Danie Marais – translated by/vertaal deur Richard Jürgens, Charl JF Cilliers & the author.
Danie Marais was born in Kimberley in 1971, went to school in Pretoria and obtained a B.Com degree with legal subjects at Stellenbosch University in 1993. He furthered his studies in the field of education at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, with German, mathematics and philosophy as majors. At present he lives in Stellenbosch and works as a freelance journalist and writer. Marais writes a regular rock column for Beeld and Die Burger newspapers. He is a scriptwriter for Binneland sub judice. In 2007 he participated in Poetry International in Rotterdam and was included in the Dutch anthology Hotel Parnassus:Poezie van dichters uit de hele wereld. For his first volume of poems, In die buitenste ruimte (2006), he received the Ingrid Jonker, Eugene Marais and UJ-debuut prizes. His second volume, Al is die maan ‘n misverstand, was published by Tafelberg in 2009. He also compiled an anthology, As almal ver is: Suid-Afrikaners skryf huis toe, for Tafelberg in 2009, a collection of essays, letters, short stories and strips about the experiences involved in emigration and/or living abroad. In March 2010 Tafelberg published Nuwe stemme 4, an anthology of poems of promising but hitherto unpublished poets which Marais compiled in collaboration with Ronel de Goede.
Cheers!
The world is everything
that is the case
Wittgenstein said.
Everything, however,
rubbed me wrong for years
I clenched my black heart
childlike for revolution my teeth
on edge for another world.
But on this hazy summer day
with the city washed up
jetsam against Table Mountain covered
in scars my cup runs over I toast:
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
and The Story of an African Farm
from an attic window in Woodstock.
For, oh, this deluded world with its petty wars
Cape Minstrel choirs and mountain fires this ocean
we have ploughed this dashed world is
my home with its
Grapes of Wrath its Rain Dogs its mutts
barking at the gates of paradise its
Madame Bovarys and bergies riding
bluetrain spirits horrors high, yes, only this world
gives us
a perverse masterpiece
our daily bread –
the great unholy mass clouding
the sun.
(Uncollected. Tr. by the author, 2012)
The Earth Slips Blue
Once the outermost darkness of space
comes to admire itself
here within
blackness of desire
surrounds the white moon still
When deepest indifference at last
recognises itself in the mirror
the earth slips blue, falls free –
twirls softly through the void
in the oil of the all
(From : Al is die maan ‘n misverstand, Tafelberg, 2009)
(Tr. By Charl JF Cilliers)
Overnight
Everywhere it is the same –
the sea washes in,
the sea washes out,
disappears in the sand.
The sun does not ask why,
nor does the moon venture a reply.
And surely that’s not what you write a poem about.
But then something else happens, suddenly overnight,
and you wake with shoes of lead
hands flimsy as breath,
a feeling that slowly looms up
around you like a cemetery
in the soft rain.
Sometimes I think you and I
can save each other from this;
defy gravity, the passage of death,
but already we are two old trees
divided by a quiet stream.
And I see the seasons
marching through you
and my leaves stir in the breeze
and my words fall
into the slow water
drifting to the sea.
—–
I read this poem to you
as you take your seat with a cup
of tea in front of the computer.
I said I wrote it last night
while you were sleeping.
You say nothing at first;
just look at me
with an unfathomable mixture
of understanding and irritation
before you ask:
“What would you do if something bad
really happened to you?
What would you do, say,
if someone close to you died?
Are you already rehearsing for the pain? ”
(From: Al is die maan ‘n misverstand, Tafelberg, 2009)
(Tr. By Charl JF Cilliers)
Christmas Eve in the Medi-Clinic
Death sometimes flings a stone through the window pane
just to wake up the people in a quiet house:
On Christmas Eve my father’s face turned ashen
close to the braaivleis coals;
he struggled to climb the stairs,
and went to lie down.
When he woke up
his pulse was out of control.
At the Medi-Clinic a doctor said
he should spend the night in the hospital.
Perhaps a mild heart attack.
My sister was in tears –
she said that a large, fatal heart attack
often followed on a mild one,
and that, as usual, Dad always
worked too hard.
By my father’s bedside in the Medi-Clinic
all this sounded absurd.
His shirt was unbuttoned,
with two EKG pads nestling amongst his chest hairs;
but he looked fit and healthy.
He spoke calmly to me.
