All day I’ve wandered around the complex and perfectly beautiful foyers of Rotterdam’s City Theatre, the home of Poetry International 2010. We poets, a happy few, are contented with the day’s work. We have also scored a series of little victories in the first round of our Translation challenge. We’ve succeeded in translating three of the poems of Tomas Lieske. Admittedly, we’ve been spoon-fed with brilliant literal translations. All morning we circled around the Present Continuous verb “Ontdekken’’ as in “Ontdekken Dat Je Te Laat Bent” or “Discover (Discovering) That You Are Too Late”—or the title “Kompel” that may mean “Cobbler” or “Coal-miner” depending on whether you are digging into the linguistic heritage of Southern Ireland or Southern Holland. Tomorrow we must work on the texts again. One of my fellow translators, the poet Patrick Cotter, is running well ahead of the pack, but we will catch up with him before the week is out.

It is a day of hidden foyers. Sometimes you come upon a foyer with books, or a foyer with food, or a foyer with a busy bank of Festival interns, all beavering away, answering phones, checking checklists. It is a world of hidden efficiencies, of quiet Dutch perfections. Around the table next to us, in our large hidden foyer, is a group of poets at work on the texts of the sublime Carlos Lopez Degregori of Peru. I remember the first time I saw his poems on the Poetry International web. I was bowled over by their reticence, their humane quality, their astonishing sensitivity. These texts alone prove that translation can work. Some quality of the poetry does survive the translation. We will continue at our dissecting tables: word-surgeons at work, saving organs of phrases and adjectives for a foreign body of words.

Last night was a night of prose-poetry, of poetry and prose, of poetry with its hyphenated life. Hassan El Ouazzani and I read our poetry to a fine audience in the main auditorium of the City Theatre. Ireland’s Ambassador to the Netherlands, Mary Whelan, along with her husband, and the Embassy Attaché in the Hague came down to hear us read. Afterwards we had a mighty chat about politics and culture. Among the Irish in the audience, also, was Lucy Cotter, daughter of the lately deceased poet, Bonnie Quinn Cotter. It was lovely to see her. For an Irish poet it was a personal moment.

We have oscillated between poetry and prose. We have been to the precarious ledge of prose-poetry, Hassan and I; we have been to the edge and not toppled over. Prose-poetry is for outlaws, for outsiders, for those who have endured extremes of politics and culture. Prose-poetry describes a hinterland of being. It began with the French, of course, with Bertrand and Baudelaire, and continued with Rimbaud. But even in the Irish tradition, which is so overwhelmed with songs and lyrics, prose-poetry breaks through in James Joyce and Beckett. It is all of Finnegan’s Wake and a good part of Ulysses. It is everywhere in Beckett, in Molloy, Watt, Waiting for Godot. Godot, a poetry of theatre, with its gestures, silences, timing, choreography, with its worn-down and weary opinion, is prose-poetry. After all, it is Vladimir who turns to Estragon and says, ‘you should have been a poet.’

Prose-poetry is now strongest in the American language, I think. I think (it is nearly midnight and I am doing my best). Prose-poetry is action through reflection. Competent Americans like John Ashbery and Charles Simić have turned it into a kind of guerrilla warfare against anthologies and canons. Prose-poetry invites you in. You don’t need a dinner-jacket. Come right it as you are. It is a summer night. It is Rotterdam.

Thomas McCarthy (c) Michele Hutchison, Poetry International festival 2010

I found his poetry exciting. His subject matter sometimes took me to places I had rarely been: Egyptology, for example, in ‘Complaint of a Shrewmouse (Mummified)’. Most of the poems selected were quite intimate, concerning familial relationships and love. However, the viewpoint of his characters often proves startling (the shrewmouse v. the falcon) or puzzling (‘Caravan of Salt’) if you are not aware of the poet’s thinking behind it. However, even he could not always provide adequate assistance when I queried his work. It is an example of further research that I wish to discuss here, on this forum provided by the Poetry International team.

