Thursday, January 26, 2006

Paul van Ostaijen


















Belgian poet Paul van Ostaijen (1896 - 1928) described poetry as "a game of words, anchored in the metaphysical". I feel quite determinedly that the opposite is true, and would prefer to call it an investigation with language, anchored in the material. Van Ostaijen's poetry is sorrowful and delicate, and his description of the nature of poetry has so much more charm than mine. I think of a ship's anchor lodged in a cloud.

More charm, and also more desperate need. Van Ostaijen's experience of the Great War in occupied Belgium, from out of which he wrote Feasts of Fear and Pain and Occupied City, helped give rise to his yearning for the purely lyrical, a yearning which could never really be satisfied in the everyday world, except glancingly in poetry.

My hands feel for my hands / incessantly

This is one of my favourite poems of his, from The First Book of Schmoll -

GEOLOGY

Deep seas around the island
deep blue seas surround the island
You do not know
whether the island is of the stars overhead
you do not know
whether the island is on the axis of the earth
deep seas
deep blue seas
the plummet seeks
sinking it seeks and seeking sinks
seeking its own seeking
and goes on
sinking
and goes on
seeking
deep seas
blue seas
deep blue seas
deepblue seas
sinking
seeking
the upside-down stars
doubly blue
and doubly fathomless
When will the blue plummet
in the blue seas
find the green seaweed
and the coral reef

An animal that hunts life towards an imagined peace
- a delusion in a million millenial cells -
like an animal that hunts and finds on its blind fingers
nothing but repetition of enacted action
like an animal
the sailor's plummet
sinks
If this sinking were to settle past your eyes you could not know
a greater emptiness

translated from the Dutch by James S Holmes

1 comment:

Haddock said...

another "Paul van Ostaijen" ...
nice weblog you have...