Said retiring far from doctors in a small coastal town
was not a good idea.
Here there was proper care…
That my father’s heart was a muscle
that could give out
seemed unlikely.
My father was 62, but looked 50.
Was only off sick for two days while at school.
Had hardly missed a day at the office.
He was an engineer who built, maintained and managed things.
Someone who made things work,
and a gentleman.
I cannot remember
him ever, in public,
being petty, mean or rude to anyone.
When, at the age of 18, I left home
I had no time for people
who did their bit for a rotten society.
Becoming a gentleman was not my goal.
My father and I had a symbiotic relationship –
he built windmills,
I tilted at them.
Now I stand before my father’s life
like a heathen with a camera
at the gates of Mecca –
speechless at the faith and perseverance
that built these walls.
That all is vanity is not exactly a new idea.
To write this down a thousand different ways
is surely no more meaningful
than mending a leaking tap.
In the Medi-Clinic
I tried to tell my Dad
with words and sign language
that I admire him,
even though he does not actually read books;
that I love him:
and thank you
for the windmills and everything.
He answered, but did not look at me:
“I only did what grandpa Danie also did.
It actually goes without saying.”
His one hand on his stomach appeared resigned
when he turned to me and tried to smile reassuringly.
He said don’t keep the others
waiting any longer.
The grandchildren wanted their presents.
He was okay.
Grandpa Danie’s fear of hospitals was childlike,
but I took my leave of my father obediently
on Christmas Eve in the Medi-Clinic.
On my way home in his silent, silver car
I realized what it meant
to squander your life.
I sailed through 35 years
like a surfer heading for the sea
through the Great Karoo, Dad.
Like the black ball on a snooker table,
unerringly I swish my way across the green baize
heading for the last pocket.
And yet there is still nothing
I want to build or manage; nothing
I can fix.
But I’m asking, like everyone else,
for more, Dad,
more windmills and everything.
(From : Al is die maan ‘n misverstand, Tafelberg, 2009)
(Tr. By Charl JF Cilliers)
The Night I Became We
Your father, dear Lea Cecilia, is a man
who tries to talk and gesture
himself through life.
But the first time you
came wriggling in my arms
and lay there, you lulled me
like a dummy,
dwarfing the world around us.
Your tiny heels
soft as cheeks
left me speechless;
the miniatures of your mother’s long toes;
the useless little hands
trying to fidget in your mouth;
the small tuft of dark hair;
the sweet baby smell.
Your wandering eyes were two searchlights probing
the contours of my unfamiliar face.
A nurse whisked you off and weighed you,
made a note in a file,
secured a tag around each ankle
and showed them to me –
as if I would perhaps be in need of a label
to identify your whimperings and your toes
in future.
After that more things happened,
but they’ve grown vague.
I do know that I kissed your mother
before I dazedly wound my way home
in my father’s old motor car –
just before sunrise through the wintry grey
deserted streets of Cape Town:
a man with only one leg and one arm
on a crutch at the station;
two bergies on sidewalk mattresses
in Roodebloem Road below Jamaica Me Crazy;
mist over the harbour and dim lights:
my scanning eyes sliding
over the landscape failing
to find a resting place.
In our living room
needy Levinia meows.
On the yellow kitchen table Die Burger‘s front page states:
“Foreigners flee from zenophobic thugs –
Rasool has plan to restore order.”
In a photo a policeman with a big gun tries to protect
the foreigners’ meager possessions on a bakkie
against the onslaught of the seething masses.
A few tears would be the least I could do,
but for new people the world is a very strange sight.
When a new-born baby cries, there are no tears flowing yet.
(From : Al is die maan ‘n misverstand, Tafelberg, 2009)
(Tr. By Charl JF Cilliers)
What Bad Poems Know
Poetry makes nothing happen – W.H. Auden
Why then does bad poetry so immeasurably depress me?
Previously I hoped
it was because bad poems were lies
which, like golden sandals,
made desire obscene.
I thought it was the tacky, predictable despair
the Highveld Stereo passion
the emotional pornography
the infantile word games
the lame forced rhymes and paraplegic rhyming couplets
the zombie-hallelujahs
the creepy intimacy and wet kisses
the clueless disappointment
the hang-tit outpourings in clouds of suffocating perfume
the unpolished cries of distress
the suicide notes riddled with spelling mistakes
the illiterate arrogance
the bumbling pretentiousness
the self-conscious honesty
the tedious nightmares
the macho self-pity
the unmagical realism
the suburban surrealism
the perpetual arse-licking of the deaf-mute Muse
the arsenic poeticas
the feigned concern for nature
the small-minded political pontification …
But all that is secondary –
it’s the unmistakable truth in bad poetry
that gets me down.
