Mária Lécina

Another poem I’d like to share with you, in part, is ‘Mária Lécina’ (1932) by J.W.F. Werumeus Buning (1891-1958), a Dutch poet, author and literary critic who lived in Amsterdam.
It’s a ballad meant to be sung accompanied by a guitar.

The full ballad has a hundred stanzas, no less, among them one unforgettable by its deep, throbbing melody of O’s and voiced vocals that alternate with the A’s in the even lines like heartbeats, a quality hard to equal in translation, but I’ll give it a try.
Firstly, the Dutch original of this one outstanding stanza,

Honderd klokken van Londen doen Londen bonzen
en vier kathedralen Genua
Maar geen brons kan zoo in het donker bonzen
als het hart van Mária Lécina
      ¿Porqué, Mária?

to be followed by my tentative translation of six picked stanzas that render the gist of the poem.

Mária Lécina has light eyes
green breakers roil inside them,
a spell is on those waters deep
there’s Hell and Heaven shines in them
      ¿Porqué, Mária?

The mountains are hot near Cartagena
And soft are the valleys of Ayora
But hotter and softer than mountains and valleys
is Mária Pepita Lécina
      ¿Porqué, Mária?

A hundred bells of London make London resound
and four cathedrals Genoa
But in the dark no bronze can ever resound
like the heart of Mária Lécina
      ¿Porqué, Mária?

Then her white bedspread she flung open
- Be my guest - said Mária Lécina
And she unhooked her black satin bodice open
- Eat the heart from my body - said Pepita
      ¿Porqué, Mária?

They slept until late in the morning
then there was the sunshine fierce
and Spain’s richest man and woman
Reclined behind a cotton curtain white
      ¿Porqué, Mária?

Then in the harbour the steam whistle blew
- Fie! - said Mária Pepita Lécina
And for the sailor there was nothing but to say
- Adiós Mária Lécina
      ¿Porqué, Mária?

Only the third stanza I know by heart though, sometimes, I stumble at the right number of Genoa cathedrals. I hope you can appreciate my efforts at rekindling some old, Dutch literary embers from the ashes. If not, it must be wholly my fault, as the poets definitely have merit.
Literature is abbreviated “lit.” and, by chance, LIT can be interpreted as meaning “Lost In Translation.”

Streamer

In my former post I showed you some pictures of a work of art, ‘Open Ended’, by Richard Serra, a steel colossus, once dominating the garden of the old Amsterdam Municipal Museum, now diminished to mere ornamental status in the shadows of a towering, vinyl monstrosity.

Though, in a way, I still like it, the most appealing trait of the rigid, slightly-tilted uprights being their warm, reddish-brown surfaces, especially in bright sunlight. On overcast or rainy days, the structure casts a drab, almost menacing impression by the sheer monumentality of its naked steel parts. Under those conditions, it seems as if the artist’s main intent was to overawe the beholders, to make them feel insignificant beside the glory of his creation, a trait not uncommon in monumental artists and architects of any epoch past and present.

Which reminded me of a different sculpture of oxidized steel, also in Amsterdam, that seems to mock the inherent rigidity of everything ferrous,

here observed from an opposite, less enticing angle, but the lightness of it still exposed by its shadow.

In passing one’s at once surprised by the frivolity of a ribbon of steel bent in such a way as to provoke a feeling of joy and liberation elicited by the paradox of movement expressed in matter. No attempt at grandiosity here, only an artist’s genuine endeavor at catching the meaning of freedom regained by stubborn resistance. The first time I saw it I had to smile.

Freedom regained is exactly what it stands for. From May 1940 till May 1945 Holland was occupied by German Nazi forces, ‘de Moffen’, as we called them. While they were still around, on May 8th, 1945, a vanguard of a thousand Canadian cavalry entered the city of Amsterdam from the south, and liberated its citizens from the Nazi terror. From many a window flew the national colors, red-white-blue, and the orange streamer of the Royal House.

In commemoration, the Canadian invasion was repeated in 1980, and at this occasion the sculpture, named ‘Amsterdam thanks her liberators’, was ceremoniously unveiled by the Mayor and lieutenant colonel Bell Irving of the Canadian Army.

