Excerpt from I Dreamed in the Cities at Night

CremaCompert

I Dreamed in the Cities at Night

TranslaTed by DonalD GarDner
InTroduced by paul vinCent

Visible Poets 18



I Dreamed in the Cities at Night

Steden bij avond

1

2

Remco Campert
I Dreamed in the

Cities at Night

Steden bij avond



Translated by
Donald Gardner
Introduced by Paul Vincent

2007
3

Published by Arc Publications,
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK
www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Remco Campert / De Bezige Bij 2007
Translation copyright © Donald Gardner 2007

Translator’s Preface copyright © Donald Gardner 2007
Introduction copyright © Paul Vincent 2007

Design by Tony Ward
Printed by Lightning Source

ISBN-13: 978 1904614 36 4

‘Light Years’ appeared in Cleo Campert’s Uit, a photo
book of the Amsterdam club scene, (Amsterdam: De
Verbeelding Publishers, 2002); ’The Remains of Moto
Mosoro’s Glasses after Hiroshima’ appeared in The Fourth
Wall, (Amsterdam: Fragment Publishers, 1991). It was
also included in a poster in an exhibition about Remco
Campert in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and was
published again in the arts quarterly International Gallerie,
(Mumbai, Spring, 1998). ‘Thinking of Jacques Prévert
and Joseph Kosma’, ‘Invisible’ and ‘Street Theatre’ were
published in Ambit 181 (Summer, 2005).

Cover photograph: ‘Las Vegas’ (1980)
© Bilderberg. Photo: Eberhard Grames

The publishers are grateful for financial support from
the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch
Literature which has made the publication of this book possible.

The publishers also gratefully acknowledge financial assistance
from the Arts Council of England, Yorkshire.

Arc Publications: ‘Visible Poets’ series
Editor: Jean Boase-Beier

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Contents

Translator’s Preface / 8
Introduction / 12

18 / Huis op de Weteringschans • My Mother’s House / 19
20 / Vergane dagen • Faded Days / 21
22 / Stad • City / 23
24 / Reis • Journey / 25
24 / Verloren partij • Lost Cause / 25
26 / Zeventien schetsen • Seventeen Sketches / 27
38 / Hotel • Hotel / 39
40 / Terug in de stad • Back in Town / 41
42 / Licht • Light / 43
44 / Chanson triste (1955) • Chanson Triste (1955) / 45
46 / De eerste keer • The First Time / 47
50 / Gemompel • Mumblings / 51
54 / Gebrek aan bewijs • Lack of Proof / 55
56 / Hooi • Hay / 57
58 / Boerin in Noord Frankrijk • Farmer’s Wife in Northern
France / 59
60 / Op mijn 72ste • Now I am Seventy-Two / 61
62 / Lichtjaren • Light Years / 63
64 / Bij wat er overbleef van • The Remains of Moto
Moto Mosoro’s bril gevonden in Mosoro’s Glasses after
Hiroshima Hiroshima / 65
68 / Denkend aan Jacques • Thinking of Jacques Prévert
Prévert en Joseph Kosma and Joseph Kosma / 69
72 / Steden bij avond • I Dreamed in the Cities at
Night / 73
76 / Slak • Snail / 77
76 / In het donker • In the Dark / 77
78 / Straattheater • Street Theatre / 79
80 / Ciudad • Ciudad / 81
82 / Onzichtbaar • Invisible / 83
86 / Brief die is blijven liggen • Unsent Letter / 87
90 / Januari 1943 • January 1943 / 91
94 / Jaloezie • Jealousy / 95
98 / Misselijk! • Sickening! / 99


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100 / Als twee witte schepen • Like Two White Sailing
Ships / 101
102 / Bij Livorno • Livorno / 103
104 / Gemompel • Mumblings / 105
106 / Huis in Antwerpen • House in Antwerp / 107
108 / Vorm • Form / 109
110 / De witte roos • The White Rose / 111
110 / Junk • Junkie / 111
112 / Ode aan mijn jas • Ode to my Coat / 113
120 / Tekenlerares • Art Teacher / 121
122 / Voorlopig gedicht voor • Provisional Poem for
Jan Wolkers Jan Wolkers / 123
128 / Lamento • Lament / 129

