A.A, Another Side / The Other Side        


(A memoir of a text in translation.)



Antonia

‘Antonia?’ I called out and she ‘Yes, Astrid?’ and when we reached each other we shook hands in the dark, and we walked up to where she had come from, which was only a short walk along the road to the Translators House. I had arrived at Übersetzerhaus Looren, a forty-minute train journey from Zürich followed by a winding bus ride through the dark. The train had taken me as far as the town of Hinwil, where I joined a handful of commuters coming off the late service. We ducked our heads boarding the local minibus. It drove through the dark, stopping unexpectedly at unfamiliar and unlit points along its route, until we reached the outskirts of Wernetshausen, the nearest village to where I would be staying for the duration of my translator’s residency, and where the bus driver knew to tell me to alight. Antonia Maino, the Haus und Gästebetreuerin, met me off the bus as promised. She hurried along the country lane towards me with a torch light that shot its beam from left to right. At least, I had assumed it was her, and it was.

I was shown to what would be my room for the next weeks. I slung my suitcase on the bed and unpacked its contents. I loosely organised my clothes, walking shoes, Compeed plasters, an assortment of spare reading glasses and other travel paraphernalia into the wardrobe and organised my laptop, power pack, notebooks, pens, and finally Van Dixhoorn’s poems and their translations on the desk in front of the darkened window in two corresponding piles. Outside is black. All there is in the reflection of the glass, is my arrival.

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The collected is within reach

Over the coming weeks I want to finish these translations. Years ago I had got as far as submitting a small batch of the translations to a publisher of poetry in translation. After what seemed an unsurmountable long silence, when it came, the response, ‘We are not convinced an English readership is ready for this work.’ 


immobile shape of mountains

On my first morning I see fields dotted with clusters of trees sloping down the hills towards Lake Zürich. Underneath my window, elongated, bendy stalks of yarrow plume out above the grass. Cows stand chomping mechanically, their tails batting at flies. Butterflies and insects zip in disorientated flightpaths, adhering to a traffic code incomprehensible to me. When I look up and squint my eyes I can see the Alps capped with snow in the distance. This landscape breathes itself in and out. I look about the room, at the unmade bed, the suitcase standing empty in the corner of the room, the bare bookshelves above the bed, the spacious desk facing the window; I look at the immobile shape of the mountains through the window and realise that I have longed for this view, for an alternate perspective.

After a protracted, unbroken period in London, I look forward to familiarising myself with this new landscape, going on hikes, exploring the hills. Having this temporary view that my first-floor window frames also offers me a new perspective from which to consider these translations, as if the window tilts to shake off everything from my life that is unconnected and irrelevant to the task at hand, to reframe them in a clearer, more undisturbed light. I glance at the two piles of poems placed side by side on the desk like two distinct alien entities: to the left Van Dixhoorn’s slim volumes and next to them my paper translations. The scant physical evidence of my efforts, the hundreds of hours of my labour mount to a stack no thicker than a Warburtons slice of bread.

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landscape is central to the work

With this canting axis of time and landscape at my disposal, with this newfound freedom that is temporal and spatial, I remember how that initial rejection had impacted and dented my confidence. I had enthusiastically anticipated and prepared for a series of sceptical questions from the publisher about Van Dixhoorn’s strangely familiar yet allusive poems. Yes, I would agree with the sceptical publisher that, indeed, yes, that’s right, this was not the kind of poetry English readers would be familiar with. In Alice Oswald’s work, for instance, stanzas are embellished with an embroidery of wandering footpaths through woodlands, fragrant shrubs of birch and oak criss-crossed by streams and shadows. In her book-long poem Dart, for instance, Oswald traces the eponymous river from its origin to its delta, parsing and exposing the water channels as a trembling human nerve. Van Dixhoorn’s choice of subjects is similarly classical, referencing spring, the elements, overpasses and bridges—

1. for the water level / dark and still / lasts now /
as long as I want / this year / spring has come / early

Pilotage I

Nonetheless, the distinctive qualities of these poems stem not from their subject matter but from the poet’s methodology: Van Dixhoorn’s poems are not so much about landscape, not even as a metaphor for human experience: landscape dictates the form. I was prepared for that somewhat uncertain and probing exchange with a publisher. In the Netherlands his work has garnered major literary prizes since his debut collection Towpath, All quiet, Swallows go in 1994 whilst remaining controversial and divisive. 

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linguistic displacement sheds light on the translations

One critic scathingly referred to his debut collection in newspaper De Trouw as ‘pale, inarticulate and utterly incomprehensible’ and concluded either the author or the poems, probably both, ‘must be autistic.’ Autistic is a curious choice of word with which to describe a poet. The notion that a poet could be so crudely diagnosed by a critic based on his poems is troubling to say the least. But if we can accept that ‘autistic’ was an impoverished, terrible choice of word to use within that context, could we also explore what the critic might have meant by it? Could we for instance analyse these poems in terms of neurobiological symptoms or neurotextual indicators? One might remark how there is scarcely a smell, sound or visual detail in the poems. Yet somehow, on reading and rereading them, it is not far-fetched to say that for all this lack of sensory detail, the poems are hyper-sensitised, particularly to the act of being read. The lines are unsuspecting, even purposefully neglectful I would say, of preceding or subsequent lines, to the point where they frustrate and thwart the intention of the one immediately above or below. The enjambment as ‘dysfunctional’ as it is, does indeed indicate a disregard for and/or absence of social interaction, or at least point to an artless withdrawal from being read.

Obviously, I am not a neuroscientist, neuroaestheticist, psychiatrist or literary critic, but as the reader of these poems and their English translator I’d venture to posit that an autistic reading for the poems is not utterly outside the realm of possible textual diagnosis.

Follow-up readings, or sessions, provided insight into how isolated statements slot together like prefabricated units that mimic and replicate themselves in (non-)identical variations, mechanically shifting back and forth. The lines do not have meaning beyond their immediate, literal sense—a strong indication of a determinedly dualistic, socially non-conformed style of insight. Could these be poems on the spectrum? I was reminded of what had drawn me initially to these poems. The linguistic dysfunction had felt oddly familiar and soothing. This linguistic displacement is exactly what I had felt when I first started learning to speak and write in English. Moreover, it brought back to me how others who spoke to me in English had sounded. To the mind of the girl sponging up the new sounds and constructions, I was not the foreigner. Everyone else around me was. Even if I understood individual nouns and verbs, their intent was often lost on me. After all, what does it mean, ‘just suck it up.’ Language was, poetry is, a beautiful misunderstanding; not simply a tool with which to communicate an end in itself.

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literary misconduct

Pushing into a territory beyond the dismissive, for the critic to call the poet and his poems autistic is at once an accusatory and a defensive imputation of literary misconduct. With the term autistic, the critic understands the poet to be violating our shared cultural understanding of language, namely that a text ultimately be accessible and intelligible (reveal itself) to the reader. Our education and traditions, which insinuate themselves into all aspects of experience and into all types of discourse, from religious domains to popular culture, interpersonal relationships, social media and advertising, and yes, even reaching into the far-flung corners of poetry, encourage us to expect acohesive account that will in turn settle, deliver if you like, a cohesive experience in the reader. Anything that falls outside or short of those deeply ingrained expectations tends to be marginalised or rejected (the accusatory imputation). 

There is an expectation, an unspoken pact between a text and the reader, that even when an initial reading of a poem resists analysis, subsequent multiple readings will unlock the poem, revealing its meaning, a design, a purpose of itself. In calling the work ‘autistic’, the critic asserts that the implicit trust that exists between the text and the act of reading has been broken and that the perceived incomprehensibility of the text is a failure on the part of the poems, not that of the reader: the failure is not his (the defensive part of the imputation).

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I, that is the ten-year-old standing on the grass of the new house looking at the fields, am learning to master this new language. After the initial hesitation, that moment of vertiginous paralysis—as when you stand by the edge of a swimming pool with the depth and temperature of the water unresolved, wobble, regain your balance, breathe in deeply and, steeling yourself, lower yourself cautiously like a glass filled to the brim to the table, only in this case not entering the crystal clear, characterless water of the swimming pool but lowering oneself into the diaphanous, dark void of a new language—like so, I immersed myself in the fluidity of as-yet-atonal sounds, contortionist expressions, misfiring idioms and fidgety prepositions; a new linguistic network that, as I begin to take ownership, incrementally, will help form complex constructions.

It is inevitable that you become discretely plausible yet different versions of yourself in the new language: I will be as two superimposed negatives of the same sky photographed seconds apart.

