On the way home, I thought about the accumulations of our lives: the people we meet, the places we see, the possessions we acquire, the books we read, the experiences we gather. The joy but also the burden of having so much, and gathering more and more; the realisation that we can’t hold all of this in our hands, in our memories – that some good things have to be allowed to slip away into absence. Tiny, bittersweet scars.

The door of my train carriage came to a halt right in front of a poster advertising the festival: 11-18 June. It was over.

Later, back at home, I drank tea and leafed through the New York Review of Books that had been delivered in my absence. There was an essay by Charles Simic (who wrote an essay on prose poetry for Poetry International this year), a review of a novel translated by David Colmer, who translated Nyk de Vries’ poems for the festival, and a piece about festival poet C.K. Williams’ autobiography of Walt Whitman. This wasn’t reassuring simply in terms of coincidence, or of having had ‘big names’ associated with the festival; it was a reminder that texts, unlike human encounters, aren’t contained by geography or time – a poet’s non-presence doesn’t prevent us from experiencing their work. Perhaps the black hole could be mitigated a little – after a lot of sleep – through reading.

Why should this surprise me? People keep asking me about U.S. poetry—to describe it or say something about its state, which I’m reminded here is also a political word, though they mean its condition, as if it were about to be admitted to the poetry intensive care unit, or discharged with a tag on its toe. In the U.S. we’ve been announcing the death of poetry for decades.

It’s hard to believe in the death of poetry here. All these poets from everywhere are quick and curious. About the plants scooting around on little robot wheels, edging flirtatiously next to our shoes. About the town, the theater, the cheese. About each other and what poetry is like where we all come from.

If there is, for good reasons, no such thing as Afghan poetry, there is this poetry of Karman Mir Hazar’s, which comes out of place, tribe, experience, and language. Persian. The moderator, who shares in an intimate literary culture, wonders that Karman and his publisher Sam Vaseghi haven’t met before this week. I find a point of kinship.  I never met the publisher of my first book, who died this year. We corresponded by letter. The roads are good in the U.S. Still, it is 3000 miles long and 2000 miles wide and holds 300 million people.

After the session, I talk with the Dutch painter sitting across the table. I am curious, so she shows me notebooks full of whimsical, abstract drawings. At dinner, American poet Christian Hawkey—whom I had to travel to Rotterdam to meet—tells me he was a student of a dear friend, Agha Shahid Ali, who died in 2001. Of the four American poets I will sit down with on Thursday, I’ve met one before this week. But we share friends. Curiosity.  The work. A small culture in a big country.

Here we are all at once strangers and familiars. We find poetry in many languages, inspired by work from other languages, even those of painting or roving plants. And there are people to receive this poetry, all over the world.  Tonight, I’ve returned early to my hotel to see the last event with those others, on my computer on the live stream. I’m curious. In my room, waiting for things to start, I feel (almost) as much in company as I did earlier in the garden. I hear a voice talking Dutch, a harp being tuned. I see fingers on strings, graceful and disembodied in the dark, poised to speak.

My most useful information about bilingualism was drawn not from “second language acquisition” literature but from a famous Soviet spy mini-series about the adventures of the double-agent Isaev working undercover as SS officer Shtirlits in the upper echelons of the Nazi high command during the last months of WWII. Here is the scene that I have in mind. Shtirlits comes to see his Russian agent Katia, my namesake, who is also located in Berlin. It’s a very poignant moment, because she is very pregnant. “You probably understand that you’ll be delivering at home,” Shtirlits says. “Why?” she asks, her German being as good as her Russian, she cannot think of any reasons why she couldn’t go to the hospital. “My German is all right. I speak without any accent.”

“Your German is indeed all right! But when in pain you’ll be screaming in Russian, dear child!” he says with a sigh.

That’s it. And that is exactly what all of us, bilingual people, need to know. The second language as well adopted won’t be the one we’ll be screaming in when in pain.

Here’s the proof. On the third day of the Rotterdam Poetry Festival, I decided to go to see Amsterdam in the morning. I’m not a big traveler, to say the least. On the day I was a bit nervous. Having a map and two sandwiches in my bag pack I left the hotel lobby braving my way to the Central Station. It took me a while till I found it though Lucy Pijnenburg, a festival coordinator, had spent minimum an hour giving me very detailed directions. Cunningly hidden between fences, cranes, working excavators, Central Station looked extremely agitated which added to my mood. As I walked toward it, people in bright orange t-shirts, orange hats, orange wigs, orange everything poured from all entances. On their chests were orange garlands and they were blowing orange horns. “Who are these folks and why are they dressed like that?” I asked myself, as I was beating my way through the crowds. Then a strange thing happened which increased my panic. I asked a couple of passers-by to show me where a ticket booth was and found out that nobody knew what I was talking about. Orange people looked at me and shrugged shoulders. Just yesterday everything was fine. Precious time was lost, my train left, I was still there wondering what might have possibly happened during one night that made Dutch people forget English. Somebody put a garland on my neck and placed a triangular hat on my head. In my new triangular hat I went out for a smoke and boom . . . it all became clear to me. All the time I was there I was speaking Russian, no wonder nobody knew what I wanted. “So what’s going on with all these orange costumes,” I asked a woman. She groped for words: “Denmark . . . Holland . . . A soccer game!”