Biographical Notes / 133

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Series Editor’s Note

There is a prevailing view of translated poetry, especially in
England, which maintains that it should read as though it had
originally been written in English. The books in the ‘Visible Poets’
series aim to challenge that view. They assume that the reader
of poetry is by definition someone who wants to experience the
strange, the unusual, the new, the foreign, someone who delights
in the stretching and distortion of language which makes any
poetry, translated or not, alive and distinctive. The translators of
the poets in this series aim not to hide but to reveal the original, to
make it visible and, in so doing, to render visible the translator’s
task too. The reader is invited not only to experience the unique
fusion of the creative talents of poet and translator embodied in
the English poems in these collections, but also to speculate on
the processes of their creation and so to gain a deeper under-
standing and enjoyment of both original and translated poems.

Jean Boase-Beier

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Translator’s Preface

Translating poetry is something that has traditionally been
part of the poet’s work. Sometimes it is a way of jump-starting
our own writing; sometimes it is a form of study or close reading,
a way of absorbing an influence. No one commissioned me to
translate Campert’s poetry. It was a free appointment I had with
Campert himself. This was a poetry I related to and wanted to
learn from. I heard echoes of other poetry in it that I loved and
admired. I liked its jaunty pessimism. I was attracted by the ten-
sion between the romantic, often sexual energy of this poetry, and
the off-hand cynicism, wit and irony. There was a conversational
tone that I saw it as a challenge to capture in English. I liked the
phrases that end in sand as it were or lose track of themselves,
leaving the reader to fill in what is missing. Campert’s laconic
lines felt like a very European kind of free verse, with concision
shaping the form. It is a poetry that draws the reader into it, so
that one is seduced and lost before one realizes it.

It is a popular cliché that you have to be a poet to translate
poetry. In reality poet-translators often impose their own ambi-
tions on their translations and make something quite misleading
– a version or improvisation, not a translation. The opposite of
the ‘free version’, however – a literal adherence to the original
text – can be equally disappointing. A truly literal translation
will also literally have to be a poem as well.

I don’t have any theory of translation. My only guideline has
been to produce a ‘twin’ of the original text while making some-
thing that reads like a poem in the target language – an impos-
sible, often contradictory task. The immediate, basic problem lies
in the nature of poetry itself – that it is language that doesn’t stay
still, that is Protean, that is always alluding to something more
than itself. One has to pack as much as possible of the density
of the original into one’s translation, without the result looking
like a superior crossword puzzle.

At one level Remco Campert’s poetry is deceptively straight-
forward; it is not hermetic, even if there is a degree of abstraction
in his more recent work. It means what it says, one would think.
What has represented a singular challenge has been his recurrent
play with everyday speech. A basic technique of his is to take
those everyday expressions that we use without thinking and to

8

place them in a quite different context, as if holding them up
for inspection or to reveal their strangeness. A literal translation
obviously won’t do, but a colloquial equivalent is also all too
likely to be so much at a tangent to the original as to send the
whole poem off in the wrong direction.

The close reader wearing bilingual spectacles will notice some
differences between the English and original Dutch texts. This
is partly because the Dutch is the text as it was published and
I have sometimes omitted local references that would stand in
the way of the English-speaking reader enjoying the poem as
poem. Also I have occasionally altered a line or left a couple of
lines out, after discussing it with Campert, because the result
was a better poem. More importantly, there are moments when
translating too literally would actually have meant a mistransla-
tion. A simple example here is the poem ‘I Dreamed in the Cities
at Night’. I have translated the Dutch word ‘avond’ as ‘night’,
instead of ‘evening’. The Dutch commonly use ‘avond’ simply to
mean the time after nightfall, rather than just the evening. ‘Night’
made more sense in English than ‘evening’. The one time in this
poem that I have used ‘evening’ instead of ‘night’ is one where
the reference is specifically to the evening hours.