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o how do you translate that? 

These poems are accessible—by and large random observations, snippets of conversations, idioms and exclamations stacked on top of one another; the absence of punctuation suggesting a narrative or at the minimum an interrelatedness between the lines that keeps you second-guessing and tuned in, as it were, to a radio station with a faltering signal. Intriguing, but nothing too taxing, a comfortable way into a career as a literary translator. This couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s a paradox at the poems’ core. You can read them at a distance but when you start reading them closely they seem to fall apart. What was coherent at one reading unravelled the next. Instead of things becoming clearer as I read and reread the poems, the more I familiarised myself with the work, and the more intimate my relationship grew with the text, the more alienating it was, the more incoherent and confusing the poems. It was exasperating. Far worse than swatting flies.

---

The notion that there is within these poems a narrative to be decoded is further strengthened by a horizontal and vertical ordering of the text. The apparent horizontal order is created through the numbering of fragments from 1 to 4. The vertical order is the suggestion of a relationship between all the fragments with the same number. Yet with every new connection the suspicion creeps up on me that nothing makes sense. Or is it the reading act, restricted by its own repetitive patterns of thought and figurative elisions, that is itself on the spectrum? All the usual ways of discussing a poem are rendered nugatory—there is no story or plot, no theme, there are no characters as such to analyse.

---

I get up from my desk and I go downstairs

I have yet to meet the other translators staying at Übersetzerhaus Looren. Mascha Dabić, an author and translator from Serbo-Croatian and Russian into German, is in the large communal kitchen, her trousers tucked into her socks to ward off the ticks. She explains ticks don’t just spread Lyme disease, they spread encephalitis too.

The button on the kettle clicks. The water is boiled. I take my mug of tea and return to my room. The flip-flop sound of my slippers is comforting to me, to hear my own footsteps resounding in the hall, disappearing up the stairs. I listen attentively and to distraction to the soles of my slippers coming into contact with the stone tiles, and next the heel’s inlay flicking back up to touch the soles of my feet. A thlup, squishy sound. I listen to my own feet thlupping through this translators’ house in which I am a stranger; from the large, communal kitchen into the hall, up the stairs, along the corridor, into my room. I am as if listening to a stranger, a visitor in my own space and time. Translating is beginning. 

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My current state is prosaic: I have sharpened and resharpened my pencil into a heap of yellow-laced wood ribbons. I decide to go back to the beginning.

---

Van Dixhoorn is not satisfied with my choice of ‘Swallows go’ as a title for ‘Zwaluwen vooruit.’ He writes that ‘Zwaluwen vooruit’ is the name of a football club and that he has a preference for ‘Swift swallows.’

‘Zwaluwen vooruit’ is not an obvious name for a football club, in the way that Ajax and Juventus are recognisable names of football clubs, but yes, ‘Zwaluwen vooruit’ could at a stretch be the name of a somewhat obscure, small-to-modest-sized provincial football club. I picture a clump of numbed-by-the-cold football supporters huddling on the sidelines, egging on the players to victory through a fine curtain of rain, ‘zwaluwen vooruit!’ >> ‘Swallows go!’ A battle cry. That exhortation, that forward thrust and propulsion so present in Van Dixhoorn’s poems and his delivery in general, this must convincingly and credibly be preserved in the English version. As battle cries go, ‘zwaluwen vooruit!’ is a bit of a mouthful, even if you speak Dutch fluently. The phonetic energy tapers, I could even say dribbles away between the –uwen and voo– sounds. Try it: it will sound more like an egg-race battlecry than the go-go-go roar rising up from the spectating crowds at a Champions League final. This is not the name of a club I imagine will be promoted up the league anytime soon.

---

My memories of me are on no occasion face-on. I am seen—I see myself—only from behind: the shoulder blades stiffened, the back of a nondescript T-shirt, nape of the neck. I want to see her face, I want my spectator-self to see her in this postcard-memory, and I am giving myself the promise of seeing her with this specific rendering, yet there is also this refusal. She, the she of my memory, is not going to let me see her face. I am subject and archivist of my own memory archive. The brain, if that can be a darkroom in this analogy, develops a faded yet hyperreal abstraction that cannot be understood in isolation. There is hyperreality and undiluted abstraction at the same moment, like a filter function that gets added to the alchemical mix of perceived and perception. The photographer Luigi Ghirri describes this hyperreal–abstraction dyad as the disappearing act of the photographer, so that he is never the author, chronicler or director but indistinguishable from those he photographs. As with language, it is through superimposition and interrelating with something else that depth and meaning are given: cohesion is context.

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variations & interactions make my head go spinning

Van Dixhoorn’s preference for ‘Swift swallows’ runs into further obstacles. ‘Swift’ indeed means ‘quick,’ ‘abrupt,’ ‘unhesitating,’ but, awkwardly, and although the taxonomy of each is different, swifts and swallows are also both highly aerial birds. Less of a tongue-twister than a brain-twister: even if the swift as a bird isn’t the first association that springs to mind on hearing the word swift in isolation, that changes when it is positioned alongside or in the frame with swallows. Breaking the translation down into its constituent parts, ‘Swift swallows’ could read as ‘quick gulps,’ ‘swift gulps,’ ‘quick swallows,’ or ‘swift swallows,’ the latter of course maddeningly taking us back to ‘quick gulps.’

As I weigh and balance the different quick swift gulp swallow variations and interactions, my head spins and I lift my chin from the computer screen for a wider perspective. I contemplate the trees absentmindedly and scan for the red kite. In translation, generalisations and definitions are set aside in favour of plurality, fragments, deceptively complex implications and intangible traces that stretch out beneath the surface, much how the roots of the trees dotted in clusters in the field outside my window are intimately connected through an invisible buried network of roots.

---

I follow the steep, overgrown footpath 

through pastureland, through woodlands (at certain points the footpath merges with animal tracks and cattle trails) all the way to the Bachtel summit, where there is a restaurant, like a dollop of cream squirted on top of a Schwarzwäldertorte. I imagine in winter hikers blowing the ice-cold mist from their lips and nostrils, stomping their snow boots on the slippery tiles as they move into the dining room. The mountain peaks on the other side of Lake Zürich loom larger, close. I am at a complete standstill with the translation. I can no longer think through the poems I am translating like I used to, holding different, at times ill-fitting parts in the same mental spacetime continuum, adjusting, editing, readjusting and shifting around, into and through shapes, as one works not only with a singular poem but with a body of work like a train driver controlling all the wheels, cogs, levers, handles, pressure valves and speed dials on the train glinting on the railway tracks in the valley.

I stare at Lake Zürich at the bottom of my eyes as if it’s a puddle of sweat at the base of a climbing wall. Nothing leads me back to the translations. Comparing the Alps to a climbing wall? I try vertiginous, sheer, plunging, escarpment, verdant, unethical, reclamation, polderisation, “ 1, 2, 3, 4” acclivity. Every word is a foothold along a precipice, and I am reeling with uncertainty and just—so—un-footed.  

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where kant occurs elsewhere in the work, 

do I repeat the identical English equivalent? Or do I choose the word that fits best in that specific, individual line? A word will resonate in a different timbre when combined with other words. Yet the repetition of the word is also a feature of the work.

---

how does one translate a discrepancy?

A slip of the tongue?

---

an accident with a deep fryer

During the early years translating Van Dixhoorn, roughly every two to three months I would lock my bike to the steel bike-rack in front of an architecturally dense massing of brick located in the Rivierenbuurt, an upmarket part of Amsterdam. Anne-Mariken Raukema lived, still lives, in the upstairs apartment of this late 1930s Amsterdam School style housing block designed by the architect G.J. Rutgers. Initially, its elaborate scheme of decorative masonry, art glass and sculptural elements was imposing. The ladder windows with their schematically designed horizontal and vertical bars are not unlike Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie: a window and the view is pure imagination, or a cell, imprisoning in monotony repetition. I would plod up the steps, vanishing into the darkness of the steep, obscured entrance to the building and ring the bell. Anne-Mariken would buzz me in, I would climb up, wrestle off my backpack, hang up my coat in the hallway, and follow Anne-Mariken through to the kitchen where we would settle at her yellow-top Formica-table, blow steam rising from our mugs and sift through my questions about the poems.

The light seeped in through the abundance of windows in the flat, and their horizontals and verticals, which had looked so oppressive from the outside, cast long, mesmerising sculptural shadows in the
interior.

