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Stepping Up to the Light
The Poetry of Jan Eijkelboom
[Kees Snoek]
In 2005 Jan Eijkelboom (1926-) published his tenth volume of poetry, An Elephant with Amnesia (Een olifant met geheugenverlies), only 26 years after his debut What Remains is Never to Return (Wat blijft komt nooit terug, 1979). Eijkelboom's first poem, written at the age of fifty, was inspired by the shaded ancient garden of the art museum in Dordrecht, the place where he grew up and lived the greater part of his life. Eijkelboom made a late debut, but in a way his poetry had been waiting to come out all along. In 1950, on the boat which took him back to Holland after several years of military service in Indonesia, Eijkelboom felt the literary spark when reading some poems by John Donne. He turned them into Dutch, and in 1957 a little book came out with his translation of ten love poems and three sermons by Donne. In 1953 Eijkelboom published a short story, ‘De terugtocht’ (meaning ‘The Retreat’ as well as the ‘The Voyage Home’) about his dramatic experiences as a soldier in the Dutch colonial army. In the fifties and sixties he edited and collaborated on several literary journals. He married in 1956 and made a career in journalism while living in Amsterdam. In 1967 he returned to Dordrecht, taking up a position as the city's public relations officer. He held this job until 1971, when he returned to journalism. He wrote for Het Vrije Volk and finally became editor-in-chief of De Dordtenaar. It was in this last post that literature took over, and from 1979 on he dedicated himself solely to writing and translating. Over the years he has published an impressive number of translations of English-language poets, including John Clare, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Weldon Kees, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott (Omeros) and Craig Raine. Eijkelboom's choice of poets shows his affinity with English
literary tradition, which has left its traces in his own poetry. Some rather free translations of particularly congenial poems were even incorporated in his own original volumes.
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Nostalgia as a tool for survival
‘Mixing memory and desire’ is a quote from T.S. Eliot which Eijkelboom used as a device for one of his poems. It points to important themes. Desire is the driving force in Eijkelboom's poetical world, either directed at the regenerating vi- | |
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tality of love, of yet another spring, of youth - or harking back to a past whose image the poet tries to eternalise as if it were still pure and intact. The poet's memory is often stirred when he is walking the streets of the city where he passed his childhood, where he had his first sublime experiences which imbued him with a true poetical sensation. In some of Eijkelboom's poems such divine moments are relived, and this brings to mind one of his Dutch literary forebears: the poet J.C. Bloem (1887-1966). Bloem's famous sonnet ‘De Dapperstraat’ tells about a moment of happiness which came over him unexpectedly in an undistinguished Amsterdam neighbourhood, ‘walking through the sleet,/ The city grime, one grey and drizzly morning,/ Blissfully happy, drenched in Dapper Street.’ (tr. James Brockway). Eijkelboom evokes similar intensified moments of sudden bliss occurring in everyday life.
When projected onto the past, desire can fix an emotion and preserve it as a relic: ‘And outside blooms the perfect rose of the past,/ never gnawed at by lice.// Yes, above all give us verandahs,/ melancholy's long-cherished poison.’ (The Arsenal - Het arsenaal, 2000). The poet is well aware that his nostalgia, however true it may be, is but a makeshift sentiment, a tool for survival: ‘Desire remains the escape season/ for who - wherefore? - wants to survive.’ (Hora incerta, 1993). Time and again, the poet attempts to retrieve the past, against his own better judgment that it is irrevocably gone. Taking a peek inside a house where he spent part of his youth, he stipulates that this house has remained ‘a stronghold sure (...)/ full of knowledge never forgotten/ of niche, corner, spiral stairs/ and time, which is reversible after all.’ (Chicken Wings - Kippevleugels, 1991). A sense of security is attached to such objects as a whistling kettle, a hotplate for tea and a radio which evoke bygone times when the political commentator with his ‘bakelite voice’ broadcast his self-confident explanation of the world. (Chicken Wings). This is a world seen through a child's eyes, but also a seemingly less complicated pre-war world, in which religion still plays an overwhelming role. Yet, in another poem, the change wrought by time - and above all by human intervention! - has changed a house and its surroundings so utterly beyond recognition, that the poet curses the day ‘that I began to look/ for what now even in memory/ has altogether ceased to exist.’ (The Arsenal). The title of this bitter and angry poem is ‘Oh, and for good and all’ (‘O, en voorgoed’), hinting at Bloem's poem
‘Recollection’ (‘Herinnering’) with its famous last line ‘Gone by, gone by, oh, for good and all gone by’.
