Gerrit Kouwenaar 
Translated by David Colmer

from ‘Three Epic Songs’


third song

The day before the armistice our almighty father-
​major sent me and six others out into the dead
of night to the enemy who was as good
as defeated 


seven scouts on the border
of almost everything: war flesh life, walking
through fog into an ambush: I alone
spared as if by miracle


they were buried on the spot
among them my inseparable mate
from four years’ trenches


six months later, spring by then, I was studying
human biology in the city, drinking ale, scoffing
steaks ladies, his father came
and said: you 
are still alive, you
were his mate, you
know where he is buried, so help me
dig him up, against the law of course, but he 
belongs at home with us, in the garden


well, what else could I do, I did it, I dug
him up with his father, worked him out
from his tag, he was
falling apart, a soft lukewarm mass, my hand
shot wrist-deep into his body, shocked
by the substance giving way
to an outrageous hole


after the funeral, illicit in his own earth, I sat
in their living room with mother father sister, sipping
a shot of tears, talking
around the portrait of him as a boy


I said: we were walking together hunched over, speaking
in hushed voices of better and later, smoking
a shared belga, neither of us scenting
danger / he was
a brave soldier, dutiful
but not without dignity, he loved
mozart wagner his country, listened
when the trees rustled / I did not
deviate too far from the truth of him, omitting
only the unsayable the lice the whores and how
we went at it like butchers


ah, it was spring, in the garden
where we had buried him the plane tree
rustled, the tree that grows hands, there was
a sense of something complete, something
finally finished, the moon too
seemed new, and his fleshly sister hung
on my lips, late april and trapped
in a cramped body, the red currant
stank of the earth, and my hand touched
her breasts, my hand


touched her breasts and it was
the same soft lukewarm mass, the same
soft lukewarm mass, the same substance but
the same, and it was
this same hand, this



never have I

Never have I striven for anything other than this:
making stone soft
making fire from water
making rain from thirst


meanwhile the cold was biting
the sun was a day full of wasps
the bread was sweet or salty
and the night as black as it by rights should be
or white with ignorance


sometimes I confused myself with my shadow
just as one can confuse the word with the word
the carcass with the body
often day and night were of the same colour
and tearless, and deaf


but never anything other than this:
making stone soft
making fire from water
making rain from thirst


it is raining I drink I am thirsty.

​

Gerrit Kouwenaar (1923-2014) first published in underground newspapers during the German occupation and came to prominence as one of the Vijftigers (the ‘Fifties Poets’, an experimental Dutch and Flemish literary movement of the 1950s, related to Cobra). His initially personal and social poetry developed towards abstraction and hermeticism, before becoming more clearly autobiographical again later in his life. His work has been translated into many languages.




The originals of ‘never have I’ and ‘third song’ are in vallende stilte, een keuze uit eigen werk, Querido, Amsterdam, 2008.

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