Another example is these lines from ‘Invisible’: ‘…and with
my sweetheart / who so as not to be on the safe side / arrived
after all.’ The Dutch reads: ‘en met mijn geliefde / die voor het
zekere het onzekere nam / en kwam.’ Campert takes the banal
Dutch saw of ‘taking the certain for the uncertain’ – a bird in the
hand being worth two in the bush – and reverses it. The literal
translation – ‘who took uncertainty for certainty’ – would have
taken all the spice out of Campert’s brilliant closing lines. I would
argue for a faithful rather than a literal translation and suggest
that my invention conveys the humour of Campert’s text, while
at the same time it is an objective equivalent of the original. This
seems to me the essence of poetic translation.

The real question however for me as translator has not been
the ‘how’ of the work, but the why. Why Campert? There are two
answers here. Firstly there was my personal motivation that I
described at the start of this preface, that of my love affair with his
work. Then there is the more objective one of the ‘importance’ of

9

Campert’s poetry, his place in the universe of poetry – in other
words, why English-speaking readers should no longer be kept
in ignorance of his work.

Poets who write in a language that is not a major one are less
likely to be translated than others of similar stature in, say, France
or Latin America. For the Dutch, it is a stock joke to speak of a
writer as being ‘world-famous in Holland’. While the marvellous
flowering of poetry in the 1960s in Eastern Europe made its way
into English versions in part at least for extra-poetic reasons, there
has never been any reason outside the interest of the poetry itself
to foster any widespread activity of translating Dutch or Flemish
poetry. Campert has, in my view, been unlucky at least in part
for this reason, remaining little known in the English-speaking
world. Rapp and Whiting published a book of Campert transla-
tions by John Scott and Graham Martin, In the Year of the Strike,
in 1968. Thirty years later, Manfred Wolf translated a selection
largely of earlier work, This Happened Everywhere (Androgyne
Books, San Francisco, 1997) In the 1980s he was included in the
City Lights Anthology, Nine Dutch Poets. All but one of the trans-
lations of Campert in the recent anthology of Dutch-language
poetry, In a Different Light (Seren, 2002) are from the old, 1968
anthology. And that’s about it.

Yet Campert really is famous in Holland. He is a household
name, whose expressions have entered the language. He is
known, of course, not just as a poet, but for his fiction and his
mischievously entertaining thrice-weekly columns in the national
daily, De Volkskrant. Moreover, he is a writer who has never
sought to be either popular or fashionable. Indeed much of what
he writes goes against the grain of the times. He has the common
touch without ever falling into easy sentiment.

While much of Campert’s poetry zooms in on the medium-
sized city of Amsterdam, there has never been anything parochial
about it. It has always been international in its influences. He is the
most accessible member of the most important post-war move-
ment in Dutch poetry, that of the ‘Fifties Poets’ – the Vijftigers.
Rather similar to the alliance between the poets of the New York
School and the Abstract Expressionist painters in the States, these
poets related closely to a group of painters, the Cobra artists.

10

Moreover many of these painters and poets spent time in Paris
after the war – the crucial cultural centre. They claimed as it were
the heart of Europe for themselves. It is the moment in Dutch
literary history when, if it hadn’t been for the ‘minor’ status of
the language, Dutch poetry might have become ‘world poetry’.
And Campert’s work is a key to post-war Dutch poetry.
One reason for his neglect may be that he doesn’t cut the figure of
a ‘great’ poet. The word ‘great’ somehow conjures up the wrong
associations with someone whose attitude to poetry has always
been imbued with the matter-of-fact and the everyday and whose
whole work displays an aversion to big words or major state-
ments. There are writers maybe who would never be candidates
for international fame because they eschew a monumental style.
There is little in Campert that sounds as though it is writ in stone
– his titles give this away: ‘Lack of Proof’, ‘Seventeen Sketches’,
‘In the Dark’ and ‘Mumblings’. His is a poetry of hesitations
and understatement; by implication it challenges conventional
notions of greatness.