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The shadow of faith
Bygone times don't only call up a sense of wholeness and belonging, sometimes they are associated with feelings of grief, fear and guilt. This is the case when religion enters the picture. Eijkelboom's parents belonged to the orthodox wing of the Dutch Reformed Church (‘gereformeerde bond’). Although they educated their son in a loving, even relatively liberal atmosphere, the doom of Calvinist belief was an ever-present burden, as is suggested in some of Eijkelboom's poems. His poems often have an anecdotal core and conjure up an image of the poet at various stages in his life's journey. Take for instance ‘Worn clothes’ (‘Gedragen kleding’), a poem in three parts, of which the last one goes as follows: ‘I took off that silly faith/ as if it were a jacket./ I was only fourteen years old/ and felt a state of grace,/ as if a miracle had happened./ Yet I didn't get off/
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without rips and tears./ Later it dawned on me:/ you are permanently damaged,/ barely saved in time.// I didn't take off a jacket/ but a skin, and/ from now on I had to do without,/ hiding/ behind a smoke curtain/ - quickly raised by the genie in the bottle -/ to disappear for him who sees all,/ even though he doesn't exist.’ (What Remains is Never to Return). In a more austere, metaphorical fashion, the horrors of this formidable faith are summoned up in the poem ‘Sometimes’ (‘Soms’, The Golden Man - De gouden man, 1982).
In Eijkelboom's first volumes of poetry, the Calvinist faith of his childhood still casts its shadow - as does the memory of failed relationships, drink addiction and loss, in poems of sometimes apocalyptic dimensions. In his later volumes the biblical God of Vengeance still pops up every so often, but in a less acrimonious setting. Even as a child the poet could always escape religion's
Jan Eijkelboom (1926-), Photo courtesy of Stichting Perspektief.
doom by finding comfort in nature. (‘Said She’, ‘Zei zij’, The Arsenal). The image of a psalm-singing woman even has a nostalgic connotation ( Hora incerta), and here again Eijkelboom tunes in with Dutch poetical tradition. Didn't Martinus Nijhoff (1894-1953), who also relinquished the religion he was brought up with, write this unforgettable portrait of a woman on a boat, reminding him of his mother, ‘ and what she sang, I heard then, was a psalm’ (‘De moeder de vrouw’).
Eijkelboom shares Nijhoff's simplicity and pictorial clarity. Things as they are, objects in the house, birds in the garden, certain effects of light acquire a mystical dimension. It may be the glimpse of a buffer-stop he spots from the train, blazing in the sun, in a peculiar shade of red, which gives him a feeling of felicity (The Arsenal), or it may be the rare sight of a white blackbird, spotted ‘in
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the snow slightly more white than he was.// How he was scratching along/ with the customarily coloured/ couple of blackbirds./ Here the healing began.’ (The Arsenal). But the things observed in their ‘thing-ness’ don't need to be rare or peculiar to give a mystical sense of well-being. This sense may also come about as the daylight filters through and slowly fills the house: ‘Wait until silence is kindled, until the singing/ of the kettle joins in/ irrevocably.’ (The Arsenal).
In his poem ‘The other way round’ (‘Andersom’), Eijkelboom portrays Mondrian, the painter who consciously rose above the ills of the past ‘just by/ stepping up to the light.’ Constantly evolving, Mondrian attained a certain mystical clarity in his work. But his last painting, ‘Victory Boogie-Woogie’, was not finished when he died. The last stanza of the poem voices a paradox which is characteristic of Eijkelboom: ‘As to that Victory Boogie-Woogie:/ it was never completed, remains for ever/ finished in its genesis.’ The Dutch word ‘eeuwig’ (for ever) can be read as the end of a statement, signifying that the painting remains for ever. But it can also be read to incorporate ‘in zijn wording’ (in its genesis) of the next line, signifying that the painting is eternally nascent. In the third reading we need to add ‘voltooid’ (finished): the painting is finished after all, but it's the picture of an eternal genesis, and for that reason even more mysterious.
Eijkelboom's famous line ‘Wat blijft komt nooit terug’. ‘What remains is never to return’, chiselled into the quay-rim of one of Dordrecht's ramparts Photo courtesy of Stichting Perspektief.
Another paradox is contained in Eijkelboom's famous line ‘Wat blijft komt nooit terug’: ‘What remains is never to return’, which was chiselled into the quayrim of one of Dordrecht's ramparts. ‘What remains’ refers to the memory of past situations and settings which are never to return. The only thing remaining is memory itself, but that too is finite. The vanity motive is not lost upon this poet
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living in one of Holland's oldest cities. ‘Vita vapor’: life is like steam, as one of his poems is entitled (in Dawn's Eyelashes - Wimpers van de dageraad, 1987). Yet, living near canals and rivers, Eijkelboom is also aware of the continuity of life which is present in the constantly moving stream, ‘Movement which will endure/ when all has stalled.’ (The Golden Man). One of Eijkelboom's most impressive poetic achievements is his cycle of eight poems, ‘Harbour of the wool-weavers’ (‘Wolwevershaven’, in De gouden man), a series of musical-philosophical improvisations on the theme of the water, experienced by someone living in an old house on the River Maas. The mystic quality of the flowing water is caught in the second poem: ‘Water, how to put order to it?/ The bard of the water-course,/ how to consult him?/ The strategist of what is writ/ who encodes and decides/ and who thereupon still knows/ that nothing is ever alike.// Let me just try it myself:/ swaying along, looking, letting go,/ becoming fluid myself/ and registering that./ As long as this house/ holds out in this stream/ I can still go with the flow and learn.’
