sparse song, dark thread
by Douglas Messerli
Hugo Claus Greetings, translated from the
Dutch by John Irons (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 2005)
Soon
after having finished the review of Desire above and having
put the Project for Innovative Poetry anthology of the Dutch Fifiters—of
whom Claus was a member—to press, I discovered that Harcourt had just
published a new collection of Claus poems, which I immediately ordered through
Amazon. Upon its receipt, however, I wondered perhaps if I’d ordered the wrong
book. It seemed amazing to me that this poet, whose work—as the fiction above
suggests—often portrayed an almost brutal depiction of sex and the human beast,
might have a book titled, Greetings, as if the bitter ironist I
knew had suddenly joined the card writers of Hallmark. If there was one thing
that Claus never seemed to do was to merrily “greet” his readers. The strange
photograph on the cover, depicting, I presume, I underside of a bridge (in
Flanders?) continued my confusion. Was Claus’s dark vision being presented as a
“soaring bridge” between beings. The poem which with the volume
began—inexplicably reprinted on the book’s back cover—was, moreover, one of the
worst poems by Claus I had ever read. Its end rhymed lines, “crow/glow,”
“ways/ablaze,” etc and its conventional subject matter—the days become shorter,
“slighter than a butterfly,” all because of love—seemed almost unrecognizable
of what I knew of the Claus canon.
Who was this translator, John Irons (the internet suggested he was a
British translator living in Odense, and, if it is the same gentleman, a rather
tepid poet—
pa was six days
gone
in a coffin of
pale wood
clad in a white
shroud
with pale blue
ribbons
begins
one of his “Pa” poems titled “Farewell”)—and what was the standard for the
poems which he had chosen? The book contained neither introduction nor
introductory note, no substantial statement about Claus (a short 6-line bio and
photograph appear on a jacket leaf) and, even more oddly, no copyright line,
which would at least tell us from which of his books the poems had been
collected. It was if the book had simply willed itself into English.*
Although I would have chosen another
selection of Claus’s poems—particularly when it comes to the rhymed
sonnet-sequence of 12 pages near the end of the book (the alternating and
sequential rhymes—“design/Einstein,” “detect/neck,” “damp/camps,” etc nearly
drown out any message that the poet might have wanted to convey)—there are,
nonetheless, important poems in this volume representing some of Claus’s best
writing.
As I have indicated—and the vast majority
of these poems support my argument—Claus’s Flanders is a dark world, a place of
“Sparse song dark thread / Land like a sheet / That sinks…,” a world in which
“A glass man falls out of a pub and breaks.” If the recurring themes of his
poetry seem predictable and almost maudlin—the difficulty of growing older
(what I described above as the “rickety-boned” subject matter of Desire, and
his life-long love of his wife and man’s desires in general)—Claus’s presentation
of these subjects is quite the opposite of sentimentality: the wife and husband
as represented in his elegiac poem “Still Now,” for example, battle out their
life and love, he “scratching and clawing for her undersized no-man’s-land,”
she a “giggling executioner,” beheading him in her “cool glistening wound.” The
poem ends with an image of their continuing struggles:
Still now riveted in
her fetters and with the bloody nose
of lovers I say,
filled with her blossoming spring:
“Death, torture the
earth no longer, do not wait, dear death,
for me to come, but do
as she does and strike now!”
Again in the poem “His Prayers,” Claus
presents the act of loving—something he often portrays in crude and
occasionally scatological terms—as a kind of beautiful punishment:
I dreamed I pulled off
my eyelashes
and gave them to you,
merciful one,
and you blew on them
as on a dandelion,
oh, hold back your
punishing hand!
……
—I
submit
to your
pleasure
There is a sense of submission, in fact,
in nearly all of Claus’s poems. The world of his Flanders is, in its stench of
human misery and flesh, highly unjust: “Do not talk about the natural hygiene
of the universe / which justifies death (from “His Notes for ‘Genesis 1.1’”).
In one of his most parable-like poems, “Elephant,” Claus spells out this
perpetual cycle of love and destruction which ends nearly always in his work in
submission and death: meeting an elephant, the narrator and the beast become “good
friends,” until one day he catches the animal “giving me a look. / an ice-cold
look, a plaice’s look.”
Then I put on my
wishing cloak
I donned my wig of
cunt-hair
and topped it with
my dreaming cap
with circle, stars,
and stripes,
and then I recited
my formula of murder
from the Catalogue
of Changeable Signs
The elephant was an
instant corpse.
Without a sigh he
fell on his rump
and rumbled,
crumbled, tumbled into ash,
But if the world is unjust, its
inhabitants are heroes for simply living. The image of the one-legged dance
(reminding me of the tradition of Flemish painting) appears again and again in
Claus’s poetry. It is the dance itself, as painful and impossible as it is,
that redeems the brutal world he evokes. In the poem “Simple” he weaves several
of his dominant themes—love, submission, fear, death—together
the two of us dance
on just one leg.
When I kneel at
your knees
and I bring you to
your knees
we are fragments
full of pity and danger
for each other.
With chains around
their necks
the dogs of love
come.
That
is not what I might describe as a world of “greetings,” but there is no
question that Claus’s vision is of a humane redemption of the sorrow and
suffering we all must face.
*I have
since discovered on the translator’s website that the poems include the works
of Claus’s ik schrijf je neer with the exception of two poems. Irons is
indeed the author of the “Pa Poems.” I believe readers would have been better
served to know this information and the fact that John Irons has translated a
great many other Dutch, Danish, and Swedish, and Norwegian poets as well.
Los
Angeles, March 10, 2006
Reprinted
from The Green Integer Review, No. 2 (March-April 2006)
Reprinted
from Jacket, No. 31 (2006)
Reprinted
from Green Integer Blog (March 2008), on-line
