Breyten Breytenbach – vertaling in Engels

 Breyten Breytenbach – vertaal deur die outeur (en ander) /translated by the author (and others)

 

 

poem

take me through a zone of snow
farmlands with bales of hay in summertime
where birds eat the patches of words
then swarm to rhythms in motion
towards clearness, towards some clearness

take me back over the courses of a life
where loved ones lie with decayed faces
in cribs of dust
show me the purpose of the tortoise tracks in the sand
let me see the stars another final
first time blessing the earth
with clearness, with thirsty clearness

let me grasp how the wind hangs out
flags and joys for the fluttering
in the tremor of tree tops
let me hear the child cry
the boy’s laugh on his way to school
the lament of the hailer of darkness at night
for clearness, for the dream of clearness

let me stretch this body for a while yet
over the folds and the sighs of a woman
let the quivering of the spinal column be a flame
it’s all right that dark like day against the window glass
sheds the recalled in seed of forgetting
and that love and grief were mentioned
for the sake of clearness, for the sake of the silent song of clearness

take me to the highest mountain
let me carry stones in my trouser pockets
fit the wings of plastic across my shoulders
that I might soar where everything blue crackles
and only the empty level sea-mirror glitters
of clearness, of the blinding quality of clearness

lower me into the deepest well
where walls are damp from the searching of hands
for the moon that like a thought
is bobbing faceless in the deep’s dark
string the flow of words like a rope around my neck
and let me hang from the raw intertwinement of clearness

but let me sit squatting in silence
let it all come and go
let me forget and be absorbed in coming and passing away
let me hear the heart swobbling in the void
as it is a journey, a space of breath
of clearness, oh the clearness

 

(©Tr. by Waldemar Gouws / 2015 of the unpublished poem “gedig” of Breyten Breytenbach)

 

*

 

*

in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince

going down on the left side

thus the Luxembourg Gardens side

where nightly little twigs are burnt by the sun

to nestle scrochingly in the trees

and this bridescake of the Odeon Theatre

that used to be a honey house of freedom

so long ago already in May sixty-eight

 

in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince

is the restaurant where we precisely

at nine o’clock and not a day later

will meet

you will recognize me because I shall

again have a beard

even if of cheap silver

or a tree of burnt-out twigs

and the Algerian boss-cum-chef

with the mustache in the nest of red cheeks

will put his arm full of bees around my shoulder

to say

alors, mon frére – ca fait bien long temps…

 

will we order couscous mouton for two –

I can already taste the crumbly snow-yellow grains

and the bit of butter – ?

and a flask of very dark Sidi Brahim

with the taste of the sun and the sea

of the Maghreb’s vineyards?

 

what do you say to a thé à la menthe

measured in glowing glasses with little flowers

and some of that sweet stuff

which is heavy and light of honey?

 

listen how the same wind

calls through Paris’s old-old streets

 

you are my darling and I am so glad

 

(my seventy six)

 

Breyten Breytenbach (from/uit Die ongedanste dans, 2005:100-101. Lewendood, 1985; vertaling/translation Helize van Vuuren)

Breyten Breytenbach is a distinguished poet, painter, novelist, playwriter, essayist and human rights activist. He is considered one of the greatest living poets in Afrikaans.  His literary work has been translated into many languages and he has been honoured with numerous literary and art awards.  Having exhibited worldwide he is also a recognized painter, portraying surreal human and animal imagery.  He was born on 16 September 1939 in Bonnievale and studied art at the Michaelis Art School in Cape Town.  In 1960 he left South Africa and went to Paris where he married Yolande Ngo Thi Hoang Lien (Yellow Lotus), a French woman of Vietnamese origin.  But he could not return to South Africa because of the Mixed Marriages Act, which classified Yolande as Coloured.  A committed opponent of apartheid in South Africa, Breytenbach established the resistance group Okela, and from 1975-1982 he was a political prisoner in South African prisons serving two terms of solitary confinement.  Both his paintings and his literary work include the notions of nomadism, values of the outsider, incarceration, death and decay, pain, movement, social criticism, memory, identity and consciousness.  Breytenbach made his debut with a collection of innovative poems in 1964 with the publication of Die ysterkoei moet sweet.  In his latest collection of poetry he engaged in a nomadic conversation with his friend, the late Palestine poet, Mahmoud Darwish.  He received the Protea Prize, Mahmoud Darwish Prize and for the French translation of Oorblyfsels/ Voice over, the Max Jacob Prize. His latest volume of poetry, forty five twilight songs, appeared with Human & Rousseau in 2014.