The artist was Jan de Baat, an autodidact, Dutch sculptor who is characterized by his own words in this web page about the monument, where you’ll find several pictures of this joyful, debonair sculpture from different angles. The page is in Dutch, so I’ll translate the salient parts for you.

Wak van licht en lucht / A blowhole of light and sky
“In the indicated place I settled myself on the turf, looked up and saw this enormous blowhole of light and sky. Almost nowhere in Amsterdam an equal place is to be found. ‘I need to reach out into that space,’ was the first thought that came up. And then followed the idea: I wanted a streamer in that blowhole.”

Werkwijze / Course of action
“I wanted to know how a streamer waves. I rented a big blower and connected it to pipes by hoses. I suspended strips of paper, rubber, sailcloth, etc. I made them wave and flutter from different angles and filmed them. So doing I obtained hundreds of black-and-white slides, which I projected upon the wall. The sequel was almost dramatic. I sat down at the table with my wife and said: ‘Make me a mug of coffee, dear, for I seem stuck.’ I took pencil and paper to sketch the cause of the obstruction, put down some lines and… suddenly, I had drawn it! I had become such kind of streamer myself that, at once, I could put it on paper freehand.”

Jan de Baat (1921 - 2010)
“I’m a monumentalist. This means I don’t incorporate personal issues into my sculptures, but I aim at touching the beholder with a thing of beauty. Like, when walking in a wood, you may think: ‘What a lovely tree,’ as such I hope people will experience my sculptures. However, I’m an abstract artist, so my sculptures are abstract.”

In my case, it definitely worked that way.

Walking home

When I was in my early twenties I worked at a private bank on one of Amsterdam’s famous ‘grachten’ (17th century canals). In the morning I took a streetcar to go to work, but in the afternoon or early evening I used to walk back home, which took the better part of an hour.
That time was well spent, on which I'll dwell shortly.

Passing by the Spiegelgracht (Mirror Canal) I headed for the Rijksmuseum (National Museum),

went through the underpass,

which opens unto Museum Square

that stretches to the southwest as far as the Concertgebouw (Concert Hall).

There I took the street beside it - on the left in the photo -

to continue to where I then lived. Often enough, though, I went by different routes, through the Vondelpark, e.g.,

but those were detours that took slightly longer.

Of course, many sights then were different. The underpass of the Rijksmuseum sported no inside glass panes, but solid brick walls; Museum Square was a broad thoroughfare called, mockingly, ‘the shortest motorway in the Netherlands’ (photo 1992).

No fountain on the grounds, no extension of the Van Gogh Museum in its center,

and no ridiculous ‘bathtub’ eyesore to hide the historic 'Stedelijk' (Municipal Museum) from view.
Read 'The New York Times' art critic, Michael Kimmelman's Dec. 2012 article, Why is this Museum shaped like a tub? Priceless.

Instead, the Stedelijk had a secluded garden, through which I liked to stroll in passing,

with a public sandbox,

a fountain where some mad contraption of Jean Tinguely spurted jets of water into the pool in front of the restaurant terrace and there was this sculpture, 'Open Ended', by Richard Serra

standing in the center of the garden - as you can spot in the aerial photo. When you step inside the structure and look upward, you’ll see a perfect triangle of sky. It really is huge, but now, in its new location - scroll back up to the picture of the Van Gogh Museum - optically dwarfed by the monstrous ‘bathtub’.
On a side note, make a mental effort to flip the triangle to the front of the picture. The graphic impression is even more astounding.

Walking home from the office I took advantage of this spare hour to rehearse the conjugations of classical Greek verbs. Not exactly for fun, though under conditions as splendid any mental activity would have passed for a pastime, but in the course of my taking evening classes to finish grammar school.
Being familiar with Latin and Greek, plain English, to me, was still a very foreign language. It’s hard to imagine, these days, but in my youth French was the language of preference. It was taught on a voluntary basis from the fourth grade of elementary school, but English? Never.