I hope my selection may do something to remedy this neglect.
I have largely gone for his more recent work, because he is a
poet who has grown over the years. At the same time, I see my
selection as representative in the sense that there is a continuity
between his early and later work. If there is a shift, it is simply
because a poet of sixty or seventy has different concerns from
one of thirty; different concerns require different treatment. The
later work is more spare and philosophical than his pre-1980s
poetry and the imagery is more muted or elliptic.

Translating someone else’s poetry is the closest thing to writ-
ing one’s own. I want to thank Remco Campert for giving me
the time of day, or rather of late afternoon, initially over cups
of tea and later over bottles of wine. Making this book has been
quite a long journey, but I always felt I was travelling first class
in luxury, getting to know Campert and having such wonderful
texts to work on. And being involved with poetry – writing, read-
ing or translating it – is indeed an exceptional kind of luxury. As
Campert himself puts it, ‘only poetry remains / your lines still
smell fresh / just round the corner / the world opens’.

Donald Gardner

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INTRODUCTION – Remco Campert: ForeverYoung

By dint of age and geography Remco Campert, born in The
Hague in 1929, belongs with the post-war generation of literary
iconoclasts and experimentalists who came to prominence in the
Low Countries in the 1950s. Certainly he shared their bohemian
lifestyle, their anti-establishment politics (he was prominent in
the Vietnam protest movement), and their openness to other art
forms. While Lucebert and Claus are poet-painters, with links to
the Cobra movement, Campert’s main affinity is with music, and
particularly jazz, which is important both thematically, as in his
ode to Charlie Parker (1955), and formally: many of his poems
read like improvisational riffs, while the poem ‘Lamento’ from
Right Shoes (1992), included in this collection, has an austere,
madrigal-like quality of repetition and variation.

Nonetheless, if one sets some samples of poetic self-definition
by Campert alongside those of his major contemporaries, it is the
differences rather than the similarities that are most revealing.
The first, much-quoted, pronouncement is:

I don’t want to strike water from the rocks
but to carry water to the rocks
(‘Credo’, Birds Fly, Don’t They?, 1951)

The humility of tone, seemingly denying any magical role for
poetry, contrasts strikingly with (and could even be a response
to) Gerrit Kouwenaar’s low-key but clearly shamanic statement
of intent:

I’ve never aimed for anything but this:
making stones soft
making fire from water
making rain from thirst
(‘I’ve Never’, St Helena Comes Later, 1962).

There is an equally obvious difference in tone and scope of ambi-
tion in the provocative and subversive programme of Lucebert,
the self-styled ‘Emperor’ of poets of the 1950s:

I’m not some lovable rime-spook
I am the expeditious crook
of love…

12

lyrics are the parents of politics,
I’m merely the reporter…
(‘School of Poetry’, trans. James S. Holmes)

or

I try in poetic fashion
that is to say
simplicity’s luminous waters
to give expression to
the expanse of life at its fullest
(‘I Try in Poetic Fashion’, trans. James S. Holmes)

or

I reel off a little revolution.

Campert’s celebrated assertion of human solidarity:

Poetry is an act
of affirmation. I affirm
I live, I do not live alone.
(‘Poetry is an Act’, The House I Dwelt In, 1955, trans. John Scott
and Graham Martin)

is also worlds removed from the oracular, chameleon-like physi-
cality of Hugo Claus, who dramatises, enacts rather than states
his sense of poethood, here with a slightly paranoid edge:

The singer is his song.
Let loose in his skin, this house,
He won’t greet cuckoo nor bird-catcher.

