SIMON VINKENOOG

poems: 1950-2006


Translations by Gerard Bellaart, Frederique Berringer
Louise Landes Levi & Hans Plomp

AFTERWORD BY LOUISE LANDES LEVI

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Be careful when you take on the map and begin to work with poets and translators in Amsterdam, France, New York City and then Venezuela who love the work of a poet gone to them and all of us. This is the first booklet pocket size English translations of Simon Vinkenoog's selected poems, ranging from his early years to the grand beatific end. In 2004 he was chosen as the Poet Laureate of the Netherlands, something all his readers and followers already embraced. He passed away in 2009.

FAITS DIVERS


------------------Je est un autre — Arthur Rimbaud


I am a stranger to my own blood
my heart beats on other doors,
I recognize the colors of gods frothing
but it is I that makes me shiver


I am broken by my own eyes
and the stones
which like budding flowers
slowly grow from my entrails


I drowned in this quicksand song
from which a thousand dead implore:


— in this bare landscape called life
time sung to death drifts asunder —
ripples of past without present
words sounds murmurings


1949/1950

translated by Gerard Bellaart, Frederique Berringer