It concerns a term used in the short prose extract from his novel Gran Café Boulevard. ‘Sprotbuiker’ is a nickname used to describe someone from Roelofarendsveen, Lieske told me, but he didn’t know where the term originated. So I asked some fellow translators what to do with it. One said to leave it out altogether, another to translate it literally, and another still to substitute it with a nickname of my own making. All agreed that ‘sprot’ meant ‘sprat’, a fish used as bait to catch mackerel. As the town is close to water, that would corroborate that theory. ‘Spratbelly’ would then be an adequate translation. Someone with his belly full of sprat. But, as a translator, I am not easily convinced, so I tapped other sources. I telephoned the local council and they knew of a local historian who could probably tell me more. And it transpired ‘sprot’ had nothing to do with fish, but with French beans, cultivated for centuries in that particular area. Farmers were usually left with an unsold surplus after auction, which instead of destroying, they ate themselves. So, while the ‘sprot’ might not be fish, the farmer and his family still had a bellyful. My sincere gratitude to the local historian, Mr Gerard van der Meer.

Although the word was now explained, this still left me with a translation problem: spratbelly, beanbelly, French beanbelly, whatever the choice would be, it would remain an alien term, as it couldn’t be sourced to a specific locale as was the case in Dutch. So, were the other translators right? Should I have abstained from my amateur sleuthing exercise and chosen a simple, even literal translation instead?

Conferring with the translations editor, we agreed on ‘potbellied’, as that referred to the bellyful without getting into the problems caused by connotations not being easily transferable into an English context.

I’ll be present at the festival all week, sitting in on Lieske’s translation project, so please don’t hesitate to tell me what you think of this solution!

But ultimately the wider world of the 1980s did not have space in its consciousness for Irish poets not embroiled in the Northern Ireland conflict. McCarthy hailed from the serene, sedate fields of Ireland’s southernmost province of Munster and his poetic discourse is primarily one of a serene and sedate sensibility. Extremes of verbal music-making or contortions of form are not the markings of a McCarthy poem. The subject matter varies from the intimacies of family tragedy to the inner workings of a political party, to biographical portraits of writers and others in verse, to rigorous examinations of history and the pathways by which it has led us all to the present.

There is a richness of language to McCarthy’s poetry but rather than stemming from experiment it emerges out of McCarthy’s own vigorous emotional and intellectual engagement with the world. The elegance and sensibleness of his language are organic and integral aspects of his mode of thought – a careful, quiet, contemplative thought flavoured with rich emotional involvement.

All of these qualities are not only evident on the page with McCarthy but also in conversation with him. A McCarthy poetry reading is a riveting experience.

Thomas McCarthy will be reading along with Hassan El Ouazzani (Morocco) at 8pm on Sunday 13 June 2010 in the main auditorium of the Rotterdam City Theatre, in an event about the relationship between poetry and prose.

Patrick Cotter is the editor of the Ireland domain of Poetry International Web.

My name is Nyk de Vries, and I’m one of the poets at the festival. Yesterday I practiced one more time with guitarist Fokke van der Veen for our performance at the opening of the festival this upcoming Saturday.

I’ve known Fokke since high school, where we first met. We started making music together, but after about ten years I found English too restrictive to sing in, since it is not my native language. The band stopped and I started writing prose in Dutch and Frisian, the language of Friesland, a province in the Northern part of Holland. From then on I wrote two novels, and a collection of prose poems. This flash fiction, as some call it, more or less unintentionally arose, as some sort of remnant, small sketches with a life of their own that I didn’t manage to fit into my longer prose. Slowly it came more and more to the centre of my work, in any case in terms of live performance.

Over the years I continued making music, with different groups, though not as a vocalist. Not so long ago, I started combining my prose poems with music. I’d like to refer in this case to the short-story songs of Tom Waits. At the moment I’m working on an album to be released on the Excelsior label at the end of this year. I asked Fokke to collaborate, and it feels like things from different parts of my life are starting to come together: the beat and atmosphere of the early band experience, combined with the content of writing.

Though we have occasionally played live together, we’ve never done so at an event like Poetry International. I’m very much looking forward to the festival.

