Hugues C. Pernath

Tien gedichten van de eenzaamheid VI - Misschien mijn keuze, mijn eeuwigheid

Language: dutch

Translations: english (Perhaps my choice, my eternity), french (Les dix poèmes de la solitude VI - Mon choix, peut-être, mon éternité)

Tien gedichten van de eenzaamheid VI - Misschien mijn keuze, mijn eeuwigheid

Misschien mijn keuze, mijn eeuwigheid
Die niet langer duurt dan het herbeginnen,
Dan het verbannen, het verstijven van de wortels.
Soms kijk ik naar jou, soms naar jou.
Soms zijn jouw velden volgroeid, soms gerimpeld,
En terwijl dit jaar verdampt, verbeur ik
De vijf bloedige cirkels en elders mijn liefde.
En als een vergezicht vergeet ik de beduimelde wand
Waarachter zovele gluurders gloeiden.

Jij tart de roffelende dagen, de nieuwe nacht,
Ontstaan maar ontluisterd door jouw kille dracht.
Jouw huid wordt een klaterend kleed, een oponthoud
Temidden de geuren van grassige gronden.
Jouw blik huivert en glanst, en verkleurt mijn deernis
Tot een schaduw die vervaagt wat voorbij is.
Die daalt en baart. En bevriest.

Maar jaagbaar, begint ook voor jou de jacht
Het verwoorden van zien en horen, het bewonen
Van de kwade mist, van de tijd wanhopig en nauwgezet
Waarin het vluchten vermetel wordt en overbodig
Het spitten, het verstarren en het vredige deinen
Na het vervreemden, na het zuiveren van de naald.
Geen orgel zal spelen, geen boog jou beschermen
Wanneer de zaadloze afgrond van de pijn
Jouw schoonheid bedekt met de pracht.

Translations:

Language: english

Perhaps my choice, my eternity

Perhaps my choice, my eternity
That lasts no longer than recommencing,
Than banishing, petrifying of the roots.
Sometimes I look at you, sometimes at you.
Sometimes your fields are full, sometimes wrinkled,
And while this year evaporates, I forfeit
The five bloody circles and elsewhere my love.
Like a vista I forget the thumb-marked wall
Behind which so many peepers glowed.

You defy the drumming days, the new night,
Created but tarnished by your chilly dress.
Your skin becomes a clattering gown, a sojourn
Amid the scents of grassy grounds.
Your eyes shiver and shine, discolour my pity
To a shadow that fades what has gone.
That sinks and gives birth. And freezes.

But huntable, the hunt begins for you too
Expressing seeing and hearing, inhabiting
The evil fog, time desperate and precise
In which flight becomes bold and superfluous
The digging, the stiffening and the peaceful bobbing
After the estrangement, the cleansing of the needle.
No organ will play, no bow will protect you
When the seedless abyss of pain
Covers your beauty with splendour.

Language: french

Les dix poèmes de la solitude VI - Mon choix, peut-être, mon éternité

Mon choix, peut-être, mon éternité
Qui ne dure pas au-delà du recommencement.
De la relégation, du raidissement des racines.
Parfois mon regard se pose sur toi, sur toi.
Parfois tes champs respirent la plénitude, parfois ils sont arides
Et tandis que cette année s’évapore, je galvaude
Les cinq cercles sanglants et ailleurs mon amour.
Et comme une perspective perdue, j’oublie la paroi pouilleuse
Derrière laquelle vaticinent d’envieux voyeurs.

Tu nargues le sourd tambour des jours, la nuit nouvelle
Née mais démystifiée par ton attitude glacée.
Ta peau devient une tunique éclatante, un intermède
Au sein de la senteur des sols herbeux.
Ton regard irradie et frémit, il fait virer ma commisération
En une ombre que estompe le passé
Qui penche et procrée et puis est pris par le gel.

