultima Prize.

Of course, she has won prizes before this : Jan Campert Prize; Dirk Martens Prize; Herman de Connick Prize etc.

But with the Ultima Prize Flemish Culture Award went a bronze statue, and 10,000 euros.
This prize affirmed her status.

She is also a participant in the Puzzling Poetry trilingual innovative app :
studiolouter.nl

She was born in Ghent in the 1950s, studied Slavic Studies at university, and taught Russian in schools.
She has translated from the Russian such writers as Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, into Dutch.

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Her first books were met with a little puzzlement, and then categorised : Neoromatic, they said. This was not it, no. A sense of bleakness, exploring of isolation and loneliness, became predominant.
This changed later, and her work took on a new vibrancy, outwardness.

I have misrepresented here. The earlier books were realist, dealt with real subjects. That, of course, is indeed bleak. The world is nowhere near as settled and human-friendly as we think it is.

Her work has sought out places of healing, of peace from our turmoil of experiences that living is.

Her use of language and imagery have marked her out from her peers. Among Flemish writers of her time we have what has been termed the baroque style. Her language was the plain style, the everyday, ‘conversational’ style.

She has much, I find, in common with the Dutch poetry Rutger Kopland. He was also misnamed on first publication as a ‘nostalgic writer’.
If we take his An Empty Spot to Stay : that is what I always wanted to be/ an empty spot for someone to stay – alongside her own earlier writings, we find a similarity of questing style, quiet, ultimately sane, an undeceived awareness. But also an acknowledgement of emotion, and an unwillingness to allow emotion too great a say: a search for balance.

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A phrase we find repeated from those earlier poems is ‘not afraid.’ We find it in Brussels, Jardin Botanique:

… it’s going
to rain, you think, and that you aren’t afraid.

and again, in Sycamores at Nimes Station:

they were growing old and would die
as we would but without fear…

The language betrays us.
There is no drama, no system of valuing here, other than the everyday sensibility we all employ.
The denied fear, with what seems such an easy gesture, is the existential fear, nonetheless, it is THE fear. How can we not be afraid of death?

The rain?
Did we leave the washing out?
No, this is the periphery, a sideways approach, to universal fears.

How can we not be afraid?
We are alive. Now. That is another time. This is the time for life.
That is the subtext.

In the Brussels poem someone asks, about transience:

whether you write to counter that
and if not, is it therapeutic then

Ah, yes the easy questions that demand easy answers. Living is a complex experience. Thinking can make it seem… accessible to thought; but it is not, except in fragments. For living is multi-cognitive.
Elsewhere she writes to the effect that she writes, as if to answer this earlier question, to integrate experiences and sense of self in the world, together.

All quotes are from Judith Wilkinson.

I have written elsewhere with reference to Rutger Kopland, that there does seem a strong phenomenology slant to his writing. I find it here also.
They both employ the ‘conversational’ tone; they both are quiet, ruminating, writers, and both are focussed on the here and now.

It is often said that Rutger Kopland had a anti-metaphysical sensibility.
This did not stop him reading and quoting St Augustine. The trick is to be, and remain, open.

Death is a constant, because it is… inscrutable?… to both writers.

Miriam Van Hee has a lovely poem, Summer End On The Leie, which begins, saying:

this is what a painter would see….

to counter, later:

how do you paint that you’ll never
walk here again, struggling
while your father holds you by the hand

And how that last image conveys so very much. It is, yes, a visual image, but it is also an experience, that struggling child with all her wants, annoyances, moods and excitements tumbling together.

Life, the here-and-now, are not just what is before us, it is how we react to it, what we bring to it, and what we’ll take away. The here-and-now is the focal point, only, of who knows how many dimensions of experience.

There is a still centre to these poems, a carefully discovered spot from where the writer can choose and manipulate words and language, mood and sensibility, to produce such multi-layered writing.

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So how does she achieve her effects?
She eschews all format other than line-integrity and stanza form. There are no upper case letters, no stops; the only punctuation allowed are commas, to emphasise/clarify meaning.
And yet the lines are strongly metrical; there is the echoic whisper of assonance. 

The line follows thought, and breaks where thought moves. It takes great craft, skill, to arrange the line like this. The thought is often ruminative, considering a past action or event – after all, whatever we are aware of is a past event. To register a real now in a meaningful and full way still entails a future action of recording. All records are of past events. 

Anne Marie Musschoot in her essay With A View of the Landscape, the Poetic World of Miriam Van Hee, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55747832.pdf writes of the search for interiority in her writing. It is as though part of an equation with ‘out there’. The search for self space is very much in keeping with the European experience in the time of closed frontiers, entrenched political confrontation – to encapsulate, part of the Cold War experience for those on or near the front lines.

This can also be found in her use of language, avoiding rhetoric and big concepts. Her language persuades as all language does, is always rhetorical to a degree, but she asks us to listen and to also prompts us to think. The essay says: ‘Great’ feelings are expressed simply and unassumingly, in a manner averse to pathos and reduced to everyday proportions, in language closely resembling natural speech.  
That is, not street speech : the brag and self-promotion of ‘street’, nor the ‘social glue’ of like-sounds, phrases, but communication that is loaded with gender, culture, one’s time, one’s experience and response to one’s time.

She is often considered a ‘domestic’ writer, concerned with home, children, limited environment. There is always, as we noted above, the other part of her equation. The ‘distance’, and the longing are part of the exploration, mapping, of self’s space in collective society. This in itself is an act of refusal that is also a positive act of valuing. 

An interview in stellarmarispoetry https://stellamarispoetry.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/buitenland-miriam-van-hee/

has: 
The four elements – earth, water, air and fire – keep playing their game; every new landscape offers a treasure: you remembered / all those sunsets / behind the dark forests / breath-taking / sunsets. Apart from the different landscapes, she also ‘touches’ the earth’s origins: the earth’s crust moved and continents / they rose as tall, rebellious children, / they crashed / on others and out the fire / rose mountains, heavy and mad.

We also read in this article:
besides,/the word apricot disappeared and Moscow,/
which I would very much want to read as a reference to Inger Christensen’s Alfabet (published 1981), along with referencing the status of opennness of her study-centre, heart, of Slavic Europe and Asia. 
The fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of Russia, coincided with an opening up in her work.

So, is she a poet of resistance?

If we consider the Russian poets she has translated, then we can see that all were poets of resistance, poets of personal value in mass society.

Miriam Van Hee’s choice of non-punctual, upper-case avoidance, writing style, echoes the approach by East European poets in the Cold War. There – see Zbigniew Herbert, for example – the style challenges the monolithic power-structures imposed upon them. By inverting the grandiosity, style, structures of discourse, of the Socialist Realist ideology, they sought to undermine its energy-sources, their tentacular reaching into lives.
Miriam Van Hee grew up in that environment, in the midst of the post-War world of the Soviet experiment, and its human costs, and of the West’s at times maniacal responses and posturing.

Also, the path Miriam Van Hee has travelled in her books bears many similarities in tone and response to that of the East German writer Elke Erb.
Elke Erb has relentlessly sought out the self-value, not just of herself, but for each of us. She has also sought to identify power-structures in society, cultures, social interactions, and to refuse and defuse them, whether they be gender-based, economic (which, of course, are all inter-connected), political etc.

I argue that both experienced similar journeys towards wholeness, and away from vacuous but vicious social and political constructs.

Other voices are always given equal weight in Miriam Van Hee’s poems, the ‘I’ does not declaim or dominate. There is a searching out of the workings of democracy in this.

If we look again at the Summer End On The Leie, it begins:

this is what a painter would see :
the bleached grassy bank, chestnuts
and lime trees….
On the other bank a walker, and his
thoughts, how do you paint those
………..
……………

from where we’re seated you can’t see
the water itself and I’m still wondering how you
paint distances…..
……………….
……………… and how you capture the past
when you still walked there yourself

how do you paint that you’ll never
walk there again…….

Is there a teasing-out of who, and how that who, holds the definite interpretations? In effect, the accepted translation of experience and reality? In other words, who determines the power-relations between people, between personal and public, between personal knowledge and accepted knowledge?

In The Pyramid of The Sun (Teotihuacan) she writes of how the singular personal act of climbing the pyramid reveals further and further views. Of what? Of how the pyramid is part of bigger complex, how other pyramids show further off, how houses and dusty roads appear : ‘a kind one connectedness’.
The poem ends:

you thought of the birds again, you’d
always been in awe of them, the way
they’d spread their wings at the last moment,
to set sail in the sky

A form of transcendence? Of the ability of the singular human experience to experience a kind of ‘freedom’?

In Kriekerijstraat, Sint-Amandsberg , she writes:

there are gardens that have escaped someone’s
watchful eye…..

(Kriekkerijstraat, is the part of Ghent the writer grew up. If you look it up on Google Maps you find an incredibly clean, litterless, un-graffitti’d area. Astonishing. Like somewhere that has indeed ‘escaped someone’s watchful eye’)

If my argument has validity, then it may be possible to read those early books, the snowed-in landscapes, the isolated and shut-down discourse, as empathetic responses to the Cold War human experiences of cultures she found sympathy with early-on. Enough to pursue three year’s of highly concentrated study, and many, many years teaching, and translating.

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The fullest current resource for the writing of Miriam Van Hee, in translation, is the generous selection of Judith Wilkinson, and available on Poetry International.
The site also has a great introduction to the writer, and lists availabilty. There is also a generous bibliography:

https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/866/Miriam-Van-hee/en/tile

The Shoestring Press selection of her work, Instead of Silence (1997), has long been out of print.

The translator, Judith Wilkinson does certainly need mention, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Wilkinson

Her own website:
judithwilkinson.net

Jens Meijen

ON Friday 8th April, the ‘High Road to Culture – The Low Countries‘ site published in their Friday Verses slot, a poem by the Belgian poet Jens Meijen.

Jens Meijen is almost unknown in the English-speaking world, which is a great shame.
His poem Luxe/Luxury took me by surprise with its reach, its implications, and its assured style. And also by its humour.
Translated by Paul Vincent, I have now gained permission to share it here, and have also included their biographical support details.

www.the-low-countries.com

This week’s Friday Verses are written by Jens Meijen. We translated Luxe (Luxury). This poem first appeared in Dutch in Het Liegend Konijn, a magazine for contemporary Dutch-language poetry.

Jens Meijen (Beringen, b. 1996) holds Master’s degrees in Literature and European Studies and works as an assistant and postgraduate researcher in political science at the Catholic University of Leuven. His first poetry collection, Xenomorf, was published by De Bezige Bij in 2019, and in 2020 won the C. Buddingh’ Prize for the best debut in Dutch. His first novel, De Lichtjaren (The light Years, De Bezige Bij), will appear in August 2021. Besides pursuing his creative writing, he works as a journalist and literary reviewer for Humo, a freelance translator, and member of the central editorial committee of the literary magazine Dietse Warande en Belfort. He has published previously in literary periodicals such as De Revisor, Kluger Hans, deFusie, Hard//hoofd and Deus Ex Machina. In 2016 he was elected as the first young Belgian National Poet.

Luxury

the customer knows that the paris fashion store where the customer
buys clothes channels all its income
into tax havens: where the palm trees are green with
dollars
the sun a lump of gold, the moon a lump of gold, the nipples
little lumps of gold
the birds long opulent tails
waving in the wind
and tax-deductible balance-sheet items are unloaded
onto the windscreen of an azure Maserati

the customer puckers its lips
diverts the air currents to its mouth,
cash flows, tangling roots
the riparian motions
that flow along the seabeds of the mouth

the customer complains about the careless stitching on the hem
of the cut-price trousers
and hence complains about the lax child labourer who sewed it
out of shame the customer eats the chemical granules that
are supposed to remove damp from the trousers and so
unexpectedly finds damp after all in the crotch

the corporation selling clothes channels
the streets rot underfoot
as if the customer steps in hot chocolate
the cut-price moccasins get stuck
in the chocolate
now the customer has to continue barefoot
and travel along mountain trails, meandering
paths, bays overlooking the ocean
the sun squeezed under its armpits
the moon wrapped in a cloth and held close
like a baby

suckling, stroking, a sweet rough skull
and so on the way to the edge of the world
to undreamt-of secrets, hidden under blushing bushes
looking for jewels, salty shells with ribbed rims
the world a Rubik’s cube
the customer forgets it is a customer
and thinks a final thought: I could serve as
an ash tray-holder make a career of it 
build a life out of it would be cool
so fucking cool

Enjoy reading.