Anne-Mariken had suffered third-degree burns in an accident with a deep-fryer and was not long discharged from the burns unit. The paper-thin skin on the backs of her hands and in particular the tissue around her fingers was tight, inflamed-looking, as if each finger had been wrapped too tightly in clingfilm. She could barely bend her expressionless, dimple-less knuckles and I wondered, but never asked, whether our sessions to discuss the translations might not have been part of a strategy between her and Van Dixhoorn to help take her mind off her slow recovery and the pain she must still have been
enduring.

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what side is this “same side”

1. dezelfde kant / ik vraag hem / wat niet betekent / een boot drijft weg / 
als iemand de lege boot vindt / denkt dat //
ik ben verongelukt

Kant translates as side, as in the front or the back of a house, or side of the family. It can be the place where two surfaces of an object meet and it can be one side of a piece of paper. It can be used to refer to an outer edge or a border, like the edge of a table. It is also the water’s edge. Or the side of an argument, a way of looking at things, which is a more abstract application. Kant crops up in countless idioms. For instance, zich kant zetten is when you dig your heels in, and when someone isn’t making sense it touches neither shore nor side > het raakt kant noch wal. More sinister, van kant maken chronicles an act of murder, the reflexive zichzelf van kant maken a suicide, the literal translation > make/go/finish (oneself) over the edge/side.

Van kant zijn on the other hand is shorthand for when everything is neat and tidy, orderly as it should be and I suspect, perversely, a morbid relatedness between death and cleanliness. 

I go back and forth like a hound, sniffing out between the front and the back of a house. What side is this same side? 

In English, the question ‘whose side?’ will more likely make you think which football club is being supported, not the bank along a canal. Kant is far more commonly used to refer to a water’s edge than its English equivalent. Kant is used for anything against which a ship can berth—jetties, mooring posts, quays, banks and the like. 

And this is assuming that “the same side” does indeed belong to a strip of land adjacent to water. This “same side” could as easily refer to the side of the boat cast adrift three lines down. Look, it’s not that side of the boat but the other side of the boat. Port. Not starboard.

We could here be on opposite sides.

One reader will watch from the slippery quay, another quietly take up position on the sluice bridge. A reader, intuitively, fills in blanks. But the requisite and indispensable conditions for the reader to fill in these blanks, which are in every text, are created by, or left by, the poet. It is the task of the translator, often painstakingly through trial and error, layering revision upon revision, writing and overwriting through erasure, to rebuild and remake until there emerges an intimate and binding autonomy that reconciles metre, cadence and meaning in the new language. And here, buried deep within the new poems you will find again these blank patches left by the translator for the reader to find. Ultimately, what will give a line its poetic currency are the unwritten, tacit conceivabilities. Cézanne called these blank patches on the canvas nonfinito: something unfinished as man’s imagination.

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I don’t want the words to be, I need the words to do. 

---

Homesick, I would lean out of my English bedroom dormer and my imagination as a film projector, project the view from my Dutch bedroom window—lake, breakwater, sailing vessels, the white tips of whipped-up wavelets, grebes ducking underwater, ice skating in winter, the ting ting of the rigging ticking incessantly against the masts in the wind as I lay in bed at night, come morning the church spire and windmill puncturing sunrise on the horizon—so flat you could see the curvature of the earth, even when you were told you couldn’t. The two distinct landscapes were like two blueprints. I was afraid that if I were to lose (forget) one blueprint I would slide into the other, never to find my way back to the other shore.

---

—another side / the other side—

---

Van Dixhoorn promises in several of the poems to be home before supper or decides to have fish for supper, or asks himself and/or others who will prepare supper.

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What do the words do?

Van Dixhoorn will rehearse and iterate a particular word, typically a pocket-sized, one-syllable word, like om [a’round] or kant > side, bringing it forward in a poem and across collections. This renders analogous and tangential variations, both on the page and in the reader’s nonfinito. Musing on how to get a grip on these particular words, to identify them and understand how they are used and Van Dixhoorn’s endless fascination with them, I decide on my return from after another walk, which act as diversions, and because it’s uphill and as a desk-bound creature I am unfit and ill-suited to climbing stairs let alone Bachtel summit, dog-tired, my skin clammy and alien, to set myself the simple if monotonous task of extracting every kant in every grammatical configuration or semantic innuendo from every poem Van Dixhoorn had published to date.

I wasn’t sure to what end, but speedreading with my finger scrolling the page like a cursor, with its sole impetus to locate and identify any mention of kant felt like a reflexive, cognitive and far less exhausting rendition of physical mountain plodding. I listed them all. Then what? I decided to apply the same method to the translation. How had I translated kant in each instance? And then for good measure I distinguished between the initial translation and the final, most recent draft.

I listed those too. 

Source / Initial translation /
        Final translation


aan de voorkant / as seen on the other side /
        seen from the other side
aan de ene kant / on that side /
        on the one hand
aan de andere kant / on the other side /
        on the other hand
aan de voorkant / as seen on the other side /
        seen from the other side
aan overkant / on the other side /
        on the opposite side             
van de ene kant / – /
        from one side
naar de andere / – /
        to the other
met een krant / with a newspaper /
        with the papers
dezelfde kant afsluiten / lock the same end /
        closing off the same side
dezelfde kant op / the same end /
        in the same direction
aan de overkant / – /
        on the other side
aan de onderkant / at the bottom side /
        side by side

*

Rust in de tent / All quiet

riskant / – /
        risky
aan de andere kant / – /
        on the other side

*

Zwaluwen vooruit / Swallows go

krant erover / never hind
        rags will cover it
aan de andere kant / – /
        on the other side
aan de overkant / – /
        on the other side
aan de overkant / on the other side /
        from the opposite side
die kant uit to / that side /
        that way
naar de overkant / – /
        across to the other side

*

Armzwaai / Arm wave

aan de andere kant / – /
        on the other side
aan de kant / on the side /
        to one side
aan de kant / – /
        to the side

*

Grote keg / Big batten

op het meest riskante / – /
        at the most risky
op het meest riskante / – /
        at the most risky
witte kant / white side /
        white lace
dezelfde kant / the same shore /
        the same side

*


*

Takken molenwater / Muddled molenwater

aan de overkant / on the other side /
on the opposite bank
aan de overkant uit / on the other side /
on the opposite bank

*

Kastanje jo / Chestnut Joe

aan de achterkant / from the back entrance /
from the back
de krant / – /
the newspaper

Hakke tonen II / Hacktones II

aan de achterkant / – /
from the back

*

Uiterton / Outer buoy

kranten / – /
newspapers
bij welke kant / on whichever bank /
on whichever side

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The obsessive (over)use of a word can get so banal that it erases itself. As if the poet is curing the work from a neurosis or phobia through (over)use and desensitisation. Translation is a discovery of what the words do. 

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I’m not reading. I’m detecting anomalies.

Friedrich Schlegel once pronounced a poem of Friedrich Schiller’s so banal that it would be improved if read backwards. I resolve to test this method on the poems and their translations. Painters do this: they will hang the canvas they are working on upside down. Defamiliarising one’s gaze from the image helps to bring other aspects into view: is there an imbalance in the distribution of paint (in places too dark?) or pigment (too thinly applied?); how do the different section on the canvas relate; is the horizon dipping in the middle; is that eye positioned where it ought to be?

I’m not reading. I’m scanning the poems back to front, or ‘upside down,’ detecting anomalies, which the eye does faster when it isn’t trying to make sense of the words. Think less, do more. Moving backwards through the poems and the translations might have a similar effect. Inverting the direction of reading might transform a factual thing into a compositional value. The word ‘something’ might become a long horizon, ‘minuscule’ could mutate into a jazz beat. Similarly, the poems might reveal a ‘visual rhyme’ or ‘optical alliteration.’    

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poetry is like life: always coming into being.
I don’t see form. I see space and rhythm.

Van Dixhoorn and I cycled from his home in Middelburg to Domburg, a seaside town tucked into the dunes along a part of the North Sea coast. The poet and I seldom discuss his work. Typically, he bats away my queries. So when on this particular bike ride I remarked how the poplars appeared to snap to attention as we cycled past and I craned my neck to see the container ships towering two metres above us with humps of sand and gravel like a caravan of camels moving through the desert, and shared with him that it was as if this landscape (at two metres below sea level) of construction and reconstruction could be taken as a blueprint for the designed functionality of his own poems, that it was as if we were cycling through his poems, and it came as a surprise, a sweet gift, when he confided that as a child, then as student at teacher training college and later as a schoolmaster, he would count the trees as daily he peddled to and fro on the towpaths : 1. 2. 3. 4. 1. 2. 3.