A good poem is the mock sun, the lie.
The world is made with shitty style and hollow rhetoric –
life is the rerun of a soapie,
death a mere formality.
Good poems are the headlights
that fatally blind you,
because there is a murderous hack
behind the wheel of this twelve-ton cliché.
(Unpublished)
(Tr. By Charl JF Cilliers)
Translator:
Charl JF Cilliers was born in 1941 in Cape Town. Initially he went into the field of electronics and lectured for 4 years. He then joined Parliament as a translator in 1968 and retired in 1998 as Editor of Hansard. His first volume of poems West-Falling Light appeared in 1971, to be followed by Has Winter No Wisdom in 1978. His Collected Poems 1960 – 2008 appeared in 2008 and The Journey in 2010. His latest volume of poetry , A momentary stay. was published in 2011. He also published a volume of children’s poems, Fireflies Facing The Moon, in 2008. He has retired to the Cape West Coast where he continues to write.
*
Other poems published with the kind permission by Poetry International Web
Sometimes you meet someone
This morning I found our cat
blissfully curled up
in the washing basket.
A sleeping paw over her head,
two white back paws
completing the circle.
A cat is its own bed,
own house, party, religion, movement, union.
A cat is a perfectly incomprehensible word of fur.
People are not like this.
People are road signs on the bottom of an ocean
dreamed in words.
People are empty.
People are “For Sale”.
People are dead-end streets.
People take what they can take.
People flitter like moths around a long ago moon.
They can’t help themselves.
Cats come and live in people only
when they’re tired, thirsty or hungry.
People have been wondering for centuries about cats.
House cats eat their people
only when they are already dead.
Sometimes you meet someone who is just like a cat.
You find the meaning of your life
in the sound of her name.
You chase her perfume
hand-over-foot
but when you find her
her eyes change
your hands into silent prayers
your tongue into sand.
She disappears like darkness in the night.
All that remains
is the outline of an emptiness –
a ring of smoke
brown marbling on a piece of white paper
wedding ring in your drawer.
In the darkroom
I took photos of all the distant places
I’d been without you;
photos that would prove how complete
my life is without you.
I tried to smile
for the camera
like a man of the world –
certainly didn’t want to seem
like a guy who couldn’t survive
a couple of old kisses and a wasted opportunity.
But my photos from Norway, Greece and Thailand
didn’t develop into the pictures
I’d planned.
In the darkroom
your face appeared to me
over and over again.
The dripping skins that I hung out in a row
were the over-exposed images
of my life without you;
the photos I showed to people
bleached postcards
from my new life to you.
And yet I still hoped
the photos would persuade you.
They didn’t.
It’s a pity, you said, that I
lead such a vicarious life in Europe.
The dictionary explains ‘vicarious’
as: ‘surrogate’, ‘indirect’, ‘second-hand’.
I disagreed with you vehemently,
said that only Tuaregs and Amazonian Indians
didn’t live a so-called ‘vicarious life’.
And when they sat around the camp fire and told stories
their lives were also indirect,
second-hand and surrogate,
I added.
But in the dark room
by the sleeping body of the woman
who I share my life with now
I know, as always,
exactly what you mean.
In the darkness
your words touch me
with soft eyes
again.
In Germany where the clouds march in single file
Germany is where the clouds
march in single file
where the sun has a permit to shine
where the moon may not stay up as late as she pleases.
Germany looks like Germany on television.
The only difference between Germany and television
is that something happens on television.
The criminals in Germany dream
of big guns
of America.
The thugs all have
hot water, electricity and medical insurance.
The criminals lead lives of quiet desperation
just like the teachers, butchers and accountants.
Germany is wealthy and fat
but anaemic and unwise.
In Germany
it is more difficult
to buy an environmentally unfriendly deodorant
than it is for an overweight teenage girl
to get into MTV heaven.