Further information:

https://www.jensmeijen.be

Alfred Giraud’s 'Pierrot Lunaire'

Alfred Giraud’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’, translated by Gregory C Richter. Published by Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri, 2001.
ISBN  1931112029

This is the first full translation into English of this seminal book of poems, originally published in France, in 1884.
The translation, ‘renderings’ he terms them, is by Gregory C Richter, professor of linguistics at Truman state University, Missouri.
He presents here a bilingual, at times trilingual publication of the complete book, Pierrot Lunaire.
He gives the original French text with English ‘render’ per poem per page. As a selection of the poems were early-on translated into German, he also publishes the German version of the poems selected. The German translator Otto Erich Hartleben, he points out, did not stick to straight translation but gave ‘versions’ that at times vary from the the originals.
For those readers with German, this is a special for you. There are translations of several poems by other German writers here also.

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Alfred Giraud was a Belgian writer. Alfred Giraud was the pen name of Alfred Kayenbergh, from Louvain, Belgium. He was born in 1860, and died in 1929.

Originally a law student, literature was his obsession, and he happily embraced the role of Decadent writer, after Baudelaire, and owned influences by contemporary Symbolists such as Paul Verlaine, Stephen Mallarme, Leconte de Lisle.

Pierrot Lunaire was, surprisingly, his first major publication, in 1884, when he was aged 24. It was a success, and continued to attract attention and influence the European art scene for decades.
He continued to write poetry, plays and critical articles throughout his life.

The German writer Otto Erich Hartleben translated a selection from the work not long after publication, in 1893. He translated the whole book eventually, but it was the selection that became the main source for other artists.

And, yes, I am thinking of Arnold Schoenberg, here. He used Otto Hartleben’s translation of twenty one selected verses for his magnificent sprechstimme Pierrot Lunaire Op21, in 1912. 

Alfred Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire is based on characters from the traditional Italian commedia dell’arte. As well as Pierrot himself, we find here also arch-rival Harlequin. Columbine, though, plays a minor role. We find another, unfamiliar character, the elderly Cassander.

The commedia was experiencing one of its periodic returns to popularity: witness Pablo Picasso’s use of the troupe in his Rose period (1904-6) paintings. Of course, connected with this is Rainer Maria Rilke basing one of his Duino Elegies on the painting, circa 1912-22.
Paul Verlaine’s Claire de Lune, after Theodore de Banville (1842), captures some of the essence of the period, and, of course, Claude Debussy made the essence more concrete, so to speak with his Pierrot song (1881) and the Suite bergamesque.

The commedia was a key cultural element throughout the period.

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The poems were written in a very strict rhyme pattern, adapting the French syllabic basis of a strict syllabic line of seven syllables.
The rhyme scheme with one or two variations only, is as follows:

A
B
b
a

a
b
A
B

a
b
b
a
A

A thirteen-line poem.

Within this scheme, though, there are other disciplines: the first line is repeated in line seven, and line thirteen. Lines one and two of the poem are repeated in lines seven and eight.

The structure is like that of a Rondel. In poem 50, Bohemian Crystal, the poem’s narrator speaks of rhyming in roundelays/rondels.

Le serenade de Pierrot (poem 6)

D’un grotesque archet dissonant
Agacant sa viole plate,
A la heron, sur une patte.
Il pince un air inconvenant.

Soudain Cassandre, intervevant,
Blame ce nocturne acrobate,
D’un grotesque archet dissonant
Agacant sa viole platte.

Pierrot la rejette, et presenant
D’un poigne tres delicate
Le vieux par sa roide cravate.
Zebre le bedon du genant
D’un grotesque archet dissonant.

(I give the repeating lines in bold.)

Gregory C Richter’s ‘rendering’ is as follows:

Tormenting his viol
With grotesque, discordant bow –
Like a heron standing on one claw –
He pinches out a painful air.

Suddenly Cassander intervenes
And scolds the nightly acrobat
Tormenting his viol
With grotesque, discordant bow.

Throwing aside the viol,
With ultradelicate grace
Pierrot now takes him by his tie
And zebra-stripes the oldster’s paunch
With grotesque, discordant bow.

Rhyme scheme nor syllabic count could be saved, but sense and intent have been. Whatever you think of these translations/renderings they do convey theme and line-sense throughout.
It is also interesting to see this Pierrot not averse to taking the upper hand.