Nor the skittish spies in the lowland.
(‘The Singer’, Oostakker Poems, 1955, trans. Paul Brown and
Peter Nijmeijer)

Such aversion to the grand gestures, the larger-than-life aspira-
tions and passions beloved of his peers, and preference for a
minor-key diffidence may relate in part to the iconic figure of his
father, the poet and resistance worker Jan Campert, whose ‘The
Song of the Eighteen Dead’, written in a prison cell in 1943, became
an anthem of heroism and sacrifice, which the young Remco was

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frequently called upon to read in public. The rhetorical pathos
of its opening places it in an older literary tradition rejected by
the young Turks of the 1950s:

A cell is just two metres long
and scarce two metres wide,
but smaller still’s the piece of ground,
unknown, where I’ll abide,
and, nameless, will not stir,
my friends will go along with me,
eighteen of us there were,
none will this evening see.

Such is the son’s suspicion of poetic slogans that under the title
‘Against Inclusion in the Umpteenth Anthology’ he subverts
his own frequently quoted poem as: ‘Poetry is an act of denial’.
Elsewhere earlier optimism gives way to the cynicism of:

Some poetry
is saying in a little voice
things that are even more little
(My Life’s Songs, 1968)

or

Poetry is lying on a higher plane
(Uncollected Poems, 1995).

Whether or not in reaction to his father, Campert follows a different
path from the full-blooded, language and image-centred counter-
blast to tradition launched by the most representative poets of his
generation. He consistently uses a conversational, or in musical
terms parlando, style, which for all its hipness and political and
cultural awareness of the post-war world represents an essential
continuity with the style of such pre-war poets as E. du Perron.

This may explain why Campert has survived to become some-
thing of a national institution in the Netherlands: as a chronicler
of alternative Amsterdam life in stories and novels, as a thrice-
weekly columnist on a national newspaper, as a scriptwriter and
film-maker, and not least as a steadily productive, if not prolific
poet, who with typical modesty told a recent interviewer: ‘I’m not

14

someone who’s built an oeuvre’, accessible without being super-
ficial, popular without being populist and (alas!, he might sigh)
eminently quotable. His deadpan understatement obviously
has an enduring appeal for his Dutch readers. That appeal also
bridges generations, since his work has always been in part a
Peter Pan-like celebration of youthful spontaneity. His first liter-
ary discovery was Theo Thijssen’s classic tale of boyhood Young
Kees (1923), and tellingly, Harry Scholten’s pioneering study of
Campert’s poetry in 1979 was entitled An Assault on Old Age.

Remco Campert has found a sympathetic fellow-poet and
able translator in Donald Gardner, who is, I think, quite right to
claim attention for the distilled minimalism and assurance of the
more recent work with its ‘jaunty pessimism’ and deceptive sim-
plicity. His quiet, quirky tone, the very personal nature of much
of his work, of which paradoxically he is a master performer,
and his rootedness in a particular place, Amsterdam (for all his
peripatetic career, in the course of which he has been based at
various times in Paris and Antwerp), suggest a possible paral-
lel with, for example, such Liverpool poets as Brian Patten and
Roger McGough. Hopefully this collection can help gain Remco
Campert a new audience in the Anglo-Saxon world, where un-
derstatement and throwaway humour, often with a melancholy
undertone, have traditionally been prized.

Paul Vincent

15

16

I Dreamed in the Cities
at Night

Steden bij avond

17

HUIS OP DE WETERINGSCHANS

in het onttakelde huis
voorgoed van je adem ontdaan
klinkt m van moeder
uit het hiervoormaals
nog één keer je stem:

‘Remco, wat doe je in mijn huis?’

vraag die me vergezelde
sinds de a van mijn geboorte
wat deed ik in mijn moeders huis?

ronddwalend in je dood
zie ik dat in je leeggehaalde kamer
nog de zonnige reisgids ligt
en hoe in zachte nevel gehuld
over het lange diepe water van het Gardameer
het bootje gaat
waar we eens op voeren
om bijvoorbeeld te bezien
of in het rariteitenkabinet van D’Annunzio’s huis
Eleonora Duse nog een plaats had
of in sommige levens actrices niet gedoemd waren
altijd de tweede rol te spelen
terwijl op het eerste plan
voor de klakkeloos bewonderende claque
de man praalt
in zijn gesouffleerd verdriet

maar dat alles komt pas later
eerst nu op reis
om iets te vinden dat ik nog niet weet
met altijd in het achterhoofd de vreugde
van de kinderstemmen op het schoolplein

zoek wat je liefhebt
wat je ontroert

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IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE

in the dismantled house
stripped forever of your breath
I hear your voice one last time
in the herebefore:

‘Remco, what are you doing in my house?’