 

 

the opening poem

(“in the beginning there is love”)

 

to her with the tiny feet like tamed pigeons

to her whose warm breath will be strung from your mouth

as the bunting of a pleasure cruiser

to her with the mother-spot a morning star

burning next to the scar under the breast

to her for whom the crest is a barely discernible sigh

to her with the black buttocks but purple flames

in the small of the back

to her who is the consort of a king enjoying you from up high

to her who is fresh snow between the sheets

to her with the slanted eyes and the bashful nether mouth

to her who laughs at your puny haft

to her who spits in your face in a foreign tongue

to her with the long grey memory and the wrinkles

the dim sight and the initiate’s know-how

to her who chases you away like a dog

to her who gurgles when stiffening in a jerk

like a body hanged from the rope of pleasure and pain

to her who takes all the Holy Names in vain

to her with the frog between the legs

to her with the pudendum like a green guitar

swollen and smooth

never yet plucked by a singing finger

to her who thought you had wings

to her with the pitch dark mouth and the powdered tits

to her who takes you for a dead lover

to her with the erotic hands

to her who killed herself

to her who murdered you

to her whose belly is a banked fire

to her who quite still turns her head away

so that you might not taste the tears

to her with the dorsal vertebrae like a ladder of notes

praying through the fingers

to her who relishes humble pie

to her who whispers unbelievable unlawfulnesses

in your ear at first

only to spout a sudden inkwell

to her with the brown body like a master violin

to her who talks to darkness

to her who like a snake

will let all of you slither down a smooth throat

to her who has forgotten you

to her who has never heard of you

to her for whom you write dedications like nuptial dances

 

to her, for all of her

this poem

 

(From: Lady one:Of love and Other Poems, Harcourt, 2002)

(Tr. by the author)

 

 

the way back

 

then Wordfool told the woman and the child

come let us squat on our haunches

here against the climb

and look down on the smoking city

to take stock-

we remain tied to the road

as the place of origin

even though we’ve forgotten the people’s names

 

then Wordfool told the woman and the child

we are free

I know it is hard

and once every year it is good

to turn around

and look back

on the journeys and the state of the dead

 

once every year

the season goes dark

and the time is right

and ripe to bring the pumpkin

a celestial fruit of eternal life

to market

 

come let us sing

 

how shall we preserve the flesh?

in crypts mummies nod their heads

heavy with the travels of decay

moths and blight darken their coats with holes

 

how shall we exorcise distance?

we stuff the trips and the tides

with desert honey and locust meat

and forgotten remembrances of the Old Country-

that a good fragrance may come from the hills

and keep book in the dust

 

then Wordfool told the woman and the child

let’s imagine ourselves as scouts

gather wood and light the fire

to signal to the dwellers

of the dead city

that we wish to entice the moon

from her dark hollows

to reconcile with the pumpkin

 

moreover Wordfool told the woman and the child

forgive me please

one makes poems also from sticks and seeds

to capture the soft words

one is always looking for measure and rhyme

and then the combustion of incarnation

you mustn’t tell anybody

 

(From: Windcatcher: New & Selected Poems, 1964-2006, Harcourt, 2007)

(Tr. by the author)

 

 

for Michael Fried: Paris, December 21, 2004

 

we live in dark times

birds of heaven are poisoned

we roam through brightly lit halls

stare myopically at exhibitions

of grey imaginaries, encyclopaedias of passing

meticulously annotated absences of sense

 

the emptier the contents the more painfully

perfection and the perfidy of looking will flow

as the world completes itself through us

and we see corpse camps, genocide, man

abjuring his skein of belonging

in a desperate wing-beat to be

 

free of death

the birds of heaven are poisoned

and we live in dark times

 

and somewhere on fetid waters of holy rivers

burning effigies of dark-faced goddesses bob

they’ve long since stopped singing to us

 

in closet spaces we stare myopically

at the skinned life of the writer

naked like a soft dragon on the floor

to kiss a black tongue to the shoe

of his cruel beloved

the spine a curve of cursed words

and we see death camps, genocide, troughs

stuffed with corpses, man

jeering at his rope of legitimacy

in a thrashing wing-thrust

to be free of passing

has long since stopped singing to us

 

“finally, when I shave my sombre morning face

I have the impression of shaving

my cadaver before it is put on its bier

and let to water

in the putrid river of oblivion”