When I was in evening class I read ‘In de Ban van de Ring’ (Lord of the Rings) in Dutch and was enchanted by it. Later, when I stumbled upon a copy of ‘The Hobbit’ in an international bookshop, I decided to take the plunge and read it in English. That must have been my first dip into English literature in the original. Soon I found a copy of Tennyson’s collected poems in a secondhand bookstall in the ‘Oudemanhuispoort’ on the University’s premises.

From it I retained a lifelong dedication to ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ - which I translated into Dutch in lyrical prose, published as a free iBook, recently - and to ‘The Lady of Shalott’, which I learned by heart, all one hundred and seventy one lines of it. Need I tell you I rehearsed its nineteen stanzas many times while walking home from the office?

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the fields the road runs by
      To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
      The island of Shalott.

The full poem can be read here.

Elysium

Nigh unto disproving my own thesis in the former post on the impossibility of truly translating a lyrical poem I did just that.
Having chosen a Dutch poem of my own, in accord with the season, I translated it into English and, to myself, I must admit it’s hardly different, same imagery, same rhyme scheme, power of expression hardly less, if at all, though words seem dancing to the quirks of a new puppetmaster.

Elysium

Easter has come and Spring is roaring
Offices empty into sidewalk cafes
Still in wintry wraps absorbing

Sunlight broke through glasses raised
When White beer chinks with ruby port
A toast to new life highly praised

Dying to thrive it yet withholds...
Skies blue, bare trees, soil still black
Until Love’s warmth again be back

The original, written in April, 2001, I present here for comparison.

Weer werd het Pasen en de lente brult
Kantoren stromen leeg in een terras
En absorberen nog in winterjas gehuld

Zonlicht brak door glas geheven
Als Wiekse Witte klinkt met rode port
Op het nieuwe leven.

Het wil eruit, maar houdt nog even in
Strakke lucht, kale takken, zwarte grond
Tot de warme liefde komt

Vera Janacopoulos, a cantilena

Presenting to you, my dear, English-reading ‘audience’, an intriguing poem I learned by heart in my teens. It’s a specimen of poésie pure and titled ‘Vera Janacopoulos’ (a Brazilian singer of Greek descent), subtitled ‘cantilene’, which in Italian means ‘a song’. The poet was Jan Engelman (1900-1972), a rather controversial Dutch poet, as he wrote erotic poetry in puritanical times - the Thirties and Fourties - and didn’t seem to fit into any contemporary literary movement.

Not every poem invites to be sung, but this one, being ‘pure poetry’, sounds like a song by sheer merit of its words even in our harsh, Dutch tongue.

At first, the poem itself.

Ambrosia, wat vloeit mij aan?
Uw schedelveld is koeler maan
En alle appels blozen.

De klankgazelle die ik vond,
Hoe zoete, zoele kindermond
Van zeeschuim en van rozen.

O Muze in het morgenlicht,
O minnares en slank gedicht,
Er is een god verscholen.

Violen vlagen op het mos,
Elysium, de vlinders los
En duizendjarig dolen.

Now, that doesn’t make much sense, does it? Even if you skip the meaning of words and try to play it by ear you’re put on the wrong leg, as our vowels and diphthongs make a mockery of English spelling rules, or vice versa. Our vowels sound like they do in Italian, be it shorter and less melodious. Our language isn’t called ‘Low German’ for nothing, after all.
But I’ll help you on. One of our singers, Lenny Kuhr, of Eurovision Song Contest fame, be it from 1969, set this poem to music and I found a YouTube clip of her performing.



Did you like it? At least, you’ve got an impression of how the words should be properly pronounced. Personally, though, I feel at odds with the melody, her musical interpretation of the poem, but let’s be generous.

But what does it all mean? Is meaning of importance, if the true test of the poem lies in its ability to please the ear, to be a concatenation of sounds, like music, that agrees with our sensual predilections?
In that case, you who don’t know Dutch be the true arbiter.
No meanings to distract you from an experience of pure sound.

According to literary critics, though, the meaning of its words does add to the experience of the poem as a whole, as words generate associations, vistas, ideas, feelings that can’t be evoked by sounds alone. The sounds and their meaning are the two different sides of the same coin.
So, I seem to owe you a translation, or let’s call it a transcription, because any poem not epic is impossible to truly translate.

