Eddy Van Vliet

Vader

Язык: голландский

Переводы: английский (Father), финский (Isä), немецкий (Vater), словенский (Oče)

Vader

Vader. Ontkleed je. Nu het nog kan.
Toon mij wat de tijd heeft aangericht
sinds wij samen in bad zaten en ik bewees
dat waterdruppels elkaar willen raken.

Schaam je niet. Wij hebben dezelfde structuur.
De benen, de rug, de nagels en ontelbare gebaren.

Ik wil geen zevenentwintig jaar wachten
alvorens te zien hoe ouderdomsvlekken
zich verspreiden, de huid verslapt en
aderwanden het begeven.

Wijs mij wat er rest als de liefde
niet langer wordt beschreven.
Noem mij vrouwennamen en laat ons
berustend schateren.

Переводы:

Язык: английский

Father

Father. Undress yourself. While you still may.
Show me what time has scarred
since we sat in the bath together and I proved
that waterdrops want to touch one another.

Fear not. We have similar structures.
Legs, back, nails and countless gestures.

I do not want to wait for twenty-seven more years
and see how hyperpigmentation
spreads, skin slackens and
veins burst.

Show me what is left when you make
love no more.
Recount names of women and let us
roar and resign.

Язык: финский

Isä

Isä. Riisuudu. Nyt kun vielä voit.
Näytä minulle mitä aika on saanut aikaan
siitä lähtien kun kylvimme yhdessä ja minä todistin
että vesipisarat haluavat koskettaa toisiaan.

Älä häpeä. Meillä on sama ruumiinrakenne.
Jalat, selkä, kynnet ja lukemattomat eleet.

En halua odottaa kahtakymmentäseitsemää
vuotta nähdäkseni kuinka vanhuudentäplät
leviävät, iho löyhtyy ja
laskimon seinät pettävät.

Näytä minulle mitä on jäljellä
kun rakastelu ei enää ole mahdollista.
Mainitse minulle naisten nimiä
ja naurakaamme makeasti, alistuneesti.

Язык: немецкий

Vater

Vater. Kleide dich aus. Jetzt wo es noch geht.
Zeig mir, was die Zeit angerichtet hat,
seitdem wir zusammen in der Badewanne saßen und ich
bewies, dass Wassertropfen sich berühren wollen.

Schäm dich nicht. Wir haben die gleiche Struktur.
Die Beine, den Rücken, die Nägel und zahllose Gesten.

Ich will keine siebenundzwanzig Jahre warten,
bis ich sehen muss, wie sich die Altersflecken
ausbreiten, die Haut erschlafft und
Arterienwände zusammenbrechen.

Zeig mir was bleibt, wenn die Liebe
nicht länger beschrieben wird.
Nenne mir Frauennamen und lasst uns
gelassen auflachen, schallend.

Язык: словенский

Oče

Oče. Sleci se. Dokler še lahko.
Pokaži mi, kaj je storil čas,
odkar sva bila v kadi in sem dokazal,
da se kapljice želijo stakniti.

Ne sramuj se. Enako sva grajena.
Noge, hrbet, nohti in nešteto podobnih gibov.

Nočem čakati sedemindvajset let,
da vidim, kako se starostne pege
razpršijo, uplahne koža in
omagajo žilne stene.

Pokaži mi, kaj je tedaj, ko
ne opisuješ več ljubezni.
Povej ženska imena in daj, da
se vdano nasmejeva.

Eddy Van Vliet

* 11.09.1942, Antwerpen, Бельгия
† 05.10.2002, Antwerpen, Бельгия

Eddy van Vliet, who in daily life was a practising lawyer, was also someone for whom poetry was a vital part of existence. Only at one moment did the two worlds literally meet. In 1994 he published the passionate essay Poëzie: een pleidooi (Poetry: the Case for the Defence), the text of address he had given back in 1976 to the annual Conference of the Antwerp Bar. It reveals something of the tension between the demands of reality and the world of the dream, the exact field in which Van Vliet’s poetry operates.

After an unremarkable debut in 1964 the poet, in line with the spirit of the times and like so many others influenced by his reading of Bertolt Brecht, plunged for a decade into social and political commitment. That commitment was fuelled not primarily by political theories, but by moral indignation at everything that that detracts from the ideal of a pure, almost paradisial world. Consequently, as the poet begins to find his own voice, starting with the collections Het grote verdriet (The Great Sorrow, 1974) and Na de wetten van Afscheid & Herfst (After the Laws of Parting and Autumn, 1978), it becomes increasingly clear that he is essentially a romantic confessional poet. Not the ethereal, introverted kind, but one who lives fully in the world and is constantly colliding with its imperfections, with loss and madness. His meeting, during Poetry International 1973, with the American poet Robert Lowell, often viewed as among the greatest ‘confessional poets’, may have influenced on that development. From then onwards his set themes become love, both its ecstasy and its failure, childhood and the relationship with the absent father, loss of faculties and death.

A first high point in that mature work is Jaren na maart (Years after March, 1983). In it March stands for the moment at which the father left home and thereby caused a first radical rift in the ordered world of the child. That rift underlies an attitude to life and a way of writing that mark the rest of his work in a fundamental way: the denial of reality and its evocation, the struggle between remembering and forgetting. It is a theme that he shares with Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who he greatly admired. In the presentation of his poetry it often expresses itself in the form of heightened attention to ‘secondary phenomena’ accompanying traumatic events. As in the poem ‘My Father’s Goodbye’: ‘The garden gate in sudden need of grease. / Gaps on the wall must be covered up quick / quick, get rid of the shaving soap smell.’ On the one hand, the eye is diverted from what is shattering the harmony, but at the same time the way in which the whole environment is affected by loss is evoked.

It also operates the other way round, in the many love poems from De binnenplaats (The Courtyard, 1987) and De toekomstige dief (The Future Thief, 1991), in which the perception of reality is transformed by the eyes of the lover: ‘I recoloured, on love’s authority, what lay there slightly wilted / in the shop into a festive meal. Lettuce regained / its vigour […]’.

Finally the collection Vader (Father, 2001), which appeared shortly before his sudden death, can be read as a testament, completely in line with what drove him from the outset. The motto from Graham Swift that prefaces the collection, heralds its tenor: ‘Narrative reconciles retention and forgetting’. Here Van Vliet simultaneously portrays his father, himself and the world of the twentieth century. He does so in the tone of restrained melancholy so characteristic of him and with great attention to sensory detail.

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