The Introduction notes how the book divides into three parts. The opening poems and last poems are more peaceful in mood, whilst the central section, poems 17-30, veer into the grotesque. Think of Belioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Here we find poems on Absinthe, Suicide, Decapitation.
Poem 23, Begging for Heads has some wonderfully grotesque imagery:

A bucket, red and full of sawdust
Lies within your clenched embrace,
O Guillotine, mad escapee,
Wandering before the prison!

Could we say of the form, that the first stanza establishes the scene, the second one examines the scene, and the third one explores it further?

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I was so looking forward to this book; it has been prohibitively expensive.

You could say the tone, rather than the characters, capture that period when Romanticism blended into Aestheticism. There is also the influence of more classical attitudes here, the Parnassian writing the younger Alfred Girauld admired.
Pierrot, himself, although quite a ‘dandy’, does not have the effete quality that later works delimit for him.

How would you characterise the work?
It is not a psychodrama, except in the most basic sense: the author plays lightly with personal themes, but more robustly with cultural elements and atmospheres of his place and period.
There is no main narrative, or through-line as such; each poem encapsulates the ‘mood’ of the theme. Some veer off into different directions: there are several boat-based poems.
The Ménage à trois of the commedia story: Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin, is alluded to (poem 11) but not central to the book.
In its way it is a very Roman Catholic book: Pierrot’s suicide, whether real or emotional appears in poem 18, but this is followed by the increasingly diabolical poems of the central section.
Poem 31 returns to images – decor – of the opening poems, and the chance to begin anew, but not necessarily changed by the experience: we still have Cruel Pierrot, poem 45, a mocking moon, poem 43. In poem 50, Bohemian Crystal the author has done with the character Pierrot, and steps forward; or another narrator does.
The image of the Bohemian crystal – symbol, he calls it – is an interesting re-take on the crystal flagons of poem 3’s Dandy from Bergamo.

There is a suggested circling of structure, but it is unproductive to look for paralleling as in chiasmic structures. Although poem 6, Pierrot’s Serenade (above) where Pierrot thrashes Cassender, does hold a close position in the structure of the book to poem 45, Cruel Pierrot, where once again Cassender is pummelled.

Tacitly acknowledging the classic commedia storylines, Alfred Giraud here produces an original work.

I place the book with Federico Garcia Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads, in that they both create their own landscapes out of the known world, and fictionally explore characters and events occurring there. These landscapes are part based on known, ‘real’ times and places, just as, say, Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, was a created place based on a number of Border Ballads, and his real environment, including his time’s current themes and attitudes.

And yet, I find myself disappointed by the book.
I expected, that is, wanted, something harder, something more realised and concrete, like in the Gypsy Ballads, the moon glinting like tin, perhaps.
Pierrot’s moon is of another kind: Moonstruck is translated

The wine we drink with our eyes
Flows from the Moon in green waves…

an absinthe moon perhaps – but there is not the passion of Green, how I want you green of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Somnabular Ballad.

Pierrot The Dandy, poem 3, begins:
A fantastic Moonbeam
Lights up the crystal flagons
Of the sandalwood washstand
Of the pale dandy from Bergamo.

And I have to admit, I love the detail.

But perhaps it is the cumulative effect of the verse form, that it is limiting the emotional and imaginative ranges possible.

There are very welcome footnotes throughout – many references are no longer current. The opening poems refer to Breughel, but it is Jan, Breughel The Younger, known as Paradise Breughel, more famed for his flower and landscape pantings.

Alfred Giraud’s images are literary, whereas Federico Garcia Lorca’s are more tactile, drawn from oral sources and then transposed through surrealist techniques married to his own idiosyncratic responses.

There are many gems to be found in Pierrot Lunaire, make no mistake. It is a book to keep going back to again and again.

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And now here’s my challenge to readers: have a go at the verse form, see how it works for you.

Here’s mine, one for the present times:

A Man From Wuhan

A man stands at his window
I wave, he does not wave back.
We chatted a day back;
He stands at his window.

The street is quiet down below
only TVs answer back.
The man is at his window,
I wave. He does not wave back.

That lull after they all go;
They cleared our block an hour back.
My wife, he‘d said… bad attack.
None come, one by one they go.
A man stands at his window.

There is a lot to be learned through imitation: compare the effects of my use of static verb-structures and tenses, and Alfred Giraud’s active, moving ones, for example.
Try it.

Keep well, my friends, and stay safe.