Cees Nooteboom (The Netherlands)
1933
Born in The Hague in 1933, Cees Nooteboom was educated in monastery schools in the southern part of The Netherlands. He now lives in Amsterdam, but spends much of the year in Spain and in travel, recently in Australia and Japan.
Although perhaps better known as a novelist and travel writer, poetry is at the core of Nooteboom's oeuvre. His first book, De doden zoeken een huis (1956), contains many of the themes he was to explore throughout his prolific career, including issues relating to time and death. Over the years—despite a pause in his poetic writing from 1964 to 1978—his poetry has grown stronger and more complex. The publication of his collected poetry, Vuurtijd, ijstijd: Gedichten, 1955-1983 in 1984, revealed a poet of intensely sober observation. His first English language collection, The Captain of the Butterflies, was published by Sun & Moon Press in 1997.
Over the years Nooteboom has won many awards including the Constantijn Huygens Prize (1992), the Aristeion Prize (1993), the Goethe Prize (2002), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2002), the P. C. Hooft Award (2004), the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren (2009), and the Prix Formentor (2020).
BOOKS OF POETRY
De doden zoeben een huis (Amsterdam: Querido, 1956); Koude gedichten (Amsterdam: Querido, 1959); Het zwarte gedicht (Amsterdam: Querido, 1960); Gesloten gedichten (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1964); Aanwezig, Atwezig(Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1970); Open als een schelp, dicht als een steen: Gedichten (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1978); Aas: Gedichten(Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1982); Vuurtijd, ijstijd: Gedichtedn, 1955-1983(Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1984); Zo kon het zijn (Amsterdam: Atlas, 1999); Bitterzoet, honderd gedichten van vroeger en zeventien nieuwe (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 2000); De slapended goden / Sueños y otras mentiras (with lithographs by Jürgen Partenheimer) (2005)
ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS
The Captain of the Butterflies, translated by Leonard Nathan and Herlilnde Spahr (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997)
The Sealed Riders
Hole in the dark
they named the light of moon
and with their hands disfigured by it
they wanted its measure
and became a new movement
an army of rags and veiled faces
hidden in crowns and coats
on horses of human flesh.
They did not bear names
other than their own
some years they are invisible
eyes mouths ears all sealed
there'll be no end to this procession
I see them, see them
and burn.
—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr
(from Aanwezig, Atwizig, 1970)
Abschied
Not for someone else
this foolishness,
but for you.
When the high-rise is gone, when this is a plain,
and you a statue, self-raised,
and I touch you,
When all things suffer like me,
nailed down with sorrow, when to know nothing
is to snake like a fungus through tissue
you stand still, silvered, splattered, the eastwind vagrant
around you, and around me,
I made a disaster out of the ordinary.
I'll forget everything about you, except you.
You rage through the space I occupy,
your live is fate.
Through your likeness I see the longing
from which we were expelled. I had offered everything,
you had refused everything. You had offered everything,
I did not see it.
Quiet now.
Death is a male disease.
You go around and gather up life
Now quiet.
—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr
(from Aas, 1982)
Grail
Remember the time
that we were searching for something,
something quite precise,
a concept, paraphrase, definition,
a theme, thesis, supposition.
a summa of what we did not know,
something we wished
to assume or measure or tally
between all things obscure?
You know, don't you know
how we always wandered off, dividing
the concept and the quest,
Augustine the brothels, Albert the numbers,
Jorge the mirrors, Immanuel home, Pablo the forms,
Wolfgang the colors,
Teresa, Blaise, Friedrich, Leonardo, Augustus,
always tallying and measuring between words and notes, thinking
among nuns, soldiers and poets,
breaking, looking, splitting,
till the bones, the shadow,
a glimmer, a narrowing down
in senses or images,
until in a glass or a number
but always so briefly
a hiccup of a thought, of a way,
so endlessly vague became visible?
—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr
(from Aas, 1982)
Cartography
for Cristina Barroso
I
Only the bird sees what I see,
the impassable ways in my hand,
a golden and ash-colored beauty,
the surprising accident
of a world drawn only once,
a though construed of matter,
a painting missing its painter,
my secret universe.
Oceans, steppes, volcanoes, the humming
of their names from always younger mouths.
My making hand follows their forms,
vein, chasm, slope, ravine,
the hidden lines of strata and ore,
diary of desert, of wilderness, of mirroring sea,
that which I am.
II
Ice age, star time,
my past exists in locked-up images,
called out by fire and water,
a registry of resin and sand.
That is how I show myself,
how I hide myself
in ciphers of height and depth,
layers of color
on an atlas as big as the world.
III
Measure, says the book of maps.
Measure, given.
Measure, real
But given by whom?
Real for whom?
The tiny plane hovering above the shoreline,
shadow of phoenician sails,
constellations, plumb line, calipers, ink,
the slow page from Trabo,
the prows of Aeneas, Odysseus,
or how the sea changes to paper,
the waves into words,
the exactilng task of shrinking,
the art of meter and time.
IV
The inner spectacle
piles question upon question.
Were the dogs visible on the spit of land?
The death of flies poison of the flowers,
the track of the enemy,
the surveyor in his hotel?
Who followed the train with future dead,
measured the slowness of the way?
Fate is not set down on maps.
Fate is all ours.
Grids, shading, scale, the constraint
of coordinates, words of magic
for the world as a thing.
But I go with my living earth
of rivers and marshes, bends and willows,
which I compose in my image.
When I retrace them I leave my seal,
a map painted
of soul.
—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr
(from Zo kon het zijn, 1999)
Mail
But then, are your ideas so clear
the mailman asked. Just at that moment
the sky darkened,
but that was another matter,
things around here happen that way,
from one moment to the next.
That means rain, he said, and it did.
Big drops. Behind him I could see the bay,
a plane leaden in the clouds,
slow. It landed.
Where do such seconds go?
How much rustling can be missed?
Which conversations cannot be
pulverized against the time-wall, in a lapse
of memory, somewhere at the bottom
of a dream?
Fiction, a house on a hill,
the psalm of rain, page six,
mailman, descent, downward path
into oblivion,
his, mine,
that fat of time
as someone might turn a page
without having read,
all written
for nothing.
—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr
(from Zo kon ket zijn, 1999)
Harbolorifa
So many forms of existence? So many creatures
to suffer and laugh in these stony hills!
The figtree is bent toward the south,
above us the soft snoring of a plane.
My friend is waiting near a bush with sharp thorns.
He knows the story of his fate,
we see the glitter of the sea
among gallnuts and thistles, a sail in the distance.
Everything sleeps. give me some other life and I won't take it.
Shells and crickets, my cup is full of eternal noon.
The stream I drank from yesterday was cool and clear.
I saw the laurel tree's reflection. I saw the shadow
of the leaves drifty away across the bottom
This was all I ever wanted. Harbalorifa!
My age hangs on a thread. So I am the spider
above the path, weaving its polygonal time
—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr
(from Zo kon het zijn, 1999)
PERMISSIONS
"Mail,""Harbalorifa,""The Sealed Riders,""Abschied,""Cartography," and "Grail"
Reprinted from The Captain of the Butterflies, trans. by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997). English language translation ©1997 by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr. Reprinted by permission of Sun & Moon Press.