Poets: Hasso Krull (Estonia), Nyk de Vries (Friesland, The Netherlands), and Kim Hyesoon (South Korea)

First up is Hasso Krull, a poet from Estonia who looks a lot younger than his 45 years. His poems appear fresh and accessible, but after each poem he reads, I’m left wondering for a few seconds what has just happened. Krull just showed me how holes are everywhere, that they in fact make up everything we see or do: is the whole of our existence actually build on holes? And when, in another poem, he just described that there’s always something alive in the water, little seeds or bugs, or some pollen, even if it’s water from the purest source, I end up unsure about whether that’s a good or a bad thing. It’s the calm, seemingly sincere way he reads his work, even when his thoughts have gone astray for a few lines already, that keeps creeping around in my own head long after he’s finished. The cosmic and the comic are blended to reveal how life is – as Eels put it – ‘funny, but not ha ha funny’.

After some twenty minutes, it’s Nyk de Vries’s turn. The Frisian/Dutch poet and musician, born in 1971, is introduced as a master of ‘the unexpected twist’, and that’s exactly right. His short prose poems, mostly consisting of less than 120 words (De Vries: ‘Well, none of them ever reaches 170. Unless it really is a damn good one’), aren’t nonsensical at all, but they do plunge you into the weirdest situations, uncertain of how you just got there, and how you’ll ever get out again.

I really liked De Vries’s Dutch debut collection Motorman, which appeared three years ago, but had never got the chance to see him read before now, even though he has performed on some major Dutch stages over the last couple of years. After tonight, I’ll be sure to try harder next time, because his show – accompanied by his high school friend Fokke van der Veen on guitar and a number of samples – really rocks. The short tales are buoyed by the music, the sounds adding an extra tension to De Vries’s already unsettling little universes, without messing with any of the words. The best example is the poem ‘Carnaval’ (Carnival): a young woman’s recorded voice reads in Dutch, while the poet reads them in Frisian, leading to a bilingual duet, of which the English translation can be read on the screen above the stage.

No additional instruments or samples with the last poet for tonight, Kim Hyesoon (1955) from South Korea. But there’s a strong musicality in her words, at least in how they sound to me, because of course I don’t understand a word of what she says in her own language. Simultaneously reading the Dutch and English translations on the big screen, it’s funny to watch some of the differences between the two. In ‘Another Titanic’ for example, one line in Dutch translation reads: ‘ik zou als een slang rijst eten en mijn mond afvegen,/ antwoordde ik’ (literally: I’d eat rice like a snake and wipe my mouth,/ I answered’), while the English states: ‘I’d eat, wipe my mouth, and slip out like a snake,/ I answered’.

In both languages though, these hallucinating poems seem to focus on identity and physical coherence, and the the loss of both. Hyesoon shows us how things and bodies could fit together, how they can fall apart, how they’re able to end up as other things or bodies, in new and yet again unstable forms. When Hyesoon has stopped reading, I leave the auditorium pondering on ‘How painful the light must be for the night’.

After over an hour with these three magnificent poets, it’s definitely time for some small talk and a beer at the bar. I’ll just try not to think about the amount of pollen, seeds and little bugs in it . . .

Early in the evening I spoke to a young American poet who told me he had once applied for a job as a copywriter at a publishing house: a position in which you fill your days writing the back cover of book jackets. We all know those texts, written along established lines. On the back cover of the Dutch translation of the short story collection My Father’s Tears by John Updike, there’s one of those texts written by Joost Zwagerman. Four lines praising Updike’s talents. This is good, this as it should be - but on Sunday evening Joost Zwagerman showed us the difference between the cliché and a more heartfelt, a more passionate piece of praise. Besides being a poet and a writer, Zwagerman is also a gripping speaker, and as such he delivered an electrifying speech on his love for John Updike. It was a pleasure a) being there and basking in his love for Updike, b) getting my first copy of the translation from him, and c) getting the chance to read a fragment from one of those brilliant stories. To me, poor lonesome translator, it was a blissful Sunday evening, if ever there was one!

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!

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.