Mais de proie tu deviens toi-même chasseresse
L’expression des perceptions de l’œil et de l’oreille,
La brume mauvaise, le temps minutieux
Et désespéré deviennent l’habitat d’où toute
Evasion s’avère vaine et téméraire
Le bêchage, la pétrification, le paisible bercement
Après le détachement et la purification de l’aiguille.
Aucun orgue ne résonnera, aucune voûte ne te protègera
Quand l’abîme bréhaigne de la souffrance
Baignera ta beauté de sa magique magnificence.

Hugues C. Pernath

* 15.08.1931, Borgerhout, Antwerp, Belgium
† 04.06.1975, Borgerhout , Antwerp, Belgium

Hugues C. Pernath is the attractive literary pseudonym of Hugo Wouters, who was born in the suburbs of Antwerp.

At the age of sixteen he volunteered for the Belgian army in order to escape the friction between his parents, who were in the process of divorcing. At the beginning of the 1950s his first poems were published in the avant-garde magazine Het Cahier. From 1955 on, with Paul Snoek and Gust Gils, he became the driving force behind the magazine gard-sivik and a pivotal figure in the second experimental generation in Flanders. In 1957, when Paul Snoek for called up for military service in the Belgian army, he and the professional soldier Hugues Pernath wrote each other poetic letters. A selection appeared as Soldatenbrieven in 1961. Their work had thematic affinities, but their approach to poetry was totally different. Pernath favoured autonomous literature, Snoek a romantic-expressive style.

1963 saw the appearance of Pernath’s collection Instrumentarium voor een winter Tool Kit for a Winter), in which through idiosyncratic selection, combination and elimination of words he adapts the syntax of Dutch to his unbridled need to explain his own existence. This he experiences as torn apart and he assembles the irreconcilable oppositions in a poetry that reflects this state of mind.

In his second collection, Mijn gegeven woord (My Given Word, 1966), Pernath gives a poetic and pessimistic report on his loves and friendships, disappointments and antagonisms, hope and despair. Feelings of fear and inferiority alternate with guilt and irritation at the loss of a lover and the disloyalty of friends.

In the early 1960s Pernath also began making translations and adaptations of dramatic texts (Tartuffe, King Lear, The Hostage, etc.) in collaboration with directors. In 1967 he went on a three-month directing course at the Film and Theatre School in Łodz in Poland, where met such directors as Wajda and Skolimowski. At the end of that year he appeared stark naked in Masscheroen by his friend Hugo Claus, which resulted in the latter’s conviction on a charge of indecency.

Between 1966 and 1970 Pernath wrote Vijftig index-gedichten (Fifty Index Poems), many of which were protests designed to be read at poetry events in Amsterdam, Brussels and Antwerp. These occasional poems show the poet’s intense involvement in social developments.

In 1970 Pernath married Myra, from an Australian Jewish background. He dedicated his Exodus cycle to her: in it memories of his visit to Auschwitz merge with painful childhood memories, a tormenting sense of loneliness, and a heightened sense of mortality. The cycles De acht hoofdzonden (The Eight Cardinal Sins) and De tien gedichten van de eenzaamheid (The Ten Poems of Solitude) present the poet’s disillusion, alienation and isolation in strongly physical imagery rooted in philosophy. They also contain sublime love poetry.

The collection Mijn tegenstem (My Counter-Voice, 1973) contains work written in the period 1966-1973.

In 1973 Pernath joined the exclusive society of Pink Poets, a group of 13 poets, artists and intellectuals united in their opposition to the dumbing down of culture, in their fostering of a dandified, romantic-decadent attitude to life and in the creation of sophisticated, word-based and mannerist poetry. Pernath had just been elected as the society’s first president, when on 4 June 1975 he died suddenly at the age of only forty-three. In the years following his death Pernath acquired the image of a writer of genuine poetry, in which what is at stake is no more or less than the authenticity of his own experience of existence. This made a great impression on the generation of poets that succeeded him: Leonard Nolens, Roger de Neef, Dirk van Bastelaere, Peter Verhelst and others. In 2005 a reading edition of the complete poetic works of Hugues C. Pernath, based on scholarly research, was published.

Joris Gerits

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