The human brain can count whilst juggling concurrent and competing thoughts. Thoughts, associations, ear-worms—activities that can run parallel, intersect and diverge without causing accident or madness. This lifelong habit had found its way into the work.

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some afternoons I take shelter from the heat with Marina Skalova

The days pass unchanged, punctuated by distracted attempts at translation. On some afternoons I take shelter from the heat under the tumbledown pergola with the Moscow-born, French-language poet Marina Skalova. She is translating the Russian poet Galina Rymbu. I haven’t seen this many insects in, oh, maybe a decade. Beetles, red and black ants, daddy-longlegs, mosquitos, hornets, wild bees, moths, all kinds of butterflies. We swat wasps and flies whilst we swap residency tips and stories about different publishers and whatnot. We cross-reference other translators we know and detail a shared love of industrial ports: she tells me about Marseille and I her about Rotterdam. Our conversation tapers cautiously into the war in Ukraine. This part of the conversation feels well-intended but disingenuous, but now we can’t help but think about war and translation.

Marina then ventures that translation offers an opportunity to appropriate foreign aesthetic values and other forms and styles. It offers an opportunity to pilfer. She tells me that in his preface to his translations from Friedrich Schiller, the Czech writer Jan Evangelista Purkeyně saw translation as an immediate reaction against the destructive impact of foreign cultures, a literal act of revenge for the damage the Slavic world had suffered at the hands of the Germans, Italians and Hungarians. Translation is a noble form of retaliation and reclamation. Of reconstruction incorporating new materials. Reclamation. Language is colonised and colonising. If it doesn’t, it ends up in a cul-de-sac.

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accepting that mistakes are a part of the work

Art historians recently found that a Mondrian painting has been hanging upsidedown for seventy-five years. Despite the discovery, ‘New York City I’ will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid damaging it. The thickening of the grid should be at the top, like a dark sky, not at the bottom of the canvas.

A photograph of Mondrian’s studio, taken a few days after the artist’s death and published in American lifestyle magazine Town and Country in June 1944, shows the same painting sitting on an easel the other way up. But who, I wonder, banks and sides and swallows and bike rides on long horizons, had it the wrong way up?

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the poets obsessions become my own obsessions

kant appears twenty-nine times. If you include riskant > risk you come to thirty-two.


NB

k[r]ant > newspaper in ‘Zwaluwen vooruit / Swallows go’
At the final count, side appears forty-eight times.

---

Kant can mean side. It can also mean lace.

---

The Case for Lace

I finish editing the translations and set them aside.

---

Not so fast.

---

little breakthroughs and triumphs that are swept away by the next line

When I return to them a couple of days later I am dismayed, horrified: what—had—I—done? On the sparsely populated pages in my hands, a patchwork of fractured, disjointed linguistic entities incapable of any movement in unison. Everything in my rendering is correct, yet none of it is right. I am disheartened, mortified: I have created a monster. And why do I feel so guilty, so responsible?

I go over the work to see where I went wrong. Too literal, or did I stray too far? Are the seams between the lines too visible or not visible enough? Are words and syntactical units interlinked and interconnected in the way that they are supposed to—no, most likely what I am dealing with is a faulty wiring, when I have lost sight of the original too soon, too early in the process.

Kate Briggs touches on this early on in her phenomenal memoir on translation, This Little Art, when she deliberates whether and how the reader establishes a relationship with the author and his or her work through the translations.

When I know that’s it, this is his work, this is what he wrote, this is what he did and this is how he did it, and this is how these things connect to that… when that clock begins to tick, then I know this is my work. The translations will be recognisably mine only in so far as they are clearly, unmistakably the work of Van Dixhoorn. 
What if the poems (and even individual lines) are miniature sketches without beginning or end, not unlike Morton Feldman’s repetitive minimal music, which he often listens to whilst working?

---

I FaceTime my fiancé, a Liverpool fan

Is there an English football club with a bird in its name? “Yeah, he says, Norwich.” And this is how I come to glean another morsel of information I never would have otherwise known but for translation, that Norwich City football club players wear yellow and green, and that as a result of these two colours their nickname is the Canaries. When the crowd gets behind them they go YELLOW YELLOW YELLOW. Quite a sweet nickname, Phil says, an uplifting chant. ‘Forward swifts’ was briefly in the running but it made me think of American football, not soccer. Bouffant pompoms puncturing a grey sky over a boggy field won’t cut it any more than exotic canaries. Come to think of it, if ‘Zwaluwen vooruit’ is the name of a club, then maybe it shouldn’t be translated at all. No one would translate ‘Crystal Palace’ or ‘Queens Park Rangers FC’ There’d be uproar in the stands. But this needs to be translated: ‘Swallows go’ is not straightforwardly a poem about a local football club. We finish our conversation talking briefly about my trek to the Bachtel summit, the eternal snow shrinking on the mountain tops like a balding man and the railway tracks running through the valley along the coast of Lake Zürich and through the mountains to Genoa on the Mediterranean.

---

I want to be an ornithologist: I say, I want to be a birdologist. I treasure, devotedly and possessively, a book on the migration of birds, Trekvogels, by Jaap Taapken and D.A.C. van den Hoorn. I have fallen into the habit of sleeping with an English–Dutch dictionary on the floor beside my bed because in the new house I will dream in words as yet unfamiliar to me and I will wake myself to look them up.

I lie in bed unable to sleep, mulling things. How trekvogels best translates as pull or trek birds because this is what migrating birds are in Dutch, birds that are pulled or drawn like small magnets through the sky from one place to another across continents and oceans. Even blackbirds, depending on how far north in Europe they are from, will migrate to countries like Portugal and Morocco. Storks migrate. Geese migrate, as do nightingales, pintails, black-tailed godwits, spoonbills, great shearwaters, oystercatchers, even the territorially patrolling robin, cranes, swallows, goldfinches, avocets, redshanks—in fact, let me save you the trouble by saying that most birds migrate, as of course starlings are drawn through the sky, in their swarming murmurations. I too am the accumulative product of migration: from the Netherlands to Nigeria and now here, England, with its freshly laid lawn extending into the fields.

---

There is not a single comma in the work, nowhere.

---

I see space and rhythm,
like container ships passing each other along the coast

Eventually the coast appeared like a metal stripe on the horizon and we are cycling not far from the place where Mondrian painted. With the construction of the Roosendaal–Vlissingen railway line in 1870, and the start of the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Zeeland, a shipping company that operated a ferry service between Zeeland and England across the North Sea between 1875 and 1989, holidaymakers, bathers from the Netherlands, Belgium, England and Germany increasingly arrived in Domburg. It’s been a popular resort ever since. Mondrian joined the growing trickle of seaside tourism encouraged through the new railway service and spent several weeks in Domburg during the summers between 1908 and 1916. His painting style shifted radically from the naturalist to abstraction in this period. The groynes holding in place the bleak, wind-dispersed dunes are said to have been the early inspiration for Mondrian’s ‘Composition 10 in Black and White,’ sometimes referred to as Pier and Ocean, an abstract, elliptical composition of short horizontal and vertical black lines the painter completed in 1915. The distinct elements of landscape—sea, land, trees, horizon—have been replaced by an expression of harmony and rhythm. Horizontal and vertical axes emerged as the major organising principles, configuring grids that included squares and rectangles of different sizes in a reduced palette of black and white. The structure of the world in these paintings is irreducible, a grid of perfectly parallel and perpendicular lines extending across the canvas (1. 2. 3. 4.). 

Similarly, Van Dixhoorn constructs and dismantles a landscape in writing. Their work shares a common rejection of perceived reality as subject matter and restricts form to its most basic elements. Van Dixhoorn’s work too is made up of invisible lines. Syntactic constructions slide past each other, words appear, vanish and reappear across stanzas and poems like container ships passing each other.

---

that night, of course, I dreamt about crabs

I dreamt I stood on the Atlantic coast in the middle of slippery stones and an ebbing tide. I caught a giant crab. I picked it up in one hand. I twisted my arm so that the oversized claws snapped at the air. Next, as happens in a dream, I stood far out in the dunes, which morphed into a heated, desert-like landscape. It was barren, the vegetation sparse and arid, prickly. It was getting evening and cooler. I put the crab on the ground but that was too hot for this sea creature. It began to cook alive. It didn’t know where to go and the crab fled now here then there and finally it crawled half-cooked under the exsiccated branches of a collapsed tree. The crab’s suffering, to be snatched from the sea and boiled alive, was intolerable in my dream, especially since I had done this to the crab myself. What struck me was that the crab was thinking about cause and effect, looking for a way to stop death. There was no anger, only the instinct to survive. Yes, anger after all. 