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A new level of reality
Jan Eijkelboom himself claims the influence on his poetry of English confessional poets as well as of Chinese and Japanese poems. Many of his poems cover subjects close to his own life and can therefore be termed ‘confessional’. Reading them, we get glimpses into his life as a man who married, had children and a career, who became a disciple of ‘King Alcohol’, who divorced, who overcame his alcoholism as well as several life-threatening diseases, who remarried and fathered children again in middle life. As a confessional poet, he uses a liberating humour and self-irony. He also demonstrates a preference for simple, intelligible language, for ‘words as plain as hen-bird's wings’, as Philip Larkin would have it, for unadorned language. Yet, he has translated Craig Raine, one of the so-called ‘Martians’, poets who cultivate an entirely new view of their surroundings, employing ‘conceit’: bizarre, unusual metaphors that are nevertheless striking. In his last volume, Eijkelboom uses the image ‘the double axle/ of one push/ of breath’. His language isn't always as simple as it seems. I have mentioned his paradoxes; the reader should also be alert for ambiguities and hidden meanings, as well as suggestive lines of utter concentration which recall Japanese haikus.
As the man who walks through life, contemplating, experiencing the change around and inside himself, Jan Eijkelboom lifts reality to another level and creates a poetical universe all his own.
Jan Eijkelboom has published the following volumes of poetry: Wat blijft komt nooit terug (1979), De gouden man (1982), De wimpers van de dageraad (1987), Kippevleugels (1991), Hora incerta (1993), Het lied van de krekel (1996), Het arsenaal (2000), Heden voelen mijn voeten zich goed (2002), Binnensmonds jubelend (2004) and Een olifant met geheugenverlies (2005). The last volume was published by Wagner & Van Santen (Sliedrecht), all other volumes by De Arbeiderspers, which also collected Eijkelboom's poetry up to 2000: Tot zo ver (2002). In 2000 De Arbeiderspers published Eijkelboom's short stories about his experiences during and after the Dutch military actions against Indonesia: Het krijgsbedrijf.
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Five Poems
by Jan Eijkelboom
Sometimes
Sometimes I just have to smelt at that sulphurous pit,
taste ash again and listen to the moaning.
I marvel how sweet being lost, being
nearly lost is to the senses. I turn away
from the enchanting valley in which I use
to draw furrows pleasing to the eye
which bear fruit to boot.
How come the shrew casts such a spell
whereas the value of mother earth -
though constant - is not so hot right now,
and decay, foul-smelling decay a blistering
plaster until the lump bursts open
crimson and yellow. The fire painted
by Patinir and Bosch in ever brighter colours
than Purgatory's fainter glow which doesn't singe
a single soul, which warms none.
where coolness flows we will yearn for.
But later, in a little while, not now.
Soms
Soms moet ik ruiken aan die zwavelput,
proef ik weer as en kan het kermen horen.
Wat is er toch zo zoet aan het verloren,
het bijna verloren gaan. Ik wend mij af
van het bekoorlijk dal waarin ik anders
de voren trek die goed zijn om te zien,
die ook nog vrucht voortbrengen.
Hoe is de helleveeg betoverend en
moeder aardes waarde wel constant
maar tijdlijk niet courant en het
bederf, het stinkende bederf trek-
pleister tot de buil weer openberst
in karmozijn en geel. De brand die Patinir
en Bosch altijd weer feller schilderden
dan 't vage vuur daarnaast, waaraan
geen ziel zich schroeit, geen mens zich warmt.
Om van de hemel maar te zwijgen,
waar koelte stroomt, waarnaar wij zullen
hijgen. Maar later, straks, nu niet.
From The Golden Man (De gouden man).
Amsterdam: de Arbeiderspers, 1982.
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The Other Way Round
as the man in autumn who suddenly
trod on his shadow grown too long
and left it behind just by
stepping up to the light.
Leaving the chrysanthemums to rot
and die in their water, he learned
the measured steps of the fox-trot
and passed on to a boogie-woogie
which he chose to define as Victory:
the war almost over, relegated to the past
the brooding near stagnant waters
that sometimes reflect a moribund moon.
