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Ton van Reen
vogels
Vanavond
zijn wij
twee doodgewaande
vogels
ver van huis
in de mist geraakt
scheef
uit ons vandaan
lopen
aan elkaar geregen
tijdsberichten
naar de wezens
in de andere sferen
onze vroegere
vrienden
in een eigen
andere wereld
waaronder wij
zijn doorgevlogen
Uit: Ton van Reen, Blijvend vers, Verzamelde gedichten (1965-2007). Uitgeverij De Contrabas, 2011, ISBN 9789079432462, 144 pagina’s, paperback
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive Q-R, Reen, Ton van, Ton van Reen
Special event at Highgate Cemetery London
for the 150th anniversary of Lizzie Siddal’s death
February 11th is the 150th anniversary of Lizzie’s death. To commemorate this, Highgate Cemetery (Lizzie’s final resting place) is having a Talk at the cemetery on that day by Lucinda Hawksley, author of Lizzie Siddal: Face of the Pre-Raphaelites.
From the Highgate Cemetery website: This is a unique and historic occasion as it is in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Lizzie Siddal’s death: she died on February 11th 1862 and was buried at Highgate Cemetery six days later.
Lizzie Siddal was a nineteenth-century phenomenon: a working-class girl whose beauty made her the Pre-Raphaelite movement’s most celebrated, iconic face. Dante Rossetti, founder and leading light of the movement, painted and drew her obsessively a thousand times. She soon became a poet and artist in her own right.
However, as his lover and finally his wife, Lizzie’s relationship with Rossetti was blighted by his infidelities and neglect. In despair, Lizzie resorted to laudanum to numb her senses. In 1862 she took an overdose and left a suicide note.
Lucinda’s illustrated and vivid account of Lizzie’s meteoric but brief career and her tortured relationship breathes new life into the images of Lizzie frozen in time in galleries around the world.
The talk commences at 6.30 and will last around an hour. Booking: is in advance by email only at events@highgate-cemetery.org. Tickets: cost £10 each (£8 for students) including refreshments and nibbles. Space is limited so early booking is advised.
About Elizabeth Siddal
Elizabeth Siddal (July 25, 1829 – February 11, 1862)
While working in a millinery shop, Lizzie was discovered by the artist Walter Deverell who painted her as Viola in his depiction of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Lizzie went on to model for other Pre-Raphaelite artists and is most commonly recognized as Ophelia in the painting by John Everett Millais, but was the charismatic Dante Gabriel Rossetti who not only drew and painted her obsessively, but encouraged Lizzie in her own artwork and poetry. Their relationship was intense and rocky, with an engagement that lasted on and off for a decade. Sadly, their marriage was short. The couple suffered a stillborn child and Lizzie was seriously addicted to Laudanum. She died in 1862 due to an overdose. The rest of Lizzie’s tale is eerily famous for its gothic Victorian morbidity: Rossetti, in his grief, buried his only manuscript of his poems with Lizzie. The poems, nestled in her coffin amidst her famous red hair, haunted him. Seven years later, he had her coffin exhumed in order to retrieve the poems for publication. The story was spread that Lizzie was still in beautiful, pristine condition and that her flaming hair had continued to grow after death, filling the coffin. This, of course, is a biological impossibility. Cellular growth does not occur after death, but the tale has added to Lizzie’s legend and continues to capture the interest of Pre-Raphaelite and Lizzie Siddal enthusiasts.
The story of Lizzie’s life is punctuated with dramatic episodes such as falling ill as a result of modeling as Ophelia,, the tales of Rossetti’s dalliances, and her grief at the loss of their stillborn daughter. Our modern society is much more aware and educated than the Victorians regarding mental health issues. Unfortunately for Elizabeth Siddal, she lived in a time where addiction was a taboo subject and little was known about post-partum depression. Lizzie lived within a cycle of illness, addiction and grief with no resources available to her. And although she did have a creative outlet while most women were denied modes of self expression, Lizzie was never able to move beyond the addiction that claimed her life.