I Google CRABS IN DREAM SYMBOLISM. It’s not good, for the most part. Crab dreams are indicatory of clinginess, emotional dependency, self-centredness, dreariness, and, alarmingly, the dreamer’s subconscious is said to be leaking with annoyance and irritation by someone or something. Closing, some unsolicited advice: ‘Perseverance and tenacity are critical points in understanding what it means to dream about crabs. After such a dream you should think about your behaviour and attitude towards someone.’

---

nowhere do I see the poet play a part in the poems

The I is a shadow. Translating, the translator gets extremely close to the poems. Being in the poems is observing what he is observing, we stand side by side, the poet and I. Ah, there goes that line carrying that image forward to that when final stanza, I see it now, I see what the poet did: but when I look again, he is gone.

---

I go for a walk, thinking I have resolved whatever
irritability is getting in the way of the translations

Mireille Gansel in her powerful and moving account of her life as a translator in Translation as Transhumance talks about how translation is ‘a hand reaching from one shore to another where there is no bridge.’ Translation has come to be considered, particularly by white middle-class monolinguals, as the privilege of moving between tongues, and subsequently translation, being that hand reaching from one cultural and linguistic shore to the other, has come to be interpreted as a gesture of empathy and kindness. I often get asked, ‘but is there a demand for Dutch poetry?’ Then of course, there isn’t, and it’s hardly the point. But particularly translating into English, when the source text is considered to be in a “minor” language and in need of attention, rescuing, help! The reality is that most humans are multilingual and for the most part this is not a result of one’s privilege but rather out of necessity or circumstance: translation is a craft, and more often than not an act of practical expedience and/or artistic
curiosity.

---

(now where did I read this? did I?)

—commas are the phrasing of the line.
—commas are the heartbeat in the line. Without commas
    it is harder to mark a vital half-breath or a pause.

That these breaths and pauses are clues, breadcrumbs left for the reader. The comma can transform the intentions of the poet and transform what the reader might feel as a result of those intentions.

---

My focus is on the memory that presents itself as a photograph of a girl standing with her back to me. She doesn’t know I am there. I want to come face-to-face with her but the laws of physics confound this. My vantage point is as of a ginormous cat upright on its hind legs behind her. I am also staring at that which I can’t describe were I to relate it in the language I do not speak yet as well as I will need to, if I am to thrive. As a gift, a welcome gift to usher me into the new family home but more likely simply a bribe of appeasement, my mother and stepfather have presented me with a copy of a 1966 revised edition of the Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds: The Complete Identification Book, Over 1000 Illustrations with 600 in Colour, by R.S.R. Fitter & R. A. Richardson. Funny, how one remembers emotions more distinctly and undiluted than one’s own face. But I do remember most vividly my initial joy at receiving what was evidently a bird book and how my joyful expression melted like a waxwork thrown into the fireplace the moment I realised the names of these birds were unknown to me. I thought at first it must have been some sort of mistake. These birds depicted in the plates all had the wrong names. How can birds be in two languages? Another word for ‘eyelash,’ yes. ‘Biscuit tin,’ ‘doorframe,’ ‘backstroke,’ ‘stamp,’ ‘egg yolk,’ all of them, yes. Birds? No. Birds were my domain. I had devotedly memorised them and their taxonomy, from the narcissistically detached, cold-hearted heron to the toucan with its monstrously flaming beak of orange, magenta and violet with streaks of green and yellow and pitch black. The pictures in this Pocket Guide to British Birds—some in colour, others, like the cormorant and guillemot, glaring back at me in alienating gradations of grey—I was lost to them. What had become of the meeuw, de patrijs, de uil, de lepelaar, de kievit, reigers? These British birds were unrecognisable, not mine, not mine.

---

faulty wires

Yet here, out of left field, pushed right under my nose, Van Dixhoorn’s detailed and elaborate notes on the translations. After years of the poet championing the poems’ autonomy, and if not quite insisting then surely encouraging me to rely exclusively on the text, when, if I did harbour uncertainties on how to negotiate intricate complexities around a certain idiom, image or a syntactical twist, it was settled between us that I would liaise through his partner Anne-Mariken Raukema, which was what we did; when now, at the endmost stages, when I have reconciled options, weighed up the different components, judgements and so forth against each other—the line, the poem, his oeuvre—and reassembled and settled the work in English; when I am no longer translating but editing what are the now fully-fledged English poems, and I am scanning for loose or faulty wires, so to speak, now the poet decides to share his intimate thought processes and the artistic considerations that shaped his poems? Not only stretching all the way back to his earliest collection but also reaching beyond the text, for instance, and this is one example of many, that I should be aware that the boot I translated as boat in ‘Towpath’ is in fact a Japanese liner?

---

I submit the translations for publication but hardly with any success. Had I deceived myself, had I tricked myself into believing that these poems needed to be shared with an English readership, or at least with my English language poet colleagues? Were these poems too impossible in their English constructs? On reflection, was I not the right translator for this work?

The translations disappeared into a folder inside a desk drawer. Every so often I would add translation drafts of new poems. Or I would tinker at already existing ones. These were sporadic, short sprints, which nevertheless demanded a vigorously sustained, heightened level of concentration. A change, even the slightest adjustment in one poem, such as from ‘quay’ to ‘shore’ to ‘side,’ had a domino effect on other poems. Making a change in one would inexorably lead to similar adjustments elsewhere. A translation appeared in an online Australian journal and in an American literary magazine. This state of stasis is how it would remain for more than ten years.

---

why had I so obediently resigned myself to the publisher’s rejection?

I get up, feeling dejected, leave my room, enter the corridor, down the stairs into the kitchen for a glass of water. An ambulatory diversion to shake off my unsteady, conflicted emotions. In the kitchen, Marina Skalova. We speak in German. I rarely get the chance to practise. Also, at some level I am sure it is appreciated, a sigh of relief, that English is not automatically the default lingua franca. So when the Russian/French-speaking Marina bangs shut another drawer, spins round to face me, throws her hands up in the air and asks, ‘Where is the Schneider?’ we both burst out laughing.

---

the under-side of translation,
when panic sets in,
followed by a resolution

Van Dixhoorn points out that while white lace might spark off (inter)lacing hands for the English reader (at a stretch), the Dutch witte kant does not in the slightest advert to trimmed garments or touching fingers and whatnot. Besides, witte kant is to say white waterside, or sunny side. Had I thought of that? Those parts of the waterside struck by the sun. (In fact, I had checked in on this point, early on, with a colleague, who had said he was sure syntactically the line had to mean white waterside.)

More urgently and importantly, and finally, Van Dixhoorn says, kant is neither lace nor waterside but the underside of a leaf of the abele tree, which is white.


Side
                                       a leaf ?


The under-side of the abele tree is white? Panic sets in, mild irritation, exasperation—a leaf ? This is not in the text, this is nowhere in the poem. No, I go back, start at the beginning, run through, check, not in any of them, I flick back and forth, check, double-check, check again, all the while formulating some type of response from my side. 

My survivor’s instinct kicks in, or perhaps it is that the poet in me takes over. From then on I see the translation as poems in their own right. As my text.

---

finally, I settle on the name of a third division football club

I like ‘Swallows go’ as the title of the poem, as the name of a football club languishing at the bottom of the third division; but moreover, and crucially, as something transparently under translation. Keeping the process of translating as well as the resulting translations transparent lays bare something about Van Dixhoorn’s methodology, the work’s character and its construction. Swallows acts as bird and verb.

---

My birds. My anchors-in-the-sky; my bond and pact with knowledge as a means of belonging, profoundly, to this earth; my soaring tokens of explicit beauty and restoration. Their names rendered meaningless and frivolously random like loose sand. The new language had exposed itself as an irruption of the inadmissible. I could no longer claim ownership of my area of specialism. Access had been denied. I had been cheated. I had been robbed. The unity between my identity and analogy, that is, my means of communication, was under attack, as if, like in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the birds had turned to dive-bomb me. I—that is, my ten-year-old self—stood on the grass blinded by a hatred for my new language. This book with its ‘over 1000 illustrations’ is testament that I do not belong. A clattering of jackdaws in the field in front of the new house caws and I want to kick their tail feathers. The consoling words of my mother, as my hysteria continues to swell like a volcano in my pumping heart, her well-intentioned but ignorant observation that learning the scientific, Latinised names of birds could settle all future misunderstanding and confusion, enraged and panicked me further. Another language?

