Joan Hambidge – Vertaling in Engels
Joan Hambidge - Vertaal deur Johann de Lange, Jo Nel & Joan Hambidge
T.M.T.L.T.B.M.G.
Joan Hambidge
There’s more to love
than patterns: boy meets girl,
buying a Sterns ring, etcetera.
There’s more to love
than a beginning, middle or end.
Because you (and me) refuse to accept it.
Oh, meeting at first (let’s call it: exposition)
always rather briskly spills over into the highlight
(i.e.: climax of consummation,
coming without qualms). Both: trapped.
Who wants to hazard a further guess?
Since what goes up, must come down.
Ecstasy only lasts as long as sending flowers
or the sweet deceit of romance.
Dénouement: vide the glossary, an “unknotting
of complications”. A discovery that passion
- by one? or both? - is running out.
Our dénouement thus: discovery of your deceit.
There’s more to love
than patterns: girl meets girl,
invests in love, togetherness, understanding.
There’s more to love
than a beginning, middle or end.
Because you (and I) are caught up in symbols.
(Vertaal deur Johann de Lange)
Ariel
Joan Hambidge
To write poetry: you have
to be prepared to die.
- Theodore Roethke
The brilliant girl
of Smith College
Phi Beta Kappa
(later on even
in the editorial
of Mademoiselle)
silently screams
her life frozen
in a bell jar.
The charming wife
of Ted Hughes
writes verses
before feeding
her little morningsong
- becomes inex-
plicably nauseous
cabbage burning
on her gas stove.
How bright the shards
of a broken jar; how
distant a finger
slashed open
by a knife; flowers
spurting blood
in the garden.
“Dying,
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.”
Thus the intellect
dissects after yet another
frustrated suicide attempt
poplars are trees of death…
copes with everyday tasks
an over-excited metronome.
Death an art
studied in its fibre and vein
- life the groundless
rhyme and reason
heartless copy cat.
(Vertaal deur Johann de Lange)
Arte poetica
Joan Hambidge
Homage à Neruda
In the afternoons when the bodies
of lovers become one in holy host,
whores pawn their bodies,
priests lose their faith slowly but surely,
women lament over abortions or children signed away,
mothers sigh over rebellious kin,
young sons strive against the father’s power,
and activists move underground,
the poet becomes one with the sacrament
of the word. Or not so?
No, the poet experiences something of the ecstasy
of love, the unscrupulousness of a whore
(anything but anything for the poem’s sake),
the desperation of the once oh so religious
person calling His God but hearing Him
no more (like a poem in a desert),
the lonely lament of a woman,
for whom the bell tolls annually, reminded
of a non-commemorative, non-happy birthday
moment (a voice smothered in a plastic bag),
a child who ends up on the front-page
or in a cell, a father who is listening,
but fails to hear, and the activist
calling out: “A luta continua!”
A lifeless poem commits suicide.
(Vertaal deur Johann de Lange)
My mannequin
Joan Hambidge
My mannequin
flaunts her emotions
prettily: she laughs, she pouts,
she’s always happy - as long as nobody
gets too close - and looking for more luck.
Moving mechanically, stiffly,
some notice - those who really look - that she
is sexless, frigid and dead:
marble eyes, fake eyelashes
and cold hands.
Do I imagine it, or is her mouth
at times defenseless like a bleeding wound.
(Vertaal deur Johann de Lange)
Programme verse
Joan Hambidge
The swallows are departing:
the souls of the dead;
silently, surely they leave
to an unknown, quiet imaginative place,
a region where the dead, according
to spiritualists, judge themselves;
the suicides and murderers
slowly, if ever, find peace
or come to terms with their deeds.
Clairvoyants can call them up;
highly sensitive mediums can sense their roaming
presence in old ransacked, spooky houses,
like trapped swallows in an airport terminal
flapping their wings searching for an exit,
blinded by damp, frozen windows,
anxious, panicky because this unknown area
restricts and fails to release
them on this obligatory journey without a passport
or an endorsed, special visa,
hand luggage or a heavy, overloaded bag.
Susceptible youths also have the ability to see:
set an extra place at the table
for the imaginary, roaming friend;
a messenger from the unreachable other side,
comforts a suffering person.
Mediums translate the oh so longed for
message to a guilt-ridden family member.
And us? The ones left behind? The mourners?
The inheritors of quiet, undecodable postcards?
They leave us with the seed
of what we wanted to feed, with the crumbs
of remorse, of I still-wanted-to-say, make amends;
closed off from this mysterious winter journey.
(Vertaal deur Johann de Lange)
Ode to her
Joan Hambidge
Homage à the poetry of Erica Jong
I cannot forget you your breasts
above all
haunt me like two headstrong detectives
in pursuit of a culprit throughout the night
never-ceasing until I turn on the light
merely a phantom experience
yet
I cannot forgive you how you deliver
my body to another
above all your eyes everything begins with the eyes your laughter
the crow’s feet
around the corners
that
I cannot forget your tongue why
didn’t I steal your tongue tiny
oyster now available to everybody
like canned fruit at the local supermarkets
at night
your sweater touches my shoulders the same one
which used to hug my body I write messages
like I love you need you suddenly the sweater
escapes my arms
to return
free of any further claims return return
to forgive or forget is in vain.
(Vertaal deur Johann de Lange)
My sweet old etcetera
Joan Hambidge
It’s through Latin
Etruscan becomes comprehensible -
and even Egyptian hieroglyphics
are effortlessly deciphered
by experts; now explicable.
But who will someday grasp
the alphabet of our ruins?
Mysteriously you construct
a plastic model ship
of the Titanic - while I drift
on the Dead Sea
anticipating deliverance.
Archaelogical research
cannot simplify
the destruction
which you multiply.
(Vertaal deur Jo Nel)
One night-stand
Joan Hambidge
The scène is always the same:
intro-drink-seduction-bed.
The next day constantly a mind fuck:
guilt-silence-longing
and regret.
To fall in love is like placing a bet.
(Vertaal deur Joan Hambidge)
Writing as fucking
Joan Hambidge
To write a sapphic verse
close before midnight
leads to many problems
(ignoring “vicious mathematics” …)
to find a non-off-beat image
for our for(ever)ness:
the pen is mightier than the sword:
does not work; too phallic, sexist,
sounds like penis-envy…
when two lips speak together:
does not reveal much of our softness/tenderness;
rubyfruit jungle:
is false, fruit-
less romanticism;
dark labyrinth:
too desperately literary;
bitter lemons:
cute poetic cunninglingus.
To write a (love)poem
like this, creates
coldness/logic/guilt
about that which merely is.
(Vertaal deur Joan Hambidge)
Domanda
Joan Hambidge
For Margaret Rosabel Mezzabotta
Untimely, premature your exit
to an unknown region.
The soul, I remember this morning,
needs the slow maturation of wine.
If hastily uncorked or poured
wine suffers bottle shock.
You would have been able to verify
this for me: an obscure reference
to the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
But to comprehend your death
is an undecodable hieroglyphic
in a dark impassable alleyway.
Death reverses the order of words,
it makes us look back, remember, even
seize small moments of chance -
like my cleaning your glasses once,
discussing dark symbols with you.
For this funeral oration, or rather declamation –
as a poet I am completely unprepared,
no, undeclared, undeserving…
The so-called consolatio or comfort
of a medium (Look, she sends you a rose)
or the flickering of a candle,
undoes nothing. What does “passing away”
mean? That you had to leave - in my book
anyway - far too rapidly
for heaven? That your soul was forced out
seemingly without warning. That roses fade,
candles cease to flicker…
Still I wanted to ask:
“Who scratched out Nefertiti’s one eye
so that she was blinded on the other side?”
(Vertaal deur Joan Hambidge)
My parents
Joan Hambidge
i
From my birdlike mother,
I inherited my unhappy, dissatisfied, unpleasing nature:
Yesterday, was a better day.
From my forceful, burly father,
my dreamy, romantic, undaunted disposition.
The one can place words like blocks;
the other’s dreamy nature almost blocked
by others…
And me?
Their heirloom?
The one part of the Janus head
looks back to what was;
the other half to what words
may unblock.
ii
Oh it was always so effortless, so easy
to turn away from you my parents,
the eternal addressees
of this poem and my prayers.
This is an elegy
before you leave for the other side
and because a funereal poem might be inappropriate
at this time of deadly silence.
For her my crooked old mother
for him my burly father
something which is shorter than a letter
worthier than a legacy
more lasting than a gravestone
more reliable than an insurance policy
more worthy than a family ring.
Every poem which stems
from me with affection
due to them.
Her voice the metre of my verses
his hand the form of my words.
iii
They are the salt of the earth
yes, the salt of the earth
because their tears
their tears
stream like salt
like salt
over their cheeks
They are the salt of the earth
my parents
lamenting in silence
over their children’s tears
streaming like salt
like salt
over their cheeks
iv
Mother:
tonight I recall a letter to you
written in my niggling handwriting
from a faraway country:
It is winter in New Haven
at night I hear the silence
of the snow falling
like the wings of departing swallows
O Mother
I carry the heavy burden
of feeling the descending words
the feathers of a departing swallow
O Mother
O Mother
I carry the heavy burden
of words descending on me
like black swallows.
v
Tonight I suddenly recall
how you called
out: “Everything is against me!”
and about three decades later
I realise
Dad
how you struggled
to fit us all in
on your 30 Day Old Mutual
calendar.
Another policy
another late shift
an extra work load.
And I?
I keep myself busy with a policy
with almost no investment value.
It fails to fit on a normal calender,
it prefers the unpredictable hour
and yes, it does not protect you
against disillusion
or similar feelings
as a published poem betraying the poet.
vi
When I was younger
and oh so unsure
they were merely in the way
but now I return
incessantly to them
my parents so sure
and understanding,
prepared to stand surety
Does a pun lurks there
in being “sure” and “stand surety”
if merely in a poem?
vii
Dad
I carry you
a graft on my body.
I dreamt of you last night:
you are playing in an orchestra
with your old cronies
at a small, village wedding
with many dirty, stacked plates.
You hand me a glass of wine…
How real, tangible
the dream feels which according to Cirlot
might indicate an approaching death.
Yes, my father presents me with a glass
from which I pour life
with full abundance.
viii
My mother prefers
Not to be mentioned in my verses.
Yet my first searching, rambling poem
written in a faraway USA
in cold winter snow, was addressed to her.
Previously I spoke to her through
other woman poets in my letters.
Poetry learnt by heart
now written from the heart.
My mother prefers
not to be mentioned in my verses.
Yet all words stem
from the restrained, confined mother womb.
Oh mother forgive me this tres-
pass, this intrusion
of your privacy,
due to the unsevered umbilical cord.
ix
Look at them, my parents,
sitting as a young engaged couple
on a sofa in a Jewish studio.
You smile with a little hat on your head
holding Dad’s hand.
Many decades later I realise:
we choose undoubtedly our parents
prenatal and astral.
Here they are, my parents,
waiting
the two old wrecks
in a poem by their second eldest.
I see them after being 50 years together:
on that day I phone them up
from a faraway place.
I place them neatly
- as if for a photo shoot -
for a final analysis,
for an unharmed version,
in a thankful cadeau.
A coup de chapeau!
(Vertaal deur Joan Hambidge)
Rome
Joan Hambidge
Although I lost my religion long before my virginity
yes it was traumatic to copy others
in this process me I copycat could I understand in Rome
the first original shall we say, most original city
of the arts understand why artists create
represent passion in a painting hanging upside
down from roofs everything for art’s sake
I must confess: I even cried
when I saw Michelangelo’s Pieta
as it becomes more than a mother
not comprehending the death
of her beloved firstborn look at the fingers
they are stretched out searching
the son’s cold broken knee
the head backwards the loin cloth unravel-
ling how long will it take before the body de-
composes? the muscles breaking down
Even the holes in hand and foot
recalled in breathtaking detail
(Remember: He was pierced)
For me death here becomes colder than marble
(Vertaal deur Joan Hambidge)
