lament pieces
an ambiguous us is being assaulted because we were mourning because we were showing too visibly what should not be shown—loss defeat living differently banishment mourning without progress they are so afraid to lose their compass and continue to cause damage with their precautions and protective measures personally i did not feel it had to be stopped this powerful lamentation traveled through my body and entire being and unfolded into all directions patches of history and future details and images memories promises patches of communal pain and misfortune pieces of roughly knit fabric built bridges books and banners in colorful print trembling songs warmth of animals routes and stories of lives and journeys light up along the laid out insides we are open and pulsating this is real it exists i feel it folding open she insisted as long as it is not felt it will never stop she just continued to lie there like river clay after a flood like dismantled apartment buildings like conflict minerals like day-old chicks like X-rays of closed off stables like disturbed nests and houses yet not abandoned do you see them standing the banshees and keeners the wild kuune hospitable for loss and mourning eventually the congruence is healing
binding pieces
if you were to describe it then only by connecting it to something else a letter is distance yet also an intimate relation but it’s too painful you are watching a nature show to unwind but it cried in waves which now seem to have already been inside you its movement recalling another time of which the vastness does not keep you from knowing you were sitting in an enclosed basin or container the waves kept breaking and turning going nowhere and you are sitting there between walruses resting side by side on the small overcrowded island dragging their heavy bodies the arduous journey up the rocks where they get back into the sea by shuffling off an eighty-meter height then falling falling and now you see the historian on the other side of the water shuffling off her rock with wings spread wide not toward the water but toward the sky
binding pieces
around the longest day just before sunrise we are watching the luminous night clouds filled with water vapour from rocket exhaust and increased methane concentrations reflecting the sunlight high up in the atmosphere. when you begin again distant parts of what feels like your body or landscape touch each other at the tip connecting only for an instant the greeting is sombre will we see each other again? the thick tongue the stiff torso disrupts the folding needed to reach the disparate parts the long tongue oblong song
from wild death
marwin vos
translated from the Dutch by Frances Welling and Nguyễn Thị Mai
The author would like to acknowledge Egan Garr, poet and translator, for help with editing the work.
Listen to a recording of:
With these translations of poems from marwin vos’ wild death, we hope to further the work of offering her poems to an international audience. vos’ poems unwrite and rewrite contemporary political themes such as mourning, rape and the exploitation of minerals while caringly placing the marginalized front and center. Instead of mobilising a traditional political self and a cohesive narrative, vos’ poems branch out and entangle, crossing genres and languages, capturing geopolitical infrastructures and somatic turns. We expect that vos’ work will resonate with readers of poets who similarly insist on political engagement, such as Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, and Dolores Dorantes.
While translating the poems we loved most within vos’ work, we found that some sounded strange in the English language. vos’ voice is analytical, sober, and often works with a parlando style to contrast with the charged political realities she latches onto. As translators, we found that our main difficulty was in translating this particularity of the voice. The Dutch language—and poetry scene—lends itself well to this tone, and can accommodate vos’ innovative pairing of contained emotion and dedicated cataloguing of registers. However, something that sounds matter-of-fact and blunt in Dutch, might stick out as sentimental, overwrought, or even awkward in English. vos’ work resists conforming to the specific tone and cadence typically demanded by the Anglophone poetry scene, and we wanted our translations to honour her innovative voice yet simultaneously stand on their own as English poems. Editor and poet Egan Garr helped us trace and retrace the sensibility of how our translations would sound to the Anglophone ear.
The three translated poems are characterized by a lack of punctuation and subtle shifts in voice and register. The speaker’s sense of detachment is juxtaposed by exacting images. The warmth of animals, river clay after a flood, disturbed nests, and methane-laden clouds never stand on their own, as the poems strive to fix something together towards a kind of repair. In our translation, we tried to strike a balance between mirroring alliterations and sonic quality on the one hand, and semantic precision on the other. We enjoyed translating vos’ work, especially with her reading and commenting along. As non-native speakers of the English language, we perceive translation as a collaborative endeavor, a form of play, and an opportunity to delve more intricately into both English and Dutch.
While translating the poems we loved most within vos’ work, we found that some sounded strange in the English language. vos’ voice is analytical, sober, and often works with a parlando style to contrast with the charged political realities she latches onto. As translators, we found that our main difficulty was in translating this particularity of the voice. The Dutch language—and poetry scene—lends itself well to this tone, and can accommodate vos’ innovative pairing of contained emotion and dedicated cataloguing of registers. However, something that sounds matter-of-fact and blunt in Dutch, might stick out as sentimental, overwrought, or even awkward in English. vos’ work resists conforming to the specific tone and cadence typically demanded by the Anglophone poetry scene, and we wanted our translations to honour her innovative voice yet simultaneously stand on their own as English poems. Editor and poet Egan Garr helped us trace and retrace the sensibility of how our translations would sound to the Anglophone ear.
The three translated poems are characterized by a lack of punctuation and subtle shifts in voice and register. The speaker’s sense of detachment is juxtaposed by exacting images. The warmth of animals, river clay after a flood, disturbed nests, and methane-laden clouds never stand on their own, as the poems strive to fix something together towards a kind of repair. In our translation, we tried to strike a balance between mirroring alliterations and sonic quality on the one hand, and semantic precision on the other. We enjoyed translating vos’ work, especially with her reading and commenting along. As non-native speakers of the English language, we perceive translation as a collaborative endeavor, a form of play, and an opportunity to delve more intricately into both English and Dutch.
marwin vos is a poet from the Netherlands. wilde dood (wild death, 2023) is her fourth book of poetry, published by het balanseer. The collection was awarded the Grote Poëzieprijs (Great Poetry Award) 2023 and is nominated for the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Prize. Other works include het leven van sterren (the life of stars, 2019 het balanseer) and oorlogspaarden tot in de buitenwijken (war horses as far as the suburbs, 2015 Leesmagazijn). wild death explores the politics of loss, destruction and mourning. Both the pain and grief of profound loss want to exist in the world and wish to be addressed.. What does loss mean in a world focused on winning and gain? Whose death is remembered and whose death is forgotten? What if you are inconsolable? What if loss ushers in even more loss? Habitats and histories are destroyed; animals and other life forms are obliterated. The book creates a conceptual and social space to make real what is ignored: can we acknowledge that our actions lead to further destruction, death and pain, and can we look for ways to stop doing so?
Frances Welling is a poet, translator and editor from the Netherlands. She studied Russian language and culture, literary studies and translation studies at the University of Amsterdam and culture studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is an editor at DIG, a Dutch online magazine focused on digital literature.
Nguyễn Thị Mai is a poet of the Vietnamese diaspora. She studied philosophy and economics at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University. She writes poems about community, money, girl music and decolonial dreams.
