Introduction to Herman Gorter: Selected Poems - by Lloyd Haft
Herman Gorter (1864-1927) is one of the all-time great
Dutch poets. Most Netherlanders, even if they seldom or never read poetry, are
familiar with Gorter’s often-quoted line Een nieuwe lente en een nieuw
geluid, literally ‘A new springtime and a new sound.’ They may or may not
know that this is the opening line of May (Mei, 1899), a long story poem
with which Gorter instantly became famous when he was only twenty-four. An epic
of youth and passion against a background of vibrant nature imagery, May
is written in traditional rhymed couplets. Thematically as well as in form, at
times it shows influence of Keats’ Endymion or of the drama and diction
of Old Norse mythology. In subsequent books, starting with Verses
(Verzen, 1890), Gorter wrote in a radically new style which combined
experimentally intense lyricism with a freewheeling approach to language.
Changing the spelling or even the sound of words to make them rhyme, inventing
his own words, using words in an archaic or dialect sense – all these devices
went into Gorter’s own brand of Dutch, making it a rich but challenging brew
for reader and translator alike. Tastes differ; Gorter’s linguistic fireworks
seem brash to some readers, brilliant to others. Even highly educated Dutch
speakers are not always sure just what a given phrase means, or which of its
alternative possibilities is most likely to apply.
As Gorter’s career evolved,
the creative oddity of his language was one thing which alienated a certain
proportion of readers; another was his emerging ultra-Leftist political stance.
Gorter believed that every human being is motivated by three fundamental
drives: self-preservation or self-love, the sex instinct or love for the
opposite sex, and the communal instinct or love for the community. This last
factor he personally identified, to the dismay of many readers, with the ideals
of socialism and communism. Difficult as it might seem to see these three forms
of love simultaneously embodied in an idealized female ‘other’ who could be
addressed in poetry, Gorter tried to do so.
When Gorter first broke into
prominence with May in the late 1880s, he was associated with the
literary movement called in Dutch the Tachtigers, literally the
Eightiers. Rebelling against the stodgy, moralistic writings of many Dutch
writers of their day, the Eightiers strove for a poetry of
hyper-individualistic emotional expression. Their ideals were more aesthetic
than social. When May came out in
early 1889, it was immediately hailed as a pinnacle of the new movement.
By autumn of the following
year, when Gorter’s Verses appeared, it was clear that he had undergone
a transformation. No longer treading in the recognizable footsteps of his Dutch
or English Romantic forebears, he was now writing literally ‘verses’ in which
it seemed every new moment of experience was autonomous, demanding its own
spontaneous configuration of sound and image. These poems were unlike anything
in the tradition. They seemed to call for an ongoing celebration of the cutting
edge of consciousness. Verses has been called ‘the Sergeant Pepper of
Dutch poetry,’ and the effect on many, especially young readers must indeed
have been almost psychedelic. The eminent writer Lodewijk van Deyssel,
reviewing the poems in the Eightiers’ magazine De nieuwe gids, wrote
that Gorter had ‘seen behind the perceptible into timelessness... There is no
adjective for it. It reaches the ultimate boundary of what is thinkable.’ In
what became a standard scholarly study of the Eightiers (1934), Garmt
Stuiveling praised the Verses for their ‘comprehensiveness of feeling’
and ‘visionary lucidity.’ In a later article, Victor van Vriesland said Gorter
had realized ‘the utmost psychic possibilities of Dutch words.’
But Verses, too, for
Gorter was but one stage in an ongoing development. He could not long remain
satisfied with a kind of writing that seemed unconcerned with larger social
issues. During the 1890s he grew increasingly critical of an individualist
focus in the arts. In a seemingly retrograde move, he wrote sonnets – though,
typically for him, they were anti-traditional in both rhythm and vocabulary –
and in 1897 he came out with a frequently-quoted critique of the Eightiers
movement. In the same year he began studying Karl Marx.
By the early twentieth
century Gorter was increasingly focused on social and socialist ideals. In 1909
he joined the Social Democratic Party, which would later become the Communist
Party of the Netherlands. He continued writing poetry but was also taken up
with turbulent personal affairs. Two young women who had come to him for
private lessons in classics eventually became his lovers. He kept each secret
from the other and they did not meet until both attended his funeral in 1927.
One of them, Jenne Clinge Doorenbos (1887-1973), became the real-life muse of
his many love lyrics; she was also a very active sounding board in Gorter’s
poetry writing and editing. Eventually she was also co-editor (with Garmt
Stuiveling) of the eight-volume set of his Collected Works (Verzamelde
werken, 1948-1952).