Source: website LizzieSiddal.com
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Galerie des Morts, Lizzy Siddal, Siddal, Lizzy
Virginia Woolf
How Should One Read a Book?
In the first place, I want to emphasize the note of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.
But to enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot. This, it may be, is one of the first difficulties that faces us in a library. What is “the very spot?” There may well seem to be nothing but a conglomeration and huddle of confusion. Poems and novels, histories and memories, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?
It is simple enough to say that since books have classes—fiction, biography, poetry—we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. The thirty-chapters of a novel—if we consider how to read a novel first—are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you— how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment.
But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasized; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist—Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different person—Defoe, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy—but that we are living in a different world. Here, in Robinson Crusoe, we are trudging a plain high road; one thing happens after another; the fact and the order of the fact is enough. But if the open air and adventure mean everything to Defoe they mean nothing to Jane Austen. Hers is the drawing-room, and people talking, and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their characters. And if, when we have accustomed ourselves to the drawing-room and its reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun round. The moors are round us and the stars are above our heads. The other side of the mind is now exposed—the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude, not the light side that shows in company. Our relations are not towards people, but towards Nature and destiny. Yet different as these worlds are, each is consistent with itself. The maker of each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and however great a strain they may put upon us they will never confuse us, as lesser writers so frequently do, by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book. Thus to go from one great novelist to another—from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith—is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist—the great artist—gives you.
But a glance at the heterogeneous company on the shelf will show you that writers are very seldom “great artists;” far more often a book makes no claim to be a work of art at all. These biographies and autobiographies, for example, lives of great men, of men long dead and forgotten, that stand cheek by jowl with the novels and poems, are we to refuse to read them because they are not “art?” Or shall we read them, but read them in a different way, with a different aim? Shall we read them in the first place to satisfy that curiosity which possesses us sometimes when in the evening we linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life in being? Then we are consumed with curiosity about the lives of these people—the servants gossiping, the gentlemen dining, the girl dressing for a party, the old woman at the window with her knitting. Who are they, what are they, what are their names, their occupations, their thoughts, and adventures?
Biographies and memoirs answer such questions, light up innumerable such houses; they show us people going about their daily affairs, toiling, failing, succeeding, eating, hating, loving, until they die. And sometimes as we watch, the house fades and the iron railings vanish and we are out at sea; we are hunting, sailing, fighting; we are among savages and soldiers; we are taking part in great campaigns. Or if we like to stay here in England, in London, still the scene changes; the street narrows; the house becomes small, cramped, diamond-paned, and malodorous. We see a poet, Donne, driven from such a house because the walls were so thin that when the children cried their voices cut through them. We can follow him, through the paths that lie in the pages of books, to Twickenham; to Lady Bedford’s Park, a famous meeting-ground for nobles and poets; and then turn our steps to Wilton, the great house under the downs, and hear Sidney read the Arcadia to his sister; and ramble among the very marshes and see the very herons that figure in that famous romance; and then again travel north with that other Lady Pembroke, Anne Clifford, to her wild moors, or plunge into the city and control our merriment at the sight of Gabriel Harvey in his black velvet suit arguing about poetry with Spenser. Nothing is more fascinating than to grope and stumble in the alternate darkness and splendor of Elizabethan London. But there is no staying there. The Temples and the Swifts, the Harleys and the St Johns beckon us on; hour upon hour can be spent disentangling their quarrels and deciphering their characters; and when we tire of them we can stroll on, past a lady in black wearing diamonds, to Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith and Garrick; or cross the channel, if we like, and meet Voltaire and Diderot, Madame du Deffand; and so back to England and Twickenham—how certain places repeat themselves and certain names!—where Lady Bedford had her Park once and Pope lived later, to Walpole’s home at Strawberry Hill. But Walpole introduces us to such a swarm of new acquaintances, there are so many houses to visit and bells to ring that we may well hesitate for a moment, on the Miss Berrys’ doorstep, for example, when behold, up comes Thackeray; he is the friend of the woman whom Walpole loved; so that merely by going from friend to friend, from garden to garden, from house to house, we have passed from one end of English literature to another and wake to find ourselves here again in the present, if we can so differentiate this moment from all that have gone before. This, then, is one of the ways in which we can read these lives and letters; we can make them light up the many windows of the past; we can watch the famous dead in their familiar habits and fancy sometimes that we are very close and can surprise their secrets, and sometimes we may pull out a play or a poem that they have written and see whether it reads differently in the presence of the author. But this again rouses other questions. How far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer’s life—how far is it safe to let the man interpret the writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that the man himself rouses in us—so sensitive are words, so receptive of the character of the author? These are questions that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we must answer them for ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the preferences of others in a matter so personal.
