Translation: Bert Schierbeek
Dec. 28th, 2024 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
de_eekhoornwe never took photos
because we thought
what we see
we see together
and will always be there
where are now those photos
that we saw?
what do you see?
what do I see?
those photos we
never took?
Bert Schierbeek, In- en Uitgang, 1974
The most decent link to the original I have been able to find.
Bert Schierbeek was associated with the post-WWII Vijftigers literary movement, which sought to break with traditional poetic forms and to address the paradigm-breaking reality of WWII in unvarnished language. This eventually heralded a transition to a dominant poetic mode that eschewed traditional forms and made very sober use of language, preferring the understated.
This poem was written after the death of Schierbeek’s wife.
Free verse turns out to be difficult to translate in a very different way than formal verse, because there is little excuse not to translate according to the sense, but all the same the flow of the line remains important…
because we thought
what we see
we see together
and will always be there
where are now those photos
that we saw?
what do you see?
what do I see?
those photos we
never took?
Bert Schierbeek, In- en Uitgang, 1974
The most decent link to the original I have been able to find.
Bert Schierbeek was associated with the post-WWII Vijftigers literary movement, which sought to break with traditional poetic forms and to address the paradigm-breaking reality of WWII in unvarnished language. This eventually heralded a transition to a dominant poetic mode that eschewed traditional forms and made very sober use of language, preferring the understated.
This poem was written after the death of Schierbeek’s wife.
Free verse turns out to be difficult to translate in a very different way than formal verse, because there is little excuse not to translate according to the sense, but all the same the flow of the line remains important…