 

from the void comes incarnation

comes dark wind

will the wind be a wound

and signal the blind child

 

in twilit cellar chambers

we eat salad and lard and bread

suddenly recall the stories of illicit ancestors

how clumsily our mouths fold around deceased tongues

to elicit murmurs of forgetting

man relinquishes the illumination

of ever again being mad and clear

 

and out there the clear city rises

magnificent ruin of man’s monstrous imagination

where much love was committed

and murders often done by knife

while the writer sang

of incandescent rivers where goddesses bathe

the water dragon naked and blind

 

to the left a high moon slips

as petrified subconsciousness

chafed pale by dust of space and time

 

tomorrow paper snow will litter and letter

the roof-map and the nest of streets

and from gutters icy drops will drip

on dark faces of shivering wanderers

 

(From: Windcatcher: New & Selected Poems, 1964-2006, Harcourt, 2007)

(Tr. by the author)

 

 

midmorning in heaven

 

midmorning in heaven above West Hill

with moon a perforated dipper

of light       dredged from time

bone-bleached by gospel tides

of verbs become verbiage

to stool in stone the size of a dream

 

which only goes to show

that since the outset of stellar configurations

there’s been a door to life in the dark out there

 

oh watchmen, you lying low in the lee of your blindness

to leer at the light in our salt

and the shimmering of rose roosting our wounds:

if you were to gaze on the gazetted faces of the dead

you’d remember gossamer mothers in gas chambers

and know: this is not the way

to recover your identity

 

you standing in the doorways of our demure dwellings:

come inside from the blind binding out there

come darken our thresholds

come rest your whitened eyes

so that we may know ourselves

as people just like you

 

come, come drink Arabic coffee with us

and you will see us weep

and fit into coffins just like you do

 

(From: Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish, Archipelago Books, 2009)

(Tr. by the author)

 

 

measures

 

you can’t let a drunken man hold a pen

he will try to tack and sail against history

you can’t let a drunken man leave the house

before dawn

when streetlights are still green

he will go to the quay to bellow at the wind

you can’t ask a drunken man to think straight

he will tell you all about rodents in Siberia

you can’t let a drunken man walk through town

where women have long and sly eyes

he will stumble over his words and his feet

and go piss behind the laurel bush in the park

with a shiver down his spine

truly, you can’t ask a drunken man what about a poem

he will pull faces by the window at passers-by

and pretend he’s looking to rhyme with fold

you can’t believe a drunken man

when he says he has flown

even if he’s covered in bumps and bruises

and though a dirty pair of underpants

be slapping from the flagpole on city hall

you cannot ask a drunken man after the whereabouts of God

he will intimate that his underpants have been stolen

you can’t allow a drunken man to work on the roof

he will tell you he knows the ins and outs of the sound of singing

while in his naked skin listening to the greediest secrets

whispered in chimney flues

you can’t question him at all about love

for as drunken suitor he will stumble

when he offers you his heart as bag of rotten tomatoes

while his mouth is still red

you can’t expect a drunken man

to snitch on dead friends

he has a knife with a white blade in the pocket

you can’t inquire of a drunken man

if he ever thinks of death

he splutters too much when he curses and laughs

verily, I say to you

you can’t have a drunken man

cry on paper

it becomes a shitting of flies

with tears and snot

      and old wine stains

here

 

(Uncollected)

(Tr. by the author)

 

***

Other:

Breyten Breytenbach – translated by Tony Ullyatt

 

26 November 1975

May trees remain ever green
and all the stars white,
and may there always be people
who without shyness can look
each other in the eye –
because life is only one breath long
and all the stars of the Nether Regions dark –

 

I shall die and go to my father

I shall die and go to my father
in Wellington with long legs
shining in the light
where the rooms are dark and heavy
where stars sit on the roof’s ridge
and angels dig for worms in the garden
I shall die and with little baggage
hit the road
over the Wellington mountains
between the trees and the dusk
and go to my father;

The sun will beat on the earth
the wind’s waves cause the joints to creak
we hear the tenants’
abrasive shuffle above our head
we will play draughts on the back stoop
– old father cheating –
and over the radio
listen to the night’s news.

Friends, dying’s cohorts,
do not hesitate; now life hangs
still like flesh on our bodies
but death does not disappoint
we come and we go
are like water out the tap so
like sounds from the mouth
as we come and we go
our bones will know freedom –
Come with me
in my death in me go to my father
to Wellington where the angels
angle with worms for stars from heaven
let us die and perish and be cheerful:
my father has a huge boarding house.

 

[Untitled]

and the poem is the meaning
of the poem

 

(Tr. by Tony Ullyatt)