Here is what I think about it now. It’s not only excruciating pain but isolation too that can burn an otherwise reliable second thesaurus that we keep in our brain, leaving in its spot an orange smoke. After I underwent a ten minute loss of bilingualism I thought: “It’s great that Rotterdam Poetry Festival brings together poets from all over the world and make them talk to each other. Not always but sometimes poetry is a soccer game of its kind, and as any game it needs other players.” Anyway, I didn’t go to Amsterdam. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good day for a trip.

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

View of Rotterdam City Theatre

The days before the festival are strange. What needs to be done is done, and it’s too late for everything else. The calm before the storm. Printing out schedules, press releases, translations, speeches, timetables for drivers, arrival times of flights, technical lists. Lots of schedules.

Everything lying on my desk was put in a box with the name Bas on it and taken with the other office equipment and papers to the Rotterdam City Theatre.

Many poets are already on their way here. They’ll be flying into Rotterdam from 20 different countries and 5 different continents. They’ve got their visas with them, letters from Poetry International, their personal schedules, their books and the names of the people picking them up at the airport. They are thinking about the poets they’ll soon meet, about the city and the audience.

There is a huge contrast between the initial introductions which will take place tomorrow, and the warm parting hugs, the type of hugs you would only give to close, old friends, as everyone says goodbye at the end of the week.

A great festival awaits. In the next week, Rotterdam will host enough poetry from around the world to last an entire year. The programme is full with new events, such as a live radio play, a theatre performance, an opera and films. And I’m very much looking forward to the events centred around our two focal points: the relationship between prose and poetry, and poetry from the USA.

But what I’m looking forward to most of all are the poems that will be recited for the first time on the stages of the Poetry International Festival; to the beautiful translations that bring the most unfamiliar languages straight into the hands of the audience; to seeing poets translating each others’ work so they can share it with friends in their home countries in their own languages.

Tomorrow is the official opening of the 41st Poetry International Festival: let the poetry begin.

Eugenijus Alisanka, Hassan El Ouazzani, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi and Nyk de Vries in Rotterdam

Today I decided to write about two events which I was involved in last week, two events important to me. At first glance they are not connected to each other, but I am connected to both. At least both of them have became objects of my poetic interest.

The first one – my trip to Rotterdam. On Sunday I took part in the Dunya festival which, I was told, gave birth to Rotterdam Poetry International years ago. Now, Dunya is not a literary festival anymore, it is a musical one, so there is only one poetical event on the schedule. The festival takes place in the Rotterdam city park, with tents scattered across the entire area. Music thunders from all sides, energetic Latin, African and other beats, and I can hardly imagine how and where our poetry will fit in. The festival lasts just one day, and it rains that day every year, as organisers tell me. There were attempts to change the date of the event, but in vain – the festival is doomed to be soaked in rain. This Sunday too – spurts of wind turn into gusts of rain. It clears in the evening, and more people flow into the park. But most of them never reach the poetry reading – H. Hesse’s idea about music as a high art is borne out. In the tent of the Poetry park Cuban musicians play, they ignite the full hall, they perform an encore, they take away time from the poets’s slot, the organisers get worried. After the concert, the hall empties, and it is frightful to go to the mike and to read to thin air, to those empty benches which still vibrate with Caribbean spirit.

And a surprise – voices of poets successfully fill all those empty places. There is nothing missing anymore. I believe in poetry again. And I recall how I was climbing once from the bed of the Colorado River uphill along canyons right before the sunset and came across the voice of a lonely flute. It had no audience, its voice rolled over stones and precipices, it echoed from caves and passes. I was an accidental spectator. The veriest one.

The second event – the evening in Zabarija village, at my country-house on Thursday. The dark cloud is approaching, green meadows are suddenly enlightened by incredible yellowness even though the sun is absent, a strange fiesta of colours. And suddenly gusts of wind descend upon the landscape, tearing trees. Bean-sized hail spills out of black cloud. The sky is slashed by lightning, wildfire like crazy. I see rapidly flowing fields, the dirt road turns into a roaring river. Maybe for the first time in my life I am scared of nature: I do not dare even to leave the house. And I am flooded with the wave of an unhuman beauty. Tremendum et fascinance. Nature performs one of its celestial oratorios. I am an accidental spectator. The veriest one.

I have tried to put poetical clothes on both events. But the most striking thing is that both poems I’ve written do not even hint at the stuff mentioned above. Both poems are like preludes to these events. In the first one I talk about the canals of Rotterdam, about the cruise ship, the biggest in the world, docked here, about my transit mood, about the world port centre. In the second one the action takes place before the rain, right before the rain. Why don’t these poems centre on the main events, as might be natural given my prosaic talk above? Maybe here one can find the aim of poetry – to be a prelude, a prolegomenon to the texts of life?

Read more about and by Eugenijus Alisanka on Poetry International Web.