Since I was born
that question’s never left my side –
what was I doing in my mother’s house?

Roaming around your death
I see the sunny travel brochure
still lying in your emptied room
and the boat gliding
through a veil of mist
that we once sailed in together
over the long deep waters of Lake Garda
to see for instance
if in the curiosity cabinet of D’Annunzio’s house
Eleonora Duse had her niche
or whether in some lives
actresses were not doomed for ever
to play the secondary roles
while before the footlights
the man parades
his prompted sorrow
to the applauding claque

but all that’s for later
first there’s the journey
to find something I don’t yet know
with the joyful shouts of children in the school yard
always on my mind

seek what you love best
the thing that moves you

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VERGANE DAGEN

Het was laat in de avond
regen in lamplicht gevangen
sloeg neer op de kasseien
van de Mechelse Steenweg
je had een offwhite jurkje aan
ik schatte je op vijftien
je liep langs de straat
waar ook ik over ging
auto’s passeerden remden af
reden weer verder
je vroeg de weg naar De Muze
het café waar Ferre optrad
Grignard de zanger van jou lied
stem die je gevonden had
waarheen je nu op weg was
‘Volg de tramrails maar’
en ik liet je gaan
Antwerps meisje
dat ik in mijn hart draag
wat heb ik toch gedaan
met mijn leven

20

FADED DAYS

It was late in the evening
rain caught in lamplight
beat down on the cobbles
of the Old Mechlin Road
you were wearing an off-white dress
I’d have guessed you were fifteen
you were walking down the street
as I was crossing
cars passed by
braked rode on
you asked me the way to the Muse Café
the bar where that singer was on
singer you said of your song
voice that had found you
you were on your way there
‘Just follow the tram lines’
I let you go
Antwerp girl
you’re still on my mind
what have I done
with my life

21

STAD

Je gaf me een stadsplan
een vochtige kaart.
De zon in mijn nek volg ik je
rij in taxi’s achter trams aan
spring voor op een fiets
val in een goot
knikker met kinderen
kijk op
net als ik win
en zie je gezicht achter een raam
even maar.
Dan gaan deuren op grendels
ladders breken
kinderen lachen
taxi’s staken
regen slaat in m’n gezicht
en onachtervolgbaar
breidt de stad zich uit.

22

CITY

You gave me a
damp street map.
The sun behind me I go after you
catch cabs chase trams
hop on a bike
fall in a gutter
play marbles with kids
just as I’m winning
I look up
and see
your face in a window.
Then doors slam bolts are shot
ladders break
kids laugh
taxis go on strike
rain lashes my face
and unpursuable
the city expands.

23

REIS

Gesleten wegen
die je moet begaan
tot de onzichtbare einder
je voeten stap na stap
op de gebarsten klei
niemand kom je tegen
en niemand jou
woord als leeftocht
wil die niet aflaat
onbestemd doel

VERLOREN PARTIJ

Jij je zin
zei ik midden in de stad
de huizen om me heen
snel bezwijkend aan dagelijks
gebrek aan aandacht

verloren partij

jouw gezicht
verscheen nergens meer
zoals ik het eens bedoeld had

’s nachts sta ik aan de kade
waar het zwarte water stroomt
en denk: nog niet

24

JOURNEY

Potholed roads
you have to travel
to an invisible horizon
your feet step after step
over the cracked mud
you meet no-one
no-one you
word as victuals
will that won’t let up
unsure goal

LOST CAUSE

In the city centre
have it your own way I said
houses all around
soon succumbing to the daily
lack of care

lost cause

your face
as I’d once pictured it
no longer showed up anywhere

at night I stand on the canal bank
where the black water flows
and think: not yet

25