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Raphael Rudnik Nijhoff vertalingen
Impasse
We're standing in the kitchen, she and I.
All day long I've thought: you must ask her today.
But, because somehow I'm ashamed to say
it, I want her caught unawares and shy.
So now, seeing her bent busy over her task,
and having the chance I wanted to have
the most unprepared answer she can give -
‘What do you want me to write about?’ - I ask.
Just as the teakettle whistles out a jet
of steam, a cloud covering her until
it shoots up and fogs the kitchen window.
Then she answers, at the same time she lets
a string of boiling water slowly fall
spreading the smell of coffee: ‘I don't know.’
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The Troubadour
Who played romances at night under linden-trees,
And midday scherzos in the market-towns,
He has thrown his flute into the fountain,
And gone to find more difficult mysteries.
He sailed in the darkness down a river,
He saw the sunlight coloring the streets -
And knew he did not live, but happened - deeds
Like the seasons all lacked their own power.
He was a traveller, dreaming through the day,
His journey's end aimed at the horizon,
He felt life in his heart flowing away -
And his countenance was pale, and gleamed with light,
Like the man who, coming down the mountain,
Has seen God face to face and still is bright.
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The Mother, the Woman
Went out to Bommel and the bridge one day.
I saw it, the new bridge. Two sides before
seeming to avoid each other like shores,
now neighbors. The ten minutes that I lay
there in the grass, my emptied tea-flask near,
and head full of wide landscape far and free -
let me out of the heart of infinity
hear a voice gathered there, played upon my ear.
It was a woman's. The boat steered by her
slid through under the bridge downstream slowly.
The only one on deck, and at the rudder,
and what she sang a psalm well-known to me.
O, I thought, O that she sailed there, my mother!
Praise God sang she, in His great hand are we.
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Con sor Dino
She said to me: ‘You are a prince in bed.’
Ice-blooms were spreading on the window-glass.
Our body, a tired and life-loosened mass
Was lying there between cool sheets abed.
The world is reborn after this fall of snow,
And I a child again after our night:
Be good to my simple gentleness, speak low
And soft as a Medieval painter's light:
See the castle standing out among pines,
And that beam aslant upon the horizon,
Sunlight on pious landscape breaking its lines.
Through the meadow, a knight rides with his love:
He calls the hounds, and she sees the falcon
Rise, lifting itself aloft from her glove.
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Clown
Blue paper arrows pasted on my face,
And upon my forehead stuck, a yellow star;
The monkey grabs both hands, I stand in place,
He hangs head-first from the horizontal bar.
My Master wants to make the whole world gay,
- ‘Satan's Apostle’ the big sign says I am -
And the crowd, of crazy pilgrims, on their way
Are steered here, and I must entertain them.
They laugh at everything my madness does,
I play the dog, man, and elephant in turn:
I bark, I scream, I trumpet through my snout -
Late in the night the tent lets them all out:
I lean in the square, where the lanterns burn,
Against a pole - proud of all I did and was.
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The Ivy
When I go by the hospital where they took care of her,
it is not because of a resurrection hoped-for,
it is because the ivy has gone reaching-up higher since
last I climbed on that low wall and looked through the fence.
And so to see the building in the garden again.
Once more I smell the roses, smell disinfectant then,
I climb up stairs, walk empty corridors once more,
and come to the tumed-around sign hanging from her door.
But at the same time, O temple-touching ivy,
back to a long-gone distant day thou hast led me.
I lay inside an arbor, I am her poor sick little boy,
and she sits by me, having sung the song that gives us joy.
‘I'm going for a blanket, my child, there is a chill’
she says, her light steps fading upon gravel.
And I wait amid the ivy leaves counting the stars
already coming out, until heaven glitters.
‘Dreamer’ says the ivy, ‘come down off your low wall,
go and lay a blanket upon your mother's pall.
She must be getting cold, all uncovered at the end,
now that she lies in ivy and sees the stars ascend.’
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