N.P. van Wyk Louw 50. Helize van Vuuren (Vertaling in Engels)
Five love-poems from N.P. van Wyk Louw’s Tristia and other poems, preludes and fugues 1950–1957 (Human & Rousseau, 1962/1973)
Becoming nude
Down now the dark-red jacket glides,
first from the left and then the right shoulder,
then over the dark head the grey jersey slides
and in their bra the small breasts come alive
then her crossed hands shoot up past armpit bushes
quickly crossed, and in an instant drop
the ribbons and the two white nests
while over their dale the tiny twin peaks quiver
as she crosses again the arms a-shiver
takes the shoulder knobs, and above the rose-red
nipples and six white bridges of the ribs
the sun-brown of her elbows trembles
linen-pieces hang empty on a chair
and barely sway; shoes fall one by one,
with many stirrups the stockings come away
and before me in the light brief you stand
then the whole of you emerge, brown with white,
the rounded muscles of the thighs around the black.
***
He searches for the ideal woman: the “eternal mistress”,
she “who does not want to marry” and become a “dairy”,
she who “will not see the man as
a breakfast-ticket or insurance policy”:
the boy-girl, the girl-boy,
freed of the biological,
with the more-or-less little breasts
depending on what needs to be accentuated:
jock-strap or bra.
He sits and sniffs, now,
mostly, and writes, and rubs sweat across his bald pate;
and his club fills up at twelve o’clock
with old gentlemen each on his own coming to enquire
– with indirect remarks (never questions!) –
whether one of the members has ever caught
the vague indirect mistress entrapped in truth.
***
Farewell in Brown
Now I want to see you in a kind of mediterranean
clarity, one last time: walking in sneakers or string sandals
over a sun-sealed beach;
or up in a warm street where buses struggle uphill,
stop at hotels, wait for lights.
Come, I will offer you the last, the
bright shining respect, that
which shines from inns where there is birthing,
shimmers out also from lonely tasks
which in the shrine (help me, St. Joseph!)
of work are being completed:
̵ Allow me the word! Oh You, bless the word:
You, before whom as Path-grader
Gabriel with tiny rainbow-feathers
came to lay in your ear the Other Word
for contemplation later. Allow me the word:
earthy words (oh Beloved like earth):
allow her, she who never has had rest, now to rest:
(brown as brown people, brown as umbrian
pain-inducing terra-cotta, brown, yes,
like the baked earth from near Siena –)
brown skin from a cheap alley – this too may –
of Amsterdam, and the brownness of the world
near the market of this Old Barcelona
where cantaloupes and watermelons
and young constables stare at each other.
(Oh “brown”, which You: Lord and God, blessed
in your brown son of a jew who in Galilee
had to walk a footpath, and sat against the mountain
and talked, and in the ship there
from afar could make a great noise heard.)
Lovely, small, woman: in the radiant reverence
which I, walking, attentively, offer you: take:
the white water of Tarragona, the naked
and the white of the mediterranean
almost-not-knowing, wind-skew knowing full-well.
***
We cannot talk: not you with me:
because in my sour love
your words flounder like drowning flies;
I not with you: where I talk
I know that each word of mine
is awaited behind the doors
of your ear, throttled
by your quiet hatred. Not us, neither
psychologists, nor psychiatrists can break
open the salt crust of the desert.
Only a godhead could succour:
make the desert turn green again
which has deposited its arid, parched
verneukpan-like mud in us;
cause water to break out in the dry pan
and wedge crowbars under
my logical intellectuality.
***
She will never come. Do not listen.
Do not wait. Expect nothing.
Unlearn to expect. Unlearn waiting.
Unlearn listening. Unlearn.
- Translated from the Afrikaans by Helize van Vuuren
More English versions of Afrikaans poems, as translated by Helize van Vuuren, are available at: https://www.academia.edu/37429762/A_Collection_of_Afrikaans_poems_with_English_translations_HvV
“Greeting in Brown”
“She will never come”
Die Engelse vertaling laat mens met nuwe oë kyk na VWL se werk. Mens ondervind ostranenie in ‘n mate en juis dit verruim jou ervaring van hierdie poësie.
Ek vind die volgende reëls besonder treffend, veral die “vague indirect mistress”
“– with indirect remarks (never questions!) –
whether one of the members has ever caught
the vague indirect mistress entrapped in truth.”
Ek hou ook baie van die volgende: Veral die laaste reël is baie knap.
“Lovely, small, woman: in the radiant reverence
which I, walking, attentively, offer you: take:
the white water of Tarragona, the naked
and the white of the mediterranean
almost-not-knowing, wind-skew knowing full-well.”
Stem saam met De Waal; verruimend en Nuwe oë. Goed gedoen, Helize.