De Gids. Jaargang 133

James S. Holmes/Hans van Marle
Five translations in memoriam Ed. Hoornik

Is that the final quarter of the moon,
or someone's face wreathed round by smoke and flame?
Where is Berlin, where is the Grenadier Street?
- What did the boy do when the hoodlums came?

Is that his shadow at the river bank?
Is this the water closing over him?
Is this the Spree, and that the Grenadier Street?
- It is the Amstel, it is Amsterdam.

On Rembrandtsplein the streetlights are turned on.
Across the rooftops bursts a spray of light.
- I press my fingernails deep in my palm.

The Jodenbreestraat is a deep ravine.
A cry reverberates across the night.
- Berlin is just ten hours from here by train.

1936

[p. 242]

The one dead

 

I went to another town.

 

That night at a sidewalk café

 

while I pretended to read

 

he shuffled across the way;

 

past the woman singing songs

 

and twisting a child in her arms,

 

he turned down a dim-lit street.

 

 

 

Who was he, where was he going?

 

 

 

The lamplight lighting my head

 

went to and fro in the wind

 

like the song the woman sang,

 

and all I could understand

 

was: ‘He's dead, he was never loved;

 

he was never loved, he is dead.’

 

 

 

1936

Man-high the reeds.
Can he hear the jumping fish?
Does he suspect there's water?
His pursuers are approaching.
There is no bridge.

1936

[p. 243]

First grief

 

How I should like to feel once more

 

that first grief and its pain:

 

death while playing the game of goose,

 

the only death there was then.

 

 

 

Now death that's the only death there is

 

shares bed and board with me.

 

Even the club of my imagination

 

cannot chase him away.

 

 

 

1960

All it does
forgive the hound;
its master's gone,
beneath the ground.

If it bites
and growls and claws,
now you know
what is the cause.

It wants to be
beneath the ground
with its master.

I am that hound.

1960