But also we can read such books with another aim, not to throw light on literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but to refresh and exercise our own creative powers. Is there not an open window on the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop reading and look out! How stimulating the scene is, in its unconsciousness, its irrelevance, its perpetual movement—the colts galloping round the field, the woman filling her pail at the well, the donkey throwing back his head and emitting his long, acrid moan. The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of such fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish-heap, its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the delight of rubbish-reading you will be surprised, indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life that have been cast out to molder. It may be one letter—but what a vision it gives! It may be a few sentences—but what vistas they suggest! Sometimes a whole story will come together with such beautiful humor and pathos and completeness that it seems as if a great novelist had been at work, yet it is only an old actor, Tate Wilkinson, remembering the strange story of Captain Jones; it is only a young subaltern serving under Arthur Wellesley and falling in love with a pretty girl at Lisbon; it is only Maria Allen letting fall her sewing in the empty drawing-room and sighing how she wishes she had taken Dr Burney’s good advice and had never eloped with her Rishy. None of this has any value; it is negligible in the extreme; yet how absorbing it is now and again to go through the rubbish-heaps and find rings and scissors and broken noses buried in the huge past and try to piece them together while the colt gallops round the field, the woman fills her pail at the well, and the donkey brays.
But we tire of rubbish-reading in the long run. We tire of searching for what is needed to complete the half-truth which is all that the Wilkinsons, the Bunburys and the Maria Allens are able to offer us. They had not the artist’s power of mastering and eliminating; they could not tell the whole truth even about their own lives; they have disfigured the story that might have been so shapely. Facts are all that they can offer us, and facts are a very inferior form of fiction. Thus the desire grows upon us to have done with half-statements and approximations; to cease from searching out the minute shades of human character, to enjoy the greater abstractness, the purer truth of fiction. Thus we create the mood, intense and generalized, unaware of detail, but stressed by some regular, recurrent beat, whose natural expression is poetry; and that is the time to read poetry when we are almost able to write it.
Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is no other sensation except that of the poem itself. What profound depths we visit then—how sudden and complete is our immersion! There is nothing here to catch hold of; nothing to stay us in our flight. The illusion of fiction is gradual; its effects are prepared; but who when they read these four lines stops to ask who wrote them, or conjures up the thought of Donne’s house or Sidney’s secretary; or enmeshes them in the intricacy of the past and the succession of generations? The poet is always our contemporary. Our being for the moment is centered and constricted, as in any violent shock of personal emotion. Afterwards, it is true, the sensation begins to spread in wider rings through our minds; remoter senses are reached; these begin to sound and to comment and we are aware of echoes and reflections. The intensity of poetry covers an immense range of emotion. We have only to compare the force and directness of
I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave,
Only remembering that I grieve,
with the wavering modulation of
Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands,
As by an hour glass; the span of time
Doth waste us to our graves, and we look on it;
An age of pleasure, revelled out, comes home
At last, and ends in sorrow; but the life,
Weary of riot, numbers every sand,
Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down,
So to conclude calamity in rest
or place the meditative calm of
whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And effort evermore about to be,
beside the complete and inexhaustible loveliness of
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside—
or the splendid fantasy of
And the woodland haunter
Shall not cease to saunter
When, far down some glade,
Of the great world’s burning,
One soft flame upturning
Seems to his discerning,
Crocus in the shade,
to bethink us of the varied art of the poet; his power to make us at once actors and spectators; his power to run his hand into characters as if it were a glove, and be Falstaff or Lear; his power to condense, to widen, to state, once and for ever.
“We have only to compare”—with those words the cat is out of the bag, and the true complexity of reading is admitted. The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by another. We must pass judgment upon these multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting. But not directly. Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole. And the book as a whole is different from the book received currently in separate phrases. Details now fit themselves into their places. We see the shape from start to finish; it is a barn, a pig-sty, or a cathedral. Now then we can compare book with book as we compare building with building. But this act of comparison means that our attitude has changed; we are no longer the friends of the writer, but his judges; and just as we cannot be too sympathetic as friends, so as judges we cannot be too severe. Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease? Let us then be severe in our judgments; let us compare each book with the greatest of its kind. There they hang in the mind the shapes of the books we have read solidified by the judgments we have passed on them—Robinson Crusoe, Emma The Return of the Native. Compare the novels with these—even the latest and least of novels has a right to be judged with the best. And so with poetry when the intoxication of rhythm has died down and the splendor of words has faded, a visionary shape will return to us and this must be compared with Lear, with Phèdre, with The Prelude; or if not with these, with whatever is the best or seems to us to be the best in its own kind. And we may be sure that the newness of new poetry and fiction is its most superficial quality and that we have only to alter slightly, not to recast, the standards by which we have judged the old.
It would be foolish, then, to pretend that the second part of reading, to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first—to open the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading without the book before you, to hold one shadow-shape against another, to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and illuminating—that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press further and to say, “Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is bad; that is good.” To carry out this part of a reader’s duty needs such imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most self-confident to find more than the seeds of such powers in himself. Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book’s absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our own identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathize wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, “I hate, I love,” and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. But as time goes on perhaps we can train our taste; perhaps we can make it submit to some control. When it has fed greedily and lavishly upon books of all sorts—poetry, fiction, history, biography—and has stopped reading and looked for long spaces upon the variety, the incongruity of the living world, we shall find that it is changing a little; it is not so greedy, it is more reflective. It will begin to bring us not merely judgments on particular books, but it will tell us that there is a quality common to certain books. Listen, it will say, what shall we call this? And it will read us perhaps Lear and then perhaps the Agamemnon in order to bring out that common quality. Thus, with our taste to guide us, we shall venture beyond the particular book in search of qualities that group books together; we shall give them names and thus frame a rule that brings order into our perceptions. We shall gain a further and a rarer pleasure from that discrimination. But as a rule only lives when it is perpetually broken by contact with the books themselves—nothing is easier and more stultifying than to make rules which exists out of touch with facts, in a vacuum—now at last, in order to steady ourselves in this difficult attempt, it may be well to turn to the very rare writers who are able to enlighten us upon literature as an art. Coleridge and Dryden and Johnson, in their considered criticism, the poets and novelists themselves in their unconsidered sayings, are often surprisingly relevant; they light up and solidify the vague ideas that have been tumbling in the misty depths of our minds. But they are only able to help us if we come to them laden with questions and suggestions won honestly in the course of our own reading. They can do nothing for us if we herd ourselves under their authority and lie down like sheep in the shade of a hedge. We can only understand their ruling when it comes in conflict with our own and vanquishes it.
If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, and you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.
Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least that when the Day of judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”
Virgina Woolf
(The Common Reader, Second Series 1926)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: - Book Stories, Archive W-X, Archive W-X, Libraries in Literature, The Art of Reading, Woolf, Virginia
Nick J. Swarth
Gentleman Fight Night
Dertig pegels per insect, dertig
voor een plek in de buitenste kring, dertig minimaal
of veertig, of drie maal veertig
voor een tafel met bediening, aan de voet van de ring
als een bok op een haverkist,
dichtbij het licht, bij een onverhoedse beuk het gezicht
gezegend met het parelend zweet van een pugilist.
De ene bokser denkt: kom op met die luis, ik lust ‘m
rauw.
De andere bokser denkt: kom op met die muis, ik lust
‘m rauw.
De ene bokser hakt de andere, de andere houwt de ene
uit vlees, draaien om die zak, links, rechts, lever, kaak,
ze slaan elkaar uit het lood, de luis en de muis, hebben
het vlees liever dan de botten.
Dus eerst slopen en daarna zien.
En het kantelt, het beeld,
het beest met de ongelijke ruggen, de rooie ruggen, het
slaat zichzelf in model, bloeit, broeit, beukt, brandt en
regent slagen, kom hier, ga weg, rot op (om die knop,
af die kop.
Manieren om de kat te villen zijn er veel.
Aan een tegenstander, aan driestheid, aan verdriet,
avatars of vette friet – een mens verkoopt zijn huid.
Hij geeuwt en zegt dan:
‘Ik heb het gevoel dat ik mij met iets verhevens moet
bezighouden.’
Het hoofd van de kantine heeft het op een zilvervisje
voorzien. Haar hond draait zich in een (droge) dweil
en doezelt weg,
de vacht vol vozende vlooien.
In de ring buigt een blinde maan zich over de rooie.
Nick J. Swarth poetry
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Swarth, Nick J.
Freda Kamphuis
Road 1 -2 -3
©fredakamphuis 2011
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Freda Kamphuis, Kamphuis, Freda
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)
Natur und Kunst
Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen,
Und haben sich, eh’ man es denkt, gefunden;
Der Widerwille ist auch mir verschwunden,
Und beide scheinen gleich mich anzuziehen.
Es gilt wohl nur ein redliches Bemühen!
Und wenn wir erst in abgemeßnen Stunden;
Mit Geist und Fleiß uns an die Kunst gebunden,
Mag frei Natur im Herzen wieder glühen.
So ist’s mit aller Bildung auch beschaffen:
Vergebens werden ungebundne Geister
Nach der Vollendung reiner Höhe streben.
Wer Großes will, muß sich zusammenraffen:
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.
Hans Hermans photos – Natuurdagboek 12-11
Gedicht Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive G-H, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Hans Hermans Photos
William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
THE SONNETS
114
Or whether doth my mind being crowned with you
Drink up the monarch’s plague this flattery?
Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy?
To make of monsters, and things indigest,
Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble,
Creating every bad a perfect best
As fast as objects to his beams assemble:
O ’tis the first, ’tis flattery in my seeing,
And my great mind most kingly drinks it up,
Mine eye well knows what with his gust is ‘greeing,
And to his palate doth prepare the cup.
If it be poisoned, ’tis the lesser sin,
That mine eye loves it and doth first begin.
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: -Shakespeare Sonnets
John Milton
On Time
Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race,
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy plummets pace;
And glut thy self with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more than what is false and vain,
And merely mortal dross,
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain;
For when as each thing bad thou hast entombed,
And last of all, thy greedy self consumed,
Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss,
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood;
When every thing that is sincerely good
And perfectly divine
With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine
About the supreme throne
Of him, to whose happy-making sight alone,
When once our heavenly-guided soul shall climb,
Then, all this earthy grossness quit,
Attired with stars we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.
John Milton
Op de Tijd
Vlieg Tijd, jaloers, tot waar je landing ligt,
Spoor loden uren en hun luie stappen aan
Met slechts de valkracht van hun zwaar gewicht;
Zwelg, en verslind wat door je buik kan gaan,
Al is ’t niet meer dan valsheid zonder zin,
Verderfelijk slechts en vies:
Zo klein is ons verlies,
Zo klein is jouw gewin;
Want als jij al het kwade hebt verdelgd,
En dan tot slot je gulzige zelf verzwelgt,
Dan zegent ons de eeuwigdurendheid
Met ’n kus elk toebereid,
En overspoelt ons vreugde als een vloed;
Als alles wat waarachtig is en goed
En opperst goddelijk
Steeds straalt in waarheid, vredig, liefderijk
Rondom de hoogste troon
Van Hem, wiens zaligmakende betoon
Eens onze ziel ten hemel begeleidt,
Dan zetelen wij, alle aardse grofheid kwijt,
Getooid met sterren in de eeuwigheid,
Met zeges op de Dood, het Lot en jou, O Tijd.
Vertaling; Cornelis W. Schoneveld (2012)
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive M-N, Milton, John, More translations
Poolse dichteres Wislawa Szymborska overleden
2 feb 2012
Gisteren is de Poolse dichteres Wislawa Szymborska op 88-jarige leeftijd overleden. Szymborska won in 1996 de Nobelprijs voor de Literatuur. De juryleden van de Nobelprijs noemden de dichteres de ‘Mozart van de poëzie’.
Volgens haar woordvoerder is de dichteres ‘vredig, in haar slaap, overleden’. Ze woonde in de Zuid-Poolse stad Krakau.
Szymborska, geboren in 1923 in Kornik bij Poznan, studeerde letterkunde en sociologie in Krakau. Haar eerste gedichten publiceerde ze in 1945. De gedichten van Szymborska zijn zowel politiek als speels en geven blijk van een groot gevoel voor humor.
Wislawa Szymborska heeft een klein (niet meer dan 350 gedichten) maar geniaal oeuvre nagelaten.
Een titel hoeft niet
Hier zit ik dan onder een boom
aan de oever van een rivier,
op een zonnige morgen.
Een nietige gebeurtenis
die niet de geschiedenis ingaat.
Het zijn geen veldslagen en pacten
waarvan de motieven worden onderzocht,
of gedenkwaardige tirannenmoorden.
Toch zit ik aan de rivier, dat is een feit.
En nu ik hier ben,
moet ik ergens vandaan zijn gekomen
en daarvoor
op nog vele andere plaatsen zijn geweest,
net zoals veroveraars van landen
voor ze aan boord gingen.
Zelfs een vluchtig ogenblik heeft een rijk verleden,
een vrijdag voor een zaterdag,
een mei die aan juni voorafging.
Het heeft zijn eigen horizons,
even werkelijk als in de veldkijkers van bevelhebbers.
De boom is een populier die hier al jaren wortelt.
De rivier is de Raba die langer stroomt dan vandaag.
Het paadje is niet eergisteren pas
door de struiken gebaand.
Om die wolken te kunnen verjagen,
moet de wind ze eerst hierheen hebben gewaaid.
En hoewel in de buurt niets groots gebeurt,
is de wereld daardoor nog niet armer aan details,
niet minder gefundeerd, niet zwakker gedefinieerd
dan toen volksverhuizingen haar in hun greep hielden.
Niet alleen geheime komplotten worden in stilte gehuld,
niet alleen kroningen gaan van een gevolg van oorzaken vergezeld.
Rond kunnen niet alleen de jubilea van opstanden zijn,
maar ook de omspoelde steentjes aan de waterkant.
Dicht en verstrengeld is het borduursel van de omstandigheden.
De steken van de mier in het gras.
Het gras dat aan de aarde is genaaid.
Het golfpatroon waardoor een twijgje wordt geregen.
Het is zo gegaan dat ik hier ben en kijk.
Boven me fladdert een witte vlinder in de lucht
met vleugeltjes die alleen van hem zijn
en over mijn handen vliegt zijn schaduw,
geen andere, niet zomaar een, alleen de zijne.
Wanneer ik zoiets zie, verlaat me altijd de zekerheid
dat wat belangrijk is
belangrijker is dan wat onbelangrijk is.
Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012)
(vertaling Gerard Rasch)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive Y-Z, In Memoriam
Freda Kamphuis photos
Colours (1)
©fredakamphuis 2011
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Freda Kamphuis, Kamphuis, Freda
Ton van Reen
spitsuur
Een sirene jankt
en de dag
spat open
fabrieken lopen leeg
schoorstenen wuiven
de arbeiders na
auto’s spelen van
wie komt er in mijn hokje
langzaam lopend
in een rijtje
behangen ze de lucht
met hun ratelend hart
op hoge benen
lopen meisjes voorbij
ongemerkt halen ze
tussen zwoele wanden van ogen
de avond binnen
Uit: Ton van Reen, Blijvend vers, Verzamelde gedichten (1965-2007). Uitgeverij De Contrabas, 2011, ISBN 9789079432462, 144 pagina’s, paperback
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive Q-R, Reen, Ton van
31 januari 2012
Schrijfster Doeschka Meijsing overleden
In haar woonplaats Amsterdam is gisteravond de schrijfster Doeschka Meijsing overleden. Zij werd vierenzestig jaar. Meijsing stierf aan de complicaties van een zware operatie.
Doeschka Meijsing schreef vele verhalen, gedichten, essays en romans. Ze debuteerde in 1974 bij Querido met De hanen en andere verhalen. Voor Tijger, tijger! (1980) ontving ze de Multatuliprijs. De tweede man (2000) werd genomineerd voor de AKO Literatuurprijs en betekende Meijsings doorbraak naar het grote publiek. Haar roman 100% chemie (2002) werd genomineerd voor de Libris Literatuur Prijs en kan worden gezien als een opmaat tot Moord, haar deel van de roman Moord & Doodslag (2005), die ze samen met haar broer Geerten Meijsing schreef. In 2008 publiceerde ze de roman Over de liefde, die bekroond werd met de F. Bordewijkprijs, de Opzij Literatuurprijs en de AKO Literatuurprijs. Dit aangrijpende relaas over de schaamte die liefde heet, werd haar laatste boek.
Annette Portegies, directeur/uitgever Querido: ‘Doeschka Meijsing verborg een diepe kwetsbaarheid achter een superieure vorm van ironie, zowel in haar werk als in haar leven. Weerspannig als ze was, was ze een vrouw om van te houden. Querido rouwt om de dood van Doeschka, die bijna veertig jaar aan de uitgeverij verbonden was. De Nederlandse literatuur verliest opnieuw een auteur van wereldformaat.’
De begrafenis zal in besloten kring plaatsvinden.
Daarachter
De diepte ja,
die kennen we.
Die is vaak nogal hartgrondig.
Maar de geur van violieren.
De deur naar de andere
kamer.
Waar ieder
voorwerp specifiek de geliefde
spiegelt.
Waar ieder
ander een rivaal is.
Die deur.
Daarachter.
Wie er liederen zingt.
Die.
(uit: ‘Paard Heer Mantel’, 1986)
Doeschka Meijsing (1947-2012) schreef verhalen, gedichten, essays en romans. Ze debuteerde in 1974 met De hanen en andere verhalen. Voor Tijger, tijger! (1980) ontving ze de Multatuliprijs. De tweede man (2000) werd genomineerd voor de AKO Literatuurprijs en betekende Meijsings doorbraak naar het grote publiek. Haar roman 100% chemie (2002) werd genomineerd voor de Libris Literatuur Prijs en kan worden gezien als een opmaat naar Moord, haar deel van de spraakmakende roman Moord & Doodslag (2005), die ze samen met haar broer Geerten schreef. In 2007 publiceerde ze de kleine roman De eerste jaren en in 2008 volgde haar veelgeprezen bestseller Over de liefde die bekroond werd met de die bekroond werd met de F. Bordewijkprijs, de Opzij Literatuurprijs en de AKO Literatuurprijs. Doeschka Meijsing heeft een indrukwekkend oeuvre op haar naam staan, dat in 1997 werd bekroond met de Annie Romeinprijs.
romans en verhalen:
De hanen en andere verhalen (1974)
Robinson (1976)
De kat achterna (1977)
Tijger, tijger! (1980)
Utopia of De geschiedenissen van Thomas (1982)
Beer en Jager (1987)
De beproeving (1990)
Vuur en zijde (1992)
Beste vriend (1994)
De weg naar Caviano (1996)
De tweede man (2000)
100 % chemie (2002)
Moord & Doodslag (2005) met Geerten Meijsing
De eerste jaren (2007)
Over de liefde (2008)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive M-N, In Memoriam
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