Virgula by Sasja Janssen, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Prototype, 2024
I write to you because you hover in the corner of my eye
I write to you because you never answer
I write to you because, like me, you dislike stagnation
In Wit, Margaret Edson’s 1999 Pulitzer-winning one-act play, the main character, English professor Dr Vivian Bearing, re-lives crucial moments of her life while undergoing an experimental chemotherapy treatment for late-stage ovarian cancer. In one instance, she remembers a comment made by her college professor, Dr E M Ashford, reprimanding her for taking language too lightly in an assignment on Donne’s sonnet, “Death Be Not Proud”; Ashford is quick to point out that the edition Vivian consulted contained faulty punctuation, and surmises that the simple message of the poem—“overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life”—gets sacrificed to the ‘hysterical’ punctuation of semicolons and an exclamation point. Vivian’s iteration—“And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!”—distorts what is conveyed by a single comma: “And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.” One can clearly see the importance of one simple symbol: how it can make or break a poem.
Virgula by Sasja Janssen, first published in Dutch in 2021 and now out in an English translation by the Booker International Prize-winning Michele Hutchison, centres on the same punctuation mark. The text is titled after the Latin word for comma, which symbolises movement and a break away from stillness. It pushes phrases ahead, links one thought to the next, and bridges language. Indeed, if the full stop—or period, as the Americans like to call it—can denote death, cessation of thought, and even an end to language, then the comma is the complete opposite. It is perpetually in motion, gesturing towards a relentless zest for life, a desire to fill the emptiness with words, to delay the inevitable. Janssen invokes Virgula as a muse, an entity no less than any other Greek goddess, and she is at the beginning of each poem in the first and last of the book’s three sections—which also take the title of “Virgula”. The poems in the middle section each begin with “I call upon you”, again after the section’s title.
The poems in the “Virgula” sections are two to three pages long, and meandering in nature. Janssen jumps between thoughts and images in quick frequency, aided by her commas. While she does employ other punctuation here and elsewhere, she uses them sparingly—so much so that one would spot them only upon careful searching. The poems in the central section are shorter in length (seven lines each, not counting the call common to them all) and read like a distillation of the precedent and antecedent verses. If the long poems can be seen as meditations, then these are incantations. As such, the collection is carefully constructed not only in content, but also in cadence. Entreaties to Virgula rise in intensity to feverish pitch, before coming down again. For Janssen, she is a close companion and a confidante, a friend as well as a lover. Yet, this relationship is also that of a supplicant at the altar of a goddess.
the morning is a wound that only becomes animated when you arrive
here still twilight, drizzly mist, though night broke free of its hinges
and me from my white suit with stars like ash,
so that thing with its back to you on the bed is my body, who would
touch it these days?the morning hovers where you hover
in this same half-light, half-hearted potato darkness, dewy sadness
Concretely, “virgula” in Latin means “twig”—fitting, since it brings to mind the image of curled little commas. Following this correspondence, the writer Nuzhat Bukhari says: “Virgula… allows each feeling and thing to branch into the other, creating a phenomenological poetics. [It] is filled with moments of elation and enchantment, but without illusion or fake transcendence.” Jannsen does not run after pseudo profundity. The language of the poems is deceptively simple, allowing it to hold space for deeper meaning. In one, the poet persona says, “. . . I eat my displacement from / my own palm and a large leaf unfolds from my heart / for you”, addressing herself to Virgula. Here is the comma as a panacea, a lifeline against abandonment and loneliness. For Jack Underwood, “[this] seizes and halts as much as it compels, gathers and pitches . . . to the next gather and pitch, to the relentless harrying of life, its blurts, burps, desires and quandaries.” It is not that the feelings toward commas are unequivocal, but that:
commas sway their way to a full stop, but mine never sway
to their end
they attack me from a line of sunlight between the curtains
jostling with amusement when they latch on
the shapes are already there, but you need to find the language
to capture them in,
I long for a full stop, but my Virgulas are wary
of employing them,
I press them close as though death were breathing down my neck
as though I no longer know how to count my blessings,
Returning to Wit, Ashford, and that last line of Donne, Edson asserts: “Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life everlasting. . . With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause.” Virgula exists in that pause. It is a reclamation of life, an attempt to square oneself with existence. It would be wrong to see it as mere fatalism, or a rejection of mortality, and the poems themselves would bear this out on close reading. Janssen’s narrator does not want to be suffocated in an eternity without end. She is loath to see it move house with her. She says:
I cannot live in my poems, it’s windy, there’s a threat of hurricanes
the silence strikes the earth like a square, poppies on an embankment
tumbleweed everywhere,
I don’t want a break, no tumbling, I want to reach the end
in a single sweep, I want the means to break the chain
but I allow myself to be chased along
by the commas, my she-devils
What is most surprising is that the translator of Virgula is the same person who translated The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld; Michele Hutchison is clearly a capable channel for her authors, as there are two distinct registers operating between these books, going beyond just a simple difference in form. To render them so faithfully in English and maintain their authorial individuality takes skill, and translating Janssen would have posed especial challenges. Her use of imagery and metaphor is very circular. Motifs repeat themselves. They disappear and reappear across the pages of a collection that begins and closes with the rising wind.
So, think of it this way: one is afraid of endings, but they provide context to the journey it takes to reach them. Death’s inevitability gives the dailiness of life meaning, and vice versa. Hence, the passage of time is cyclical, circular. Movement and stagnation are strung together. They remain there, side by side, vivisected by a virgula.
Areeb Ahmad is editor-at-large for India at Asymptote and books editor at Inklette Magazine. Most of his writing can be found on his bookstagram, a true labour of love. Their reviews and essays have appeared in Scroll, The Chakkar, The Federal, Hindustan Times, and elsewhere.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: