from Eyestone

Hester Knibbe

Law

Take water, evident, that feeds the seas
or wind that blows and turns apathetically,
the grass that grows and once again gets
mowed, or us, growing larger at first,
then shrinking wrinkling simplifying
to nothing: always changing. Or

more capriciously: you'll get from A to Z, but then
—just about at J—suddenly fate stands
in your way and takes you off. Where to?

The water shacked up with seas knows.
The wind that leaves no trace knows.
The grass stutters it out under the blade.





Delphi

The gate stands open and the path upward
has been studded with superstition and sun. We
strap on bag and camera. The thin
sand that plaits itself into skins leaves

the spot with us. We got here
by memory and tarnished hope:
there'd be temples, high-sounding hymns.

Remnants of stone ordered in the array of death
bluntly set us straight: neither god nor
muse is praised, Apollo has vanished.
Someone has roped that loss off.

Tall, blonde, bronzed—that's the way I pictured him,
I say. You laugh, wander off where
an indistinct arch blends you into antiquity.

And for a moment you alter the centuries,
become the player who just left me,
you play the oldest, cruelest
game: I love you I love you not.





Oder

This is the waterfront you walked along
whistling a new spring song, walking
hand in hand with your love. Same banks

but the water isn't, that water
is long gone and what grew then

has blown over. The land lends air
to desolation. This is the waterfront

where you whistled—past tense, the horizon
is tainted with your death, winter
just won't get out

of what the cow parsley brushes aside.


translated from the Dutch by Jacquelyn Pope



Read the original in Dutch

Listen to 'Law' read in the original Dutch by the author

Read translator’s note

Hester Knibbe was born in 1946 in Harderwijk, The Netherlands, a small city in the eastern part of the country, on the Ijsselmeer (formerly known as the Zuider Zee). Since 1972 she has lived in Rotterdam. Her first collection of poems, Tussen gebaren en woorden (Between Gestures and Words) was published in 1982; since that time she has published thirteen more collections of poetry. She has been recognized with numerous national awards: in 2000 she received the prestigious Herman Gorter Prize for the poem-cycle Antidood (Antideath); in 2001 she was awarded the Anna Blaman Prize for her entire œuvre, and in 2009 she received the A. Roland Holst prize.

Jacquelyn Pope is the author of Watermark, which was selected by Marie Ponsot for the inaugural Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize and was published by Marsh Hawk Press in 2005. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, The New Republic, Gulf Coast, FIELD, and Southern Review. Her work has received the José Marti Prize and awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her translations from Dutch and Afrikaans have been published in journals in the US and abroad, and have been featured on the Poetry Daily website. She is the recipient of a 2012 PEN Translation Fund grant.


There is a fluidity in Hester Knibbe's poems that can seem quite removed from daily life, even in poems studded with the most quotidian details. The past, the present, dreaming and waking states, life and death, presence and absence: these are always in flux. Some poems go further, attempting to reform time or take it back, to forge a more explicit continuity between life and death, the present and the past. Flexibility, possibility, endurance and silence are important threads in her work, but these are often in conflict, or being undermined. Language that seems simple or straightforward is subverted. Assumed oppositions are bluntly flipped onto their backs, through shifts of tone or perspective. Such surprises distinguish Knibbe's work, and the unsettled, disoriented sense they evoke has drawn me back to them over and over again.

A related source of the mystery and attraction of these poems for me, and much of the challenge of translating them, is the many layers of compression involved: there is the compression inherent in poetry, a compression intrinsic to the Dutch language (certainly compared to English), Knibbe's own reticent style, and the compression imposed by the compromises involved in translation. The choices involved in the effort to balance all the mechanisms that work to make meaning in a poem sometimes involve sacrificing words or sounds or references, but the terms of those choices are unpredictable. The path through the poem is always different: that's what makes the work so interesting.