‘There's a lot of abstract fellows over here,’
beckoned someone from Blaricum. He went,
wrote turbid things and eventually painted
so lucid that he could just as well let go.
As to that Victory Boogie-Woogie:
it was never completed, remains for ever
Andersom
als de man in de herfst die zichzelf
op een te lange schaduw betrapte
en die achter rich liet door gewoon
op het licht af te stappen.
De stervende chrysanten liet hij
verder in hun water verrotten.
Hij leerde de afgepaste foxtrot
en ging over op een boogie-woogie
die hij nader aanduidde met Victory:
de oorlog bijna voorbij, lang al voorbij
het broeden aan stilstaande waters
die soms een doodzieke maan weerkaatsen.
‘Er wonen hier veel abstracte luidjes.’
lokte iemand hem vanuit Blaricum. Hij ging.
schreef troebele dingen en schilderde allengs
zo helder dat het bijna niet meer hoefde.
Die Victory Boogie-Woogie nu
raakte nooit af, blijft eeuwig
in zijn wording voltooid.
From The Cricket's Song (Het lied van de krekel).
Amsterdam: de Arbeiderspers. 1996.
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A Friend from Former Days
It's a dim morning and the day hides.
One could up-grade that greyness
with electric light on this white sheet.
Then a hand from long ago
holds back mine. A scant light
enters shy yet purposeful
as if the window were the door. It's a friend
from former days. He even knew your mother.
She didn't need an alarm to always
get up before you. Nor did she bother
about weather predictions.
Now stay as motionless as this day.
Wait until silence is kindled, until the singing
Een vriend van vroeger
Het schemert 's ochtends en de dag blijft weg.
Men zou die grauwte kunnen opwaarderen
met lamplicht op het wit papier.
Dan houdt een lang gestorven hand
de mijne tegen. Schraal buitenlicht komt
schuchter en toch doelbewust naar binnen
als was het raam de deur. Het is een vriend
van vroeger Hij heeft je moeder nog gekend.
Die had geen wekker nodig om altijd
eerder op te zijn dan jij. Zij had
geen boodschap ook aan 't weerbericht.
Blijf even roerloos nu als deze dag.
Wacht tot de stilte oplicht, het zingen
van de ketel zich onherroepelijk
From The Arsenal (Het arsenaal).
Amsterdam: de Arbeiderspers, 2000.
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Porridge Eaters
despite our dawdling attempts
just being motionless, I saw
through the narrow window
all seasons pass through a tree
I was part of the motion again.
I found a potsherd in the mud,
The bottom part of a plate.
it said in calligraphic writing.
calling you to clear your plate
or else you won't grow up.
Billions and billions of porridge eaters
but the petrified general
Papeters
wij zijn het die voorbijgaan
al trachten we soms treuzelend
door het smalle raam alle seizoenen
Ik vond een scherf in het slijk,
stond er in schoonschrift op.
Het is je dode moeder die roept
anders word je nooit groot.
Papeters in miljardenvoud
From Inwardly Jubilant (Binnensmonds jubelend).
Amsterdam: de Arbeiderspers. 2004.
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I grope for another diction
than that of my year-worn self.
Did I mutter too much, sound too little,
utter too much without singing?
all that piled up time of then and now
showing from child to old man one big gap
filled with war and measly loves.
Enough of that grime, pounded
by an elephant with amnesia.
Should I lapse into wisdom?
that would only yield texts
which are then paraded in the paper
when yet another successful deceased
has exchanged his transitory state
for nothingness. Stay clear of that.
But my circle of acquaintances expands.
It happens that children who don't talk yet
look at me with a glimpse of recognition.
That will do. If I still wish to record
that overpowering feeling, it should be done
in unadorned language, almost self-evident.
Ik tast naar een andere dictie
dan die van mijn verjaarde zelf.
Heb ik te veel gepreveld, te weinig geklonken,
te veel ongezongen gezegd?
Ouderdom is mij toch lief,
heel die opeengehoopte tijd van toen en nu
met tussen kind en grijsaard één groot gat
vol oorlog en verpieterde liefdes.
Zand erover, aangestampt door een olifant
Moet ik vervallen tot wijsheid?
dat leidt maar tot teksten
die ongevraagd in de krant gaan staan
als weer een geslaagde dode
het tijdelijke heeft verwisseld
met het niets. Blijf daarvan weg.
Maar mijn kennissenkring breidt zich uit.
Soms kijken kinderen die nog niet praten
mij aan met een blik van herkenning.
Dat is genoeg. Als ik die overrompeling
toch wil vast leggen, dan moet dat zijn
in onversierde taal, bijna vanzelfsprekend.
From An Elephant with Amnesia (Een olifant met geheugenverlies).
Sliedrecht: Wagner & Van Santen, 2005.
All poems translated by Kees Snoek
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