Here goes...

Ambrosia, what’s flowing onto me?
Your cranial field is cooler moon
And all apples are blushing.

The tone gazelle that I found
How sweet the balmy child’s mouth
Of sea foam and of roses.

O Muse in the morning light,
O beloved mistress and svelte poem,
There is a god in hiding.

Violets flaring upon the moss
Elysium, release the butterflies
And a thousand years of roaming.

I tried to warn you in advance: in translation, without the magic of alliteration, rhyme and melody, it’s gibberish. It’s pure impressionist, allegedly jotted down by Jan Engelman in five minutes at a bar table after he'd heard Vera Janacopoulos sing at the Opera House. He must have been rather smitten by her voice or, apart from poetic license, he wouldn’t have imagined her as the slender nymph Ambrosia who rose up from the sea at full moon to meet him and send him forth on an ecstatic, millennial quest in a cloud of butterflies.
In Dutch, however, it makes perfect sense, if mainly by the mystery of its music.

Saint George - 21. Epilogue

In some ancient chronicles it is told that afterwards the officer, presumably, rode to the pond, raised his sword over it and told the fishermen to cast their nets, which shortly thereafter they hauled onto the bank brimming with fish. This Miraculous-Draught-of-Fish redux is in serious doubt. One suffices.
With the monster out of the way the fish stock will have recovered by itself soon enough.
That the border patrol was passing by that very day was not exactly coincidental, of course. For the benefit of men of science God simply loves to make His miracles appear as inconspicuous as possible, in accordance with the laws of nature and probability if only He can help it.
After his defeat in the council the junior councillor had retired to his study and abstained from any involvement in subsequent events. When by and by the dust had settled he noted with heartfelt pleasure that once again there was as much joy and love in the land as before the dragon's advent.

English translation by Ronald Langereis © 2013
from the Dutch, "Sint Joris" by Belcampo, 1983

The first episode of this tale is called: 1. The Oasis and can be found here. From there, you can read all the way up to this Epilogue using the Blog Archive.

Saint George - 20. The Miracle

It was no longer necessary. He was already there. As if waiting for them. Sitting his stationary horse, the princess riding pillion.
The people were dumbstruck. Nobody moved. Face to face at ground level is something quite different than from high upon the wall. He was a dragon slayer, after all.
Now he slowly approached them. The people backed away. Through the open gate he entered the town. In the square he halted and, for a while, they stood facing each other, the people grimly.
Someone in the crowd dared hurl an abuse. The officer drew his sword and what the people expected, that he would hit out with it, didn’t happen. Instead, he turned its point downward and raised it high, right in front of him. Like a priest the Host. Here it was an image of the Cross.
Then the miracle happened.
From this cross a radiance jumped forth that all but dispelled from the town the brown breath of the monster, from its streets and from its dwellings and from the people, also. All of a sudden, every single one of them came to realise the full extent of the pitiful state of wickedness to which they had stooped, recalled how gay they had been before, how much they’d loved each other and they burst into tears of shame of themselves. And these same people, who only moments ago had been out to stone them, now wrung their hands in agony and sank to their knees in horror of what they had taken for profit and pleasure and their shameful tears melted into tears of joy because now they had been redeemed from it. They looked up to him as their saviour and to their eyes it seemed as if his whole armour was taking part in the radiance emitting from the cross.
One of the elders came forward and reverently kissed his stirrup.
The rider thereupon raised his voice and spoke, ‘Not to me thou ought to be grateful but to Jesus Christ, my Lord. His servant I am and in His name I have done this. Convert to His teachings of love and nevermore wilt thou fall into the state in which I have found thee.’
Everyone became a convert. Nobody stayed behind.
When the officer and his soldiers - he was in command of a border patrol that had pitched camp a little farther up the oasis and had been completely ignorant of the whole event - moved on, he left behind a penitent but happy people.
The royal family was reunited.
The prisons were turned into chapels.

English translation by Ronald Langereis © 2013
from the Dutch, "Sint Joris" by Belcampo, 1983