Eddy Van Vliet
Author

诗歌作品

Dood 荷兰文

翻译: en fr fi es de sl

Vader 荷兰文

翻译: en fi de sl

Verliefd 荷兰文

翻译: en es it fi bg sl

De binnenplaats 荷兰文

翻译: en it sl

De stad 荷兰文

翻译: en es

De wandelaar 荷兰文

翻译: en fr de bg

Eddy Van Vliet
Author

About

* 11.09.1942, Antwerpen, 比利时
† 05.10.2002, Antwerpen, 比利时

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.