P/P | r2c | March: When Color Returns

| click photo or here for r2c new dutch poetry | HOME |

"Women are ones deeply drowned misty and more unnoticed disappearing than men who on the surface of their eyes usually can be read" from Women, a poem by Lizzy Sara May This week, an image called Happy Balloons, End of Winter. Also: six new translations of Lowland poems. rss: Twitter r2c_dutchpoetry

'Ik heb nooit naar iets anders getracht dan dit:
het zacht maken van stenen
het vuur maken uit water
het regen maken uit dorst'

   Gerrit Kouwenaar *

"I've never tried to do anything but this:
to make stones soft
to make fire out of water
to make rain out of thirst"

In the high mountains of Europe, winter comes long and hard. This time
of year, around or just below treeline (±1800 meters) there's still an abun-
dance of snow, usually a good two or three meters of it. One of the joys of
living in such an environment, austere as it is in many ways, is that one
comes to see many aspects of both the natural and cultural worlds
that in the lowlands we normally take for granted in new ways

After many years of such mountain winters, one such feature which I've
come to experience as a yearly cyclical movement is the waxing and waning
of the pallet of natural color with the seasons. In the depths of alpine winter,
the spectrum of color is attenuated to the extreme. On cloudy, misty or
snowy days, of which there are many, color seems to whisper between
the contrasts of intense white and the dullness of granite gray. In an eerie
yet magical way, this absence of color is accentuated tremendously by a
parallel absence of sound, or depending I suppose on one's disposition,
on the extraordinary depths of mountain silence. Even the sound of rushing
water, usually everywhere, is almost completely covered or muted by the
continuous pack of snow.

But come April, on the happy, sun-facing southern slopes, it is truly a
joy to witness the return not just of spring, but of all the richness of living
sound and vibrant color. Like the Italians say, Primavera, or first green.
After six months living with only the gray-green of spruce trees and dry
hay in the barn, to come upon a little patch of fresh grass with a few
scattered crocuses is indeed a miracle.

So in this supersaturated Western world of extreme stimulations of every
description, the ancient mountains at the very center of Europe still hold
a very powerful message for the current era. While it is, of course, not
possible to say exactly what this message is, it does perhaps have something
to do with coming to order or harmony by not adding more and more,
but by simply taking away. This is the work which high country winter
does for us; it drains the world of color, taking it back to some kind
of formal or primal essence, so when color does return, we experience it
as if for the very first time. First green, first yellow, first blue! 

The new translations from the Dutch featured this week, when taken as
a set or sequence, make a rather similar journey of color's absence followed
by its happy return. In poetic space we make then an arch from Gerrit
Achterberg's mysterious and brooding composition, Black Spring, to
Martinus Nijhoff's masterpiece, Clown. Of course, the poems refer not
just to color in the literal sense, but also to what we might think of as
hues or shades of emotional being....especially the darkness of loss of some
kind.  --  the loss of a beloved, which is Achterberg's perennial theme, or
of the loss of one's youth or self-respect. But there's also a sense of return,
or full-spectrum rebirth, to discover here, most notably in Nijhoff's Clown,
Here, the poet describes himself as a kind of circus performer with
the striking lines,

They laugh at everything my craziness does,
I play dog, play human, play elephant:
I bark, I cry, I dig around with my snout—

Late at night the tent empties itself:
On the plain, where the lanterns are burning,
I lean against a pole, and call my deeds good.

| view / print Picture/Poem Poster: Clown (86 K) | or download as PDF |

See also:

"Straight roads, Slow rivers, Deep clay."

A collection of contemporary Dutch poetry in English translation, with commentary and photographs by Cliff Crego

---

| See also a selection of recent Picture/Poem "Rilke in translation" features at the Rilke Archive.

---

See also another website by Cliff Crego: The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

A presentation of 80 of the best poems of Rilke in both German and new English translations: biography, links, posters

---

| # listen to other recordings in English and German of eight poems from
The Book of Images at The Rilke Download Page (# Includes instructions) |

---

| back to r2c | back to Picture/Poems: Central Display |

---

| Map | TOC: I-IV | TOC: V-VIII | Image Index | Index | Text Only | Download Page | Newsletter | About P/P | About Cliff Crego |

---

Photograph/Texts of Translations © 2001 Cliff Crego
(created IV.I.2001) (revised  IV.3.2002; II.29.2012)
Special thanks to Anne-Marie Mineur
of the Lowlands for catching a mistake in
an earlier version I did of Nijhoff's Clown.