---

translator as time-traveller:

Van Dixhoorn crafted the poems chronologically, one after the other, over the space of a number of decades. He was forward-looking as he constructed and/or composed one poem after the other, one collection after the other. I move back and forth through time and can see more dimensions than the poet himself.

---

There are no limits to the dangers facing migrating birds on these journeys: redwings ram themselves to death against isolated lighthouses; light beacons at sea attract passing birds; trading vessels have to be scrubbed top to bottom after they have been blitzed by the faeces of thousands of starlings. Annually (illegally, and hence clandestinely) in the southwest of France, from Bordeaux to Toulouse, many tens of thousands of song thrushes are processed into tinned paté de grives, and pasties are stuffed with blackbird, lark or ortolan. In the north-east of Italy, there are roccoli, which are large catchment gardens, often laid out long ago and usually located at favourably and slightly higher points in the landscape, in which whole trees are decorated with sticks dipped in vischio—bird glue—that can be swung down like flagpoles to bring in the loot of sparrows and wagtails. Hunters use tape recorders with decoy sounds to lure songbirds that are sold at bird markets in Cyprus. Malta has a particularly strategic position geographically, and three hundred types of birds will use the island as a stepping stone in the sea between Africa and Europe. Twenty-metre-high nets are erected in spring, when exhausted orioles and turtledoves return. Migration is complex.

---

reading the poems is like trying to walk on quicksand

The poems manage their symptomatic lack of continuity without letting the whole drift into something hollow or disjointed. This baffled me. How can a poem so confidently not be about something? How does it communicate? How do I translate the work? Van Dixhoorn’s poems started me thinking about what poetry is.

---

de-shaping a distraction

1. lostrekken

vervorming van
miniscule luchtbelletjes               
                                                       
                                                           [All at sea]


What are these luchtbelletjes, these air bubbles?

And their vervorming > ‘deshaping,’—how do air bubbles deform, transform; how can they change their shape? Into what? Evaporate?

Something I could never have guessed the answer to. But when I happened to mention my head-scratching to the poet Erik Lindner, who knows Dix and his work well, he told me that Dix had told him that he [Dix] had been playing with a piece of sellotape stuck to the side of the table. Air bubbles had formed and become trapped between the sticky plastic and the tabletop. Dix would rub his thumb over, loosen the sellotape and rub his thumb back over the back of the tape, trying to smooth out the trapped air bubbles...


1. pull loose

transformation of
miniscule air bubbles
                                       
                                                        [Dan op de zeevaartschool]


Our enterprise is not that dissimilar, I thought, not at all.

---

what I learned about poetry from Van Dixhoorn

Equality.                      Equality between past, present and future. Equality of metre, rhythm, cadence. There is equality in what gets attention and what is relevant. There is equality between the words. ‘Of,’ ‘minuscule,’ and ‘air bubbles’ are all equal. A word can be read as a noun or a verb. Van Dixhoorn in an interview with Fleur Speet for Het Financieele Dagblad: ‘All the parts are equal, and there is equality [similarity]. This is what I show in my construction [order/arrangement]. A construction that is merely misconstruction. Because the world can’t be constructed [put in order].’

Landscape.                The poem as landscape is crucial to Van Dixhoorn: the size of the margins, the type of font, the colour on the cover, dimensions of the page, the placement of the stanza on the page, which, including any blank lines, each count sixteen lines, so that when you close his books and stack them, the poems form a block with six sides. His commitment to straight lines. The landscape of the poem informs the form: all is at work to make the poem work. 

Perspective.               Barbara Hepworth famously stated that all her early memories were of forms and shapes and textures. ‘Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form.’ From the 1950s onwards, she sometimes, like my poet,
titled her sculptures after specific places. How we look at things, from what angle we observe, whether that be with the eye or in the mind, perspective dominates the work. 

Finally, and this is before I continue with the final editing and fine-tuning of the translations, it is important we understand that every poem is part of the Aesthetic Whole. Van Dixhoorn looks beyond the single poem to the artistic project ahead.

---

I fetch milk from the farm shop
a short walk down the hill from the Translators House

I pass an orchard. A bull stands in the shade of one of the old fruit trees. He is thrashing his oversized head back and forth, as if the music in his bushy ears is too loud. I come off the path to inspect. Closer, I see that he has lost one of his horns. Where there was a horn there is a gaping wound like a puddle in the middle of a path. The blood is a dark cherry red like the red lacquer used to decorate Japanese bowls, and it looks syrupy, coruscated and unoxidised. Flies have started to cover the wound like a lid covering a pot. They are causing the bull a great deal of discomfort and distress. This is why the bull is violently twisting his neck to shake them off.

---

at the smallest level of language, the poet seems say,
anything is possible 

Verre Uittrap / Drop kick (2017), his most recent collection to date, is a book-length poem consisting entirely/solely of vocables ambiguously/obscurely arranged/placed at the left-hand margins of—not every—the page. Van Dixhoorn’s poems gain in minimalism and abstraction over time.

I find myself increasingly relying on the term ‘composition’ in relation to Dix’s work. Verre Uittrap / Drop kick is a much-reduced gestural composition. Although the starting point of the poem is still, just about, visibly a poem, it is clear as mud that Van Dixhoorn is no longer interested in the recognisable representation of language. He is mainly concerned with the bringing together of contrasts, appositionals, and other sides of language to thereby express/return poetry to form.

It is as if, in accordance with the title, the poet aimed off the page and kicked the lines through the air like a football, and the remainder, words that had trailed at the end of the line and didn’t make it off the page, landed there. It is a radical yet logical progression for the poet. And at the smallest level of language, the poet seems to say, anything is possible. Drop kick is a poem that isn’t a poem, it’s a non-poem poem. Counting no more than 53 written lines and 92 words, 93 if you count the letter ‘b’ in line 32 as a word.

---

Van Dixhoorn is a football fan.            (regional)
It’s in the work, yet never ceases to amaze me.

---

it is about Verre Uittrap / Drop kick, this non-poem poem, this cluster of words kicked and scattered to the extremities of the page that Van Dixhoorn and I have our longest exchange ...


_{Op 13 Nov. 2021, om 12:14 heeft Astrid Alben
het volgende geschreven:}


Ha Dix,

How was Verre uittrap made?

I want the translation to be authentic and translating the construction is part of that. Which is to say the translator’s process needs to somehow mirror, reflect or act as viewfinder for your process. If it’s just single words on the outer edges of a page, I’ll translate those literally. But if they are the ends of poetry lines (so there is more than what the reader can see), then I would need what is missing to do the translation (and the process) justice. E.g. “less”—is that “emotion-less” or “we need less?" The difference will result in a fundamentally different translation.

Liefs,

Astrid


<sub>On 13 Nov 2021, at 11:42,
F. van Dixhoorn wrote:


Ha Astrid

They’re remnants. Lines of poetry, which by now, well, they could be anything, if you can think of some options that would fit nicely that would work for me—will have a look at them / prefix with sentences myself tomorrow morning, dashing off/appointment. Hopefully that’s ok.

With less it is indeed meant as e.g. needing less, because less is meant as a free-standing word, which emotionless is not, but also I chose it for its rhythm / sound into the next word: loose.

(As an aside: I have a newer version/read-version did I mention, a new towpath stronger than the old one, contains “sections from” other work/work to date/post original towpath.)

Lieve zwaai [Sweet handwave],

dix


Op 13 Nov. 2021, om 12:45 heeft Astrid Alben
het volgende geschreven:</sub>


Dix,

Do I understand correctly they are remnants but you didn’t keep the rest?

Astridxx


_{Op 13 Nov. 2021, at 12:45,
F. van Dixhoorn wrote:}


That’s right! but the “crazy” thing is that for me, what is there is a poem, a unity, a composition, i.e. can be read that way. (I am very pleased with this work, and what I’m currently working on is a continuation of this principle)


I explain that as a reader I don’t doubt the ‘remnants’ form a unity but that as a translator that will be tricky to accomplish in English without having any knowledge of the invisible part. 

Dix in turn tells me not to worry too much about the missing text, ‘it’s not from a book or magazine, narration, they are single words at the end of a sentence or a conversation.’ He tells me that what binds them is nature but also, purposefully, ‘ugly’ words/concepts that are not poetical, ‘like a product, percentage, power, practice, parallels.’ Words that are not his world, a world of nonsense, mixed with words to give it cadence (for example) but that still fit through meaning, ‘sometimes double meaning.’




