(Donald Gardner will present Remco Campert’s poetry at the Poetry Café on Wednesday, November 24. He will share the evening with Sarah Lawson who will present the work of Jacques Prévert)

Remco Campert, born 1929, belongs to the group of Dutch poets labelled after their decade, the ‘Fifties’ poets (De vijftigers), who broke the mould of Dutch poetry in those years. Paris was their chief literary and artistic reference point. They had come to maturity in the bitter years of the occupation and the buttoned-up sobriety expected of the Dutch in the post-war period was for them the last straw. Determinedly modern and worldly, theirs was an existential rather than a political revolt. Of this avant-garde Campert was always the most accessible. He wrote novellas and newspaper columns as well as poetry, establishing himself as a much-loved and widely-read writer.

Though he started in the fifties, Campert also caught the playful mood of the 60s very well and he has continued to draw on this spirit, although his most recent work is often lyrical or elegiac. The irony that is thought to be his hallmark is often a mask for a surprising emotional engagement. Now aged eighty, Campert is still writing in all three of his genres as well as giving superb readings of his work.

Another Dutch poet, Louis Lehmann, wrote about Campert, ‘What is so marvellous is that someone who appears to do nothing but mumble a few dead ordinary words, without getting worked up about anything, can say so much.’ It is just this quality – the seeming off-the-cuff naturalness of Campert’s poetry that was a challenge for me as his translator. To capture language that is colloquial and very close to conversation and render it as poetry in another language – that was the challenge.

Donald Gardner’s book of translations of the poems of Remco Campert, ‘I Dreamed in the Cities at Night’, was published by Arc publications in 2007 as no. 20 in their bilingual series, Visible Poets, edited by Jean Boase Beier. (www.arcpublications.co.uk) Donald Gardner is a poet and translator who has lived in Amsterdam for many years. Recent publications of his poetry include ‘The Glittering Sea’ (Hearing Eye, London, 2006) and ‘Sleight of Tongue’ (Boekie Woekie, Amsterdam, 2010). His website is: www.donaldgardner.net

The following three poems are taken from the collection ‘I Dreamed in the Cities at Night’, published by Arc in 2007 as no. 20 in their bilingual series, Visible Poets, edited by Jean Boase Beier.

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

HOTEL

For