In 1912, Gorter again turned
to writing an epic. This time it was Pan, in which Pan, as god of
nature, falls in love with a ‘golden girl’ who is the Spirit of the New
Humanity. Prophetically, it described a coming great war to be followed by
world revolution. A much expanded version was published in 1916.
True to his independence of
mind, in Pan Gorter reversed the genders traditionally associated with
physical and spiritual life. In Pan, the representative of earthly
instinct is the male god Pan; it is the woman or ‘maiden’ who personifies the
spirit. Their story is a long one, occupying some 400 pages as published in the
Collected Works. But the scenic decors of their love (and lovemaking)
include some of Gorter’s most impressive nature poetry. One almost wonders how
Gorter found time to write long narrative poems like May and Pan;
he would seem to have needed countless hours of his life just to observe and
remember nature as minutely as he did. How a rainstorm develops, beginning with
faint ‘silken’ inklings, continuing through a heavier phase of pounding
‘diamonds,’ then ‘softening its streaming’ as clouds of fragrance arise, until
finally ‘the pliant rain settles into the forest’ – this we find noted in
passing as if it were an effortlessly sketched backdrop. Gorter’s descriptions are
not just rhetorical pile-ups of words found in dictionaries. We feel that he
really has seen the ‘shone-through vague rough bigness’ of trees in a forest,
the ocean waves ‘falling over the top and forward...crashing full bouldering
swaying striped dark-faceted water.’ Perhaps it is no wonder that Gorter
identified with Pan, god of nature, considering that nature is the setting and
the inspiration of so much of his poetry.
In most introductions to
Gorter’s life and work, Pan is mentioned as an important work, perhaps
even his only notable effort after May and Verses. Much less
attention is paid to the very impressive long lyric sequence, posthumously
published, called Lyrics (Liedjes, literally ‘little songs,’ 1930).
Gorter worked on these poems from 1910 to 1924 – partly at least in the same
period that he was working on Pan. Certain passages from Pan show
up in Lyrics as well. An example is the following poem from Pan,
addressed ostensibly to the Spirit:
O Golden Spirit
of Freedom,
I’m thrusting higher now,
thrusting into ever brighter, whiter,
golder
Joy,
into your golden Body.
O Chalice
heaven-seeming!
Into your deep teeming
may all someday rise –
Goal!
that the drift eternal
hot and cool
is driving to.
Longing
ever greater
as the womb climbs
higher above it.
Womb,
depth without end,
ever farther
as the longing lengthens.
Joy. Woman. Humanity.
Longing that never ends
O! because the rising of humanity
is nowhere bounded.
In Lyrics, the first strophe appears as a separate
poem, the second is deleted, and the third through sixth are a continuous
sequence of separate poems.
In the starkly minimalized
stage settings of Lyrics, the imagery becomes almost alchemical. Rather
than a description, it is a transmutation of nature. The fire and water
elements originally seen in sun and sea reappear as interacting energies:
My Beloved
as water pure
came into the fire
of love.
...
...
Deep into the fount
the sun finally fell.
And the fount
rose to heaven.
Lyrics is more loosely structured than Pan; it does not form
a narrative but is like a slide show of mini-episodes. It is like an
etherealized, more private version of Pan, still set against the
background of a longed-for ‘new humankind’ represented by a woman, but with a crucial
change – the male protagonist of the erotic scenes is usually no longer the god
Pan but ‘I.’ Lyrics represents Gorter’s ultimate effort to combine the
love for a woman with love for humanity as he conceived it within his communist
political ideals. Here, the beautiful ‘Lady’ or ‘Maiden’ stands both for
herself and for the ‘new humankind’ that Gorter hoped the Revolution would
bring into being. In the coda-like fourth section of Book Three, after the
initially despondent tone of ‘The Defeat of the Revolution,’ Gorter comes back
to reassert his concept of the three basic loves. In a magnificent sequence of
three similarly worded sonnets, he again sees visions of the beloved woman,
himself, and humanity against a heavenly background.
Gorter perhaps did not see fit to, in any event did not, publish the Lyrics sequence during his lifetime. He had it privately printed in three copies, one for himself and one for each of his two lovers. It was published for all the world to see in 1930, three years after Gorter’s decease.
Gorter is not ‘difficult’ to translate; he is
impossible... unless the translation is a labor of both love and luck and can
convey to the reader at least some glint of the impulse which inspired the
original poems. To begin with, the words on the page. How to translate a
language (Dutch) in which one and the same word (schoot) can mean ‘lap,’
‘bosom,’ or ‘womb’? And this in poems by a man who was straining to achieve a
join between the beauty of a woman’s anatomy and the beauty of her...ah yes,
her what? considering that the same word (geest) can mean ‘mind’ but
also ‘spirit.’ Are we to admire her wise thoughts (mind), or her passionate
ideals and hopes (spirit)? Examples of both can be found in the poems.
Again, leest often
suggests the ‘form’ or ‘figure’ of a person’s body rather than the body as
such, yet in a poem on Spinoza’s philosophy, Gorter unmistakably uses the
rhyme-pair geest and leest to refer to the opposing poles of
‘spirit’ and ‘body.’ In the first strophe of the poem from Pan which I
have translated above, I read them to be used in the same senses.
So far I have only mentioned
the ‘legitimate’ or ‘dictionary’ meanings of words. But Gorter is the supreme
player on words, their sounds, their possible and perhaps-barely-possible
associations. In a short poem from Verses,
Her eyes glimmering chalices,
her hand silent red,
her body a calyx
welling from her womb.
in the first line of the original, the ‘chalices’ are kelken, plural, with the normal plural suffix -en. In the third line, the ‘calyx’ in the original is kelke, a word you will not find in any dictionary. No matter, obviously it is kelk with an extra -e to give it an added syllable and make it rhyme with kelken. The translation is problematical. Kelk can mean ‘chalice’ but also ‘calyx.’ Is her ‘body’ a veritable flower? Very plausible. But in the original it is described as wèlle, again a non-existent word, which commentators have taken to mean ‘welling up.’ So, is a wèlle kelke uit haren schoot a ‘chalice, welling from her womb’ or a ‘calyx, stemming from her womb’? Probably for Gorter it was both, and for the imaginative reader it can be both. But we have to come out with a single translation. I have chosen for the calyx, calling it ‘welling’ to keep it somewhat chalice-like.
The present book is a companion volume to M. Kruijff’s
superb translation of Gorter’s epic May. The poems I have chosen to
translate are:
(1) twenty-two poems from Verses (1890);
(2) fifteen other short, intense
poems from later collections;
(3) nine selected lyrical
passages from Pan (1916); and
(4) my abridged but substantial
version of Lyrics (1930), not including all the poems but maintaining
the order and overall structure of the original.
The four sections of my book correspond to the main successive stages in Gorter’s career after his initial breakthrough with May in 1889. concluding with Lyrics (1930). Within each section the order of the poems, except in Lyrics, is of no particular significance but follows the order in the Collected Works. Gorter himself does not seem to have intended the original Verses as a structured sequence: in a later republication he changed the order and deleted many of the poems. The poem I translate on page 25 originally appeared in Verses as three separate poems; in later editions they were always combined into one, as in my translation.
Lyrics has never before appeared in English. My version comprises about sixty percent of the original. It is in the interest of maintaining musicality and focus that I have chosen to omit some of the poems that seemed to me ineffectively repetitious, or which I could not get to sound plausible in translation. Stuiveling included a radically short selection from Lyrics (about one-sixth of the whole) in the selected volume of Gorter’s poems which he edited in 1956. That book has been reprinted many times and is a standard introduction to Gorter. My selection is not only much longer than Stuiveling’s but includes some of the more explicitly political poems like the sonnets to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. But like Stuiveling and like another major Gorter anthologist, J. C. Brandt Corstius whose selection came out in 1946, I could not get myself to include the hero-worshipping sonnet to Lenin.
My translations do not rigidly reproduce the rhyme-schemes
of the originals – that would have imposed a too crippling limitation on the
available choice of words – but they do, I think, fairly represent the overall
sound and texture of Gorter’s verse.
For the reader who wishes to
consult the Dutch originals, it is easy to access online, and to download free
of charge, the texts as they are included in Gorter’s Collected Works.
In the appendix, together with a brief pointer to the relevant links, I list the
volume and page in the Collected Works where each translated poem
begins.
On the completion of this book which I first began to envision some four decades ago, I wish to thank Jan Bouts for introducing me to Lyrics, Jan Kuijper for sharing his knowledge of Gorter’s vocabulary and poetics, Henk van der Ent for astute comments on difficult passages, and Agnès van Rees for help with nuances in translation.
Lloyd Haft
August 2021
Reviews here:
https://arimei.vrijeboeken.com/may__reviews_348
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