I can’t put my finger on it. The sparser the poems, the more parsed the language—the fewer words (Verre uittrap / Drop kick is by far the shortest poetry collection I have ever read), the harder it is to pinpoint what it is that I translate when I translate and what it means to translate. As if language becomes more resistant to translation the more minimalist or abstract it is. 

Maybe Dix is right, I should at least take a stab at translating this motley parade of words, maybe intuitively, as I find it: thing.’ / thing.’ /// bet.’ // thing.’ … justified.’ But it doesn’t feel right, I am not connecting to the words at all. I can’t animate the work. The reader reads the poems through the translator. I feel as if I’m blocking the text somehow. Even a random string of words is not a shopping list or a list of instructions, not in poetry anyway: rhythm, metre, internal rhyme, cadence, etymology and sound conspire to create something that is itself and other.

What has been deleted, cut away; the words that are missing, the punctuation, the spaces and blank lines—everything that has been hewn away around out, it turns out, is a vital part of the poem.

Thankfully, Van Dixhoorn reaches the same conclusion.

He writes the next day...




Dear Astrid,

I realised now how difficult the translation of verre uittrap is, poor soul. Jotted down sentences this morning, could be different tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Of course this text isn’t set in stone, not possible. Can’t wait to see what you do with it!

Origin: the bullshit on the radio t.v. newspapers have/had had enough and could only hear fragments/final bits, like what happens with spectators cheering from the sideline of the football pitch e.g. the local football club.

What precedes these thoughts, don’t know will never know, an entire world probably. Of course there are one two another thought-skips, pieces of conversation—more than one on the go—circle back to it. And so these are the thoughts of others I caught snatches I used to make a story = poem.

P.S. the letters in bold are more of a hint for the graphic designer indicating why not every line starts in the same location but Aaron should look to Verre uittrap, let that margin be the guiding principle. He’ll understand.

Now for some pea soup with French rye bread, it’s that time of year, lieve groet greet.

dix

---

A good deal of Van Dixhoorn’s ‘t&s’ on the translations are digressions on the poems that take place outside the work. Some of these will improve the translations. Things I missed completely or insights that will help me understand a word’s expanding usage across the collections, such as side.

---

Van Dixhoorn introduced me to the poems of Vasko Popa, Astrid Lampe and Thomas Tranströmer. I read their work, avidly, greedily.

---

Something slows the line down

Iets is maddeningly tricky to translate into English. You might think, and you might be right, what is so complicated about a word that ought to be a straightforward conversion into something? That’s what it means, literally: something. Well for one thing, something takes much longer to vocalise than its Dutch equivalent, and this makes a real and powerful impact on how we read, and how we read what we read. A translator can adapt the tenor of the transmission to a degree, especially in prose this is a little easier, where you can tighten the reins in one clause or part of the sentence and loosen them in another to redress the direction of a tone or mood, or the shifting pace that is set by the sound of a particular word. In poetry this is harder to achieve. Poetry is far more reliant on metre, rhythm and cadence, and phonetic correspondences and footprints, reverberations and repercussions, to begin with. There is, also, practically, physically less space to let the language play out. Something slows the line down. And that is not what Van Dixhoorn lines do, slow down; his lines move with a palpable physical agility and energy: as if riding a bike. Words are gestural. At the core something akin to body language, a kinetic force. Flower and bloem have a comparable kinetic force and as a result are capable of making a similar gesture in a line of poetry. Waanzin and madness the same. Something and iets are chalk and cheese. Which brings me to the next point, which is that the sounds of the two words have radically different personalities in the two languages. And sound affects how a word is perceived and how it means and how it orientates itself vis-à-vis other words—what the personality and behaviour is of the word: 

Iets is explosive, resolute, impatient. Look, it insists, you don’t mean me, you mean this, that but. not. me.

Something is spondaic, something—seaweed, swaying in the undertow.

Something is hiding something.

How can a word as noncommittal, non-descriptive and lobbed-sounding as something take up so much
room and take so long to articulate?

Iets not much to add. Something I hardly need to explain.

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instructions on how to pronounce /i:ts/

To pronounce iets, slightly open your mouth and pull your upper and lower lip all the way back. If you look in the mirror, your face should have a Joker-grimace. Your eyes naturally start to squint, your nose furrows a little.

Hold that smile and try to relax your tongue at the same time. Now emit an /i:/ sound, as in English // need//.

Press the tip of the tongue against the superior alveolar ridge, that’s the gumline just behind your front teeth.

Push out air to produce the voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate /ts/, similar to ts in //bats//. Don’t forget to hold that grimace. Yes, it does sound like a bottle of Schweppes being opened. Yes, or like a candle wick extinguished between finger and thumb wetted with a little saliva, that’s right. //i:ts// You’ve got it!

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The Case for Lace

In large parts of Zeeland women displayed their cleanliness by folding up their pinafores very tightly. Once they were folded, the women tied them with a piece of string or ribbon and stored them in a cabinet. The more folds, the prettier the pinafore was considered to be. A visibly folded pinafore was a mark of tidiness and respectability. Not only that, the sharpness of the folds were a clear indication of how long the pinafore had been kept in the cabinet. A tightly folded pinafore was a status symbol. A woman of means could lay aside a number of spare pinafores.

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& you become discretely plausible
yet different versions of yourself in the new language.

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to return to what unsettles me

‘An English readership is not yet ready for this work.’ A can I kicked up the road because I didn’t know what else to do with it, yet here we are.

Did the editor mean that this work was intellectually superior? That the work was too complex, too experimentally challenging for an English readership? Did the editor mean the work was too abstract for an English readership? That the work was considered to be too conjectured and suppositional, dare I say, too Continental for an English readership?

Like what happened to Marlow Moss?

I only see space, movement and light—this comes from Moss.

Did the editor mean that a lag in publishing these translations would produce a larger readership? That it was a matter of timing and finding the right moment to publish the work in English? That this was an issue of anticipation?

That I would need to be patient.

And then ‘not yet.’

But that this could change? That over time an appreciation could take hold for this type of experimental work among an English readership? So there was hope? Was this type of reasoning the misguided optimism Brian Dillon refers to in Essayism as ‘the effort to frame the wreckage in the aftermath?’

The publisher’s comment had a powerful effect on how I thought about myself. It was this: cf. page 1 dented my confidence.

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to belong to, you have to change it

I stare out the window, my eyes absentmindedly scanning for the red kite. The sky is lonely. Why do extremities suggest their opposites? I recall a clear night at my father’s house on the water’s side on a dyke in the Netherlands. The only artificial light by the back door was an industrial-looking outdoor lantern light swarmed by moths, midges and other insects. I pointed to the dark side of the moon, ‘Look, the dark side of the moon. Beautiful.’ And my father says ‘there is no dark side of the moon’. This was confusing. An mathematical exposition follows. I let it wash over me, celestial navigation, synchronous rotation, tidal locking, terms my father, having served in the merchant navy and blessed with a brain from geometry, is familiar with. I know I can see the dark side of the moon. It’s there, with my own eyes. Clearly to the left of the beaming sickle, a monochrome landscape with hues of undulating and varying depths of metallic shimmering grey that I knew were bare-knuckled mountains ranges and meteoric craters. I imagine a bird making a life for itself up there. What kind of bird would it be? A roadrunner, I am inclined to think: it has superlong skinny, virtually twig like legs which, from what I have seen on TV, can move super fast across vast desert-like surfaces that fluctuate between extreme heat and cold temperatures while seemingly palatably happy on its own. I imagine the bird running hither and thither, hither and thither on its stilted legs across the surface of the moon like the moon is an actual television screen, crossing from the illuminated to the dark side, in and out of view, calling out “meep meep”. “Uhu”, I say, instead, anticipating my father’s exposition drawing to a reductive conclusion.

I bring Dillon’s Essayism into the garden. Our host Antonia routinely flags up the freakish overpopulation of ticks in the local area. I don’t care. I sit in the grass and watch the sun in its closing hour.

Marina comes and sits next to me with her legs outstretched. ‘The difficult, and often underestimated task of translation,’ she sighs, quoting Eva Hoffman, and I laugh. It has been a long day. I bring her up
to speed on the ‘side v.s. lace’ affair/business. I don’t want to choose the wrong word. ‘And so what if
you choose the wrong word. Who’s to say what’s a mistake. The poet left the door wide open. It’s language, dummy.’

