uit: Oogsteen

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.