In the Old Irish Sagas, in the Fenian cycle of tales, the boy Fionn eats the flesh of the Salmon of Knowledge as he turns the fish on a spit by the River Boyne. The salmon had eaten nuts that fell from the Tree of Knowledge into the rivers of Ireland. The salmon was owned by the Wizard but the boy burns the flesh of the fish and touches its burned flesh with his finger, accidentally becoming the first to taste the Salmon of Knowledge and therefore becoming the wisest man in Ireland. Later, Fionn, the boy, grows up to become a great warrior and a great hunter. One day his companions asked him (him being wise) what was the most beautiful sound in the world: the others thought it must be the sound of a stag hunt or of a maiden in the act of love. Fionn said ‘No, the most beautiful sound in the world is the music of what happens.’ And so it is with poetry. It is both an accident and a preparation, a thing made that is both fortuitous and well planned. It is both the Knowledge and the Fish. It is wisdom without flesh, it is the hunt without any killing. It is both the moment that passes unconsciously and the accrual of wisdom over time.

Like the boy Fionn who tastes the burned flesh of a salmon, the poet also tastes the flesh of things, innocent with life and full of hope for poetry. The making of a poem begins and ends in hope. It is the hope that time stands still, that something may come out of nothing. The poet is at the centre of this making, the poet is the flesh around which the ideas accrue. At the heart of creativity the poet is not ‘for something’ in the political sense – the language as it is made to stand upright in a poem is not a banner only, but a limb, a part of life. What a poet does with that life is entirely a ‘social’ decision, never a literary one.

Therefore, we ask the questions ‘What is poetry? What is prose?’ each time we unburden ourselves, each time we make signs in language. Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago asks this question repeatedly in his Christ-like love quest, the poet Gottfried Benn asks this question repeatedly as he journeys from cadavers and syphilitic patients into the late prose meditations on wisdom in old age. The French ask this question repeatedly as they tumble and cartwheel in prose poems across the disputed territories of European poetry, from Baudelaire to Jacques Reda. Language asks this question repeatedly, as ideas pour through it, as the colour of saying things (and the weight of feeling things) fills us with a personal urgency to be understood.

There is some part of poetry that seems to belong to prose. In a very early book of mine, The Sorrow Garden, a memory recaptured became a chunk of prose-poetry. Later, in Merchant Prince, the compelling and urgent information blossomed into an entire novella at the centre of the poetry collection. In my latest book, The Last Geraldine Officer, the prose-poetry is scattered in a patchwork of history, the history of an imagined Anglo-Irish poet, Colonel Gerald FitzGerald. The information is urgent between lyrics, it is fractured and threatened like any poetry at war. It is not that there is a technical difference here, a collapse of prosody, but history releases itself at a different pace. History demands a different poet, a poet beyond my capacity to create lyrics. Here, history swarms around the desk where I’m writing. This happens with every Irish poet. We are young boys at a riverbank, eating wise salmon.

Read more about Thomas McCarthy on www.poetry.nl and www.poetryinternational.org.

In the weeks leading up to the festival we’ll be introducing you to this year’s guest poets via this blog and giving you a taste of what’s to come in June. And throughout the week of 11-18 June itself we will be covering the festival with diaries, interviews and recordings.

We can now reveal a list of guest poets to this year’s festival:

Eugenijus Ališanka Lithuania

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi Sudan

Ursula Andkjær Olsen Denmark

Jon Fosse Norway

António Gamoneda Spain

Christian Hawkey USA

Hiromi Itō Japan

Lêdo Ivo Brazil

Katia Kapovich Russia / USA

Kim Hyesoon South Korea

Marc Kregting The Netherlands

Hasso Krull Estonia

Tomas Lieske The Netherlands

Ewa Lipska Poland

Carlos López Degregori Peru

Thomas McCarthy Ireland

Kamran Mir Hazar Afghanistan

Hassan El Ouazzani Morocco

Michael Palmer USA

Valérie Rouzeau France

Erik Spinoy Belgium

Nyk de Vries The Netherlands (Friesland)

C.K. Williams USA

Ron Winkler Germany

From early May you’ll find information in English about the festival events and guest poets via www.poetry.nl.