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on (re)reading this sentence shame washed over me

At the top righthand corner of my homework my English and Drama teacher has added two words in green fountain pen ink after my name. Intuitively, I’m a little apprehensive and it takes me a moment to decipher his script without looking too conspicuous or eager. I read, ‘Astrid is putrid.’ Only Astrid is in blue.

My mother doesn’t know what putrid means, either. I ask her when I get home off the school bus. I find her in the bathroom, which she explained to me had been done in an avocado green. This was a popular colour for bathrooms at that time. Mother is pressing her hips against the basin, applying mascara in the mirror. ‘It sort of rhymes,’ she tells me, glancing at Astrid is putrid, ‘maybe it is poetry.’ I return downstairs to the shelf in the kitchen where we keep the honey, the peanut butter, Nutella, cookbooks. I pull out the OED and rest it on the counter, leafing through to ‘p.’ Puh-Puh-Puh-Puh, I sputter, like a little diesel outboard engine scanning the page for ‘u.’ I looked it up by myself. I wonder if he knew that.

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What the publisher meant when he claimed that an English readership was not yet ready for this work was that we can do very well without this work, thank you. Why had I obediently, patiently resigned myself to the publisher’s rejection? Against my better judgement I had ignored my gut instinct, postponed its truth, and deliberately misinterpreted and misrepresented the publisher’s rejection to myself. I had not done so out of a desperate ambition for the poems to be published in English, although of course that would have been nice, but because of a deeply entrenched fear of exclusion. I had taught myself to subjugate my foreignness, my alienness, my utter other utteranceness to the overriding desire to belong. I wasn’t upset at the publisher. Clearly, they just didn’t like the work. Simple as that. It was that I felt so conflicted about it, that I felt long-ago spoors of self-abnegation and even self-disgust, that was so upsetting.

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One of my go-to books is Ágota Kristóf’s short autobiography, The Illiterate.

In it she describes arriving in Switzerland at the age of twenty, arriving completely by chance in a city where French is spoken. Kristóf talks of her learning French as an arduous battle to conquer the language that will last her entire life. It is a battle that is killing her mother tongue.

I have spoken English for more than forty years. I have been writing in English for almost as long. As my identity started to take on the shape of the new language, my former self slowed down, like an arm that can’t keep up with the beat and lags behind. Unnoticeably, mostly even to myself, I let go of the version I might have been had I not left, had I stayed. I left this version by the side of the road like a child that I had had to rest on the ground because she had become too heavy for me to carry. I wonder, as Kristóf does in The Illiterate, would I have become a writer had I not left my country of birth? I don’t believe I would have. I start writing because I get homesick. I sit at my desk where I do my homework and write letters. Initially, my letters are prayers: Oh please god, let my father not fall through the ice when he goes skating and be safe, let Oma not get any older and die and be safe, let Miss Hofstede be safe, let Juliette not forget who I am and be safe, let Truffle not cross the road and be hit by an oncoming car and be safe. Don’t let anyone die because I am not there and be safe. My illogical superstition, my illiterate fear was that my absence would be the death of others. In my sleep I am restless and have nightmares. In the morning I panic, uncertain what is true.

I write letters. I begin to invent what I write. Through writing I begin to sense and appreciate that I am everywhere and I am nowhere. My writing occupies no fixed location but I can move perpetually through a series of possible destinations. I am being elsewhere. This being elsewhere, this sense of belonging and unbelonging, this displacement, this loss of what I left behind—oneself, one’s roots, one’s future—the cure that combats the homesickness of the child has become the disease of the adult. I write.

It is, as Kristóf says, a constant battle to materialise in one language. To live under constant fear of vaporising in the other.

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being in-between really means being from nowhere and going nowhere

Shortly after Ai! Ai! Pianissimo came out, my own debut poetry collection, my English teacher had a heart attack on the platform at Staplehurst Station. I picture him lying on his back, featureless against the concrete, one leg twisted out from underneath him like a Cirque du Soleil contortionist. There is no moral redress here, but a kind of private failure, and mine was a lack of compassion on hearing the news of his death. In its place a blind panic and for a split second I can’t think what causes it. Then I do.

Something I hardly need to explain.

It twists like a weasel in a sack.

I ask my mother why we came to England. You were a child, she says, it was none of your business.

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6. bij de deur staan strepen / als zon op de varens / krant erover / hoe vaak langs je heen // wordt gepraat


bij de deur staan strepen >> at the door stand stripes >>
                                                    there are stripes standing
                                                            at the door
                                                    who’s at the door?
                                                    stripes
als zon op de varens         >> like sun on the ferns
                                                    ah, I see what you mean:
                                                            the sun casts shadows                                                                                               at the door
krant erover                        >> newspaper on it
                                                    a slip of the tongue,
                                                            you meant zand not krant?
                                                    an idiom of conciliation:
                                                            let’s forget it
                                                            let bygones be bygones
                                                    never (m)hind? 


Van Dixhoorn’s poems combine an incantatory and spoken-language tone that invites the reader to enjoy the poems for the sake of its poetry, not for <what it means> or <what it is about> ... I often find myself (re)tracing the same lines over and over, asking myself, ‘now he did he do that?’ and, ‘how did we get to
this point?’ 

Van Dixhoorn disapproves of never hind. Here he is again, questioning my choice: ‘is there a meaning where you have an old-fashioned newspaper that is used to protect an indoor plant from the sun?’ He is correct. What had seemed a deliciously glorious find, never hind I had to admit, was over-contrived. Translating this idiomatic pun, I had concentrated on form and methodology, on how he had come to write the words he wrote, not enough on the actual words themselves. At one level I wanted show what
the text says, at another to show the poem as a means, a process, a tool, not a finished product. Here it had misfired. Thankfully, Van Dixhoorn caught it. There is always a point at which to reconsider the literal meaning, a ‘going back to the beginning,’ and more often than not it will do the translation a favour. Poems and their translations shouldn’t be too tightly held.

To continue...

a rag
(a moth-eaten term for a newspaper); 
(a tattered piece of clothing will do to protect the ferns from the sunlight);
also a tune (accidental).

hoe vaak langs je heen
another idiomatic deceit, adjectives have been switched instead
of phonemes, as above
approx. how often passed by/over you

in conjunction with
wordt gepraat
being talked. In combination with the above line (as opposed to the line immediately below it, let’s not forget, that’s to come) we write: how often people talk
// at cross-purposes.


6.               there are stripes standing at the door / like sun on the ferns / a newspaper over them / how often people // talk past you

6.             there’s stripes at the door / like sun on the ferns / never hind / often
// at cross-purposes

6.             there are stripes at the door / like sun on the ferns / never hind / how often people
// talk over you

6.             there are stripes at the door / like sun on the ferns / never hind / how often people talk
// at cross purposes

6.             stripes are at the door / sun on the ferns / a rag to cover them / people talk
// at cross purposes

6.             stripes at the door / sun on the ferns / rags will cover them / people will talk
// over you

6.             stripes at the door / sun on the ferns / a rag to cover them / people often talk
// at cross purposes


With the line as with the stanza, there is an ambiguous shuttle between precision and transparency, between literal integrity and a fracturing or even pulverising of the translation.

And then you choose...

stripes at the door
sun on the ferns
let’s forget
how often people talk
you over

(Zwaluwen vooruit / Swallows go)

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When receding lines in a photograph, or a landscape, appear to converge or even be disappearing altogether, this is a vanishing point, in the way in which a memory fades gradually into the murky background of time and space, or how railway tracks thin out on the horizon. And so the nine-year-old standing on the freshly laid lawn looking out on the fields in front of the new house is making attempts at addressing, calculating ways in which to negotiate her disorientation with the new paradoxes that emerge when existing within and between two languages, of what will be a bartering system of identity and prospective, credible narratives that are unfolding as part of a landscape she realises she is seeing for the first time. I know this now because I am standing right behind her, and I observe that this vertigo is a maelstrom of love and violence that accompanies the mastering of a new language as it is illogically and extravagantly pitted against the unrealised yet potential murder of the old, the first language—this vanishing point, against the optical laws and physics, a point of emergence, is the point where I belong and unbelong, where I am being looked at and am the onlooker, the translator and the translated. 

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Poems, the kind Van Dixhoorn writes, are an improvisation, they are a risk in progress and perfect in their unfinished state, like humans or like a bird.

& become discretely plausible yet different versions of themselves in the new language.

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