I suppose Germany is like everywhere –
the kind of place where you are scared
that The People will find you out,
that they will discover your hide-out,
switch off their TV sets
and escape from their talk shows
to come and get you
to groan and bang at your windows
on the fourth floor
like the zombies in “Night of the Living Dead”.
In Germany
you sow mealies
in the flower pots on the balcony.
In Germany
a sea of square houses turn blue in the twilight
when you hear far away voices on the telephone.
In Germany
you speak German like a German
until one morning you struggle again
to pronounce “selbstverständlich”
like someone with a mouth full of novocaine.
In Germany
your mother tongue is still your mother tongue.
In Germany
Afrikaans is the killer whale
you’re raising in the bath;
Afrikaans is the python curled up
under the fig tree in the living room.
Afrikaans becomes your house god, your altar,
the pot plant next to your CD-collection
that grows in the moonlight
like Audrey II in “The Little Shop of Horrors”
to cast long and scary shadows
over the rooftops of the neighbourhood.
In Germany
you walk
perfectly digitally animated
you take
without touching
you move
silently through people and walls
you slip
effortlessly like a voice through a telephone wire
straight through an indifferent day.
In Germany, South Africa
is no more and no less than memories and photos –
that old rugby injury you feel in your joints
when it’s cold and wet.
You are surprised to find yourself
choking back tears one day
next to the Cape grapes in the supermarket.
In Germany
even the grapes from Italy
remind you of home.
In Germany
you often dream
of family, old friends and long ago;
that someone dies
while you are still here far away.
In Germany you do
what you want to
whether you want to
or not.
At a sea green kitchen table somewhere
It’s you said and I said
at a sea green kitchen table
somewhere on the arsehole end of the world
once again.
And I say it’s South Africa,
it’s simply South Africa
that’s been driving me crazy
all these years.
I say I feel about South Africa
like Robert Lowell felt about a manic episode,
“an attack of pathological enthusiasm”.
To have lived with that savage beauty,
the sweet human persistence
and the consuming hopelessness
for twenty-two years
makes everything here
seem like much ado about nothing, indeed.
I say as Lowell said:
“to have known
the glory, violence and banality
of such an experience is corrupting”.
And you say,
blue eyes blazing,
that I have to stop stop stop
all my sweeping statements and grand gestures
that, oh, “Herr Gott weiß!”
I have to
fucking stop quoting things at you.
You say
that I ought to know
that I am not clinically depressed or something
as I seem to believe.
I have to finally realise
that I am actually just
a pathologically pathetic neurotic and hypochondriac
and that is why I always think
I’m going crazy or something.
You say
you often feel exactly as miserable
as I do, but you don’t
jump to the same conclusions
and you don’t mope and moan about it.
No, you get up
and try again
and you flap your arms wildly
and you spit and curse at the moon
and then you go on.
You don’t climb back into bed
to suck your sherbet childhood
like a baby sucks its thumb.
You say that I’m mainly
“theatralisch” and melodramatic
and full of shit.
And I take a deep breath
and I say
fuck you fuck you fuck you
you can’t call me a drama queen!
I say it’s you only you –
you you are
too stubborn and scared to admit
that you too are lost;
that your heart paces your rib cage
like a grizzly bear
when you say “Guten Morgen”
to the secretary.
I say it’s you,
you’re the one who’s convinced
that you’re going to turn into a pillar of salt
if you’d turn around
once
to look your sad animal helplessness
in the eye.
I say don’t you dare
ever call me theatrical and melodramatic again.
I hear you play Chopin.
I have seen you weep Schubert
when your fingers run away with you
across the keys.
I say
to die little by little
bit by bit
is only natural, “Schatzi!”
I say
I want to say
when I notice how suddenly
silent and wide-eyed you’ve become;
when I see
how a reluctant tear
slowly rolls down your cheek
as you get up
and disappear into the bedroom.
Leaving me
at a small sea green kitchen table somewhere
on the bruised end of our stubborn love.
Leaving me to think how I
suddenly how I love you again.
I know you would have
played piano,
if I hadn’t said those things
about Schubert and Chopin.
I sit and wonder
about melodrama and theatrics.
Sit and wish
that I could tell you
how truly sorry I am;
sit and wish
that I could make you see
how nostalgia is eating my mind alive
how I bellow for love
while you sleep like a baby at night.
Like you
I can be no different.
© Translation: 2007, Richard Jürgens & Danie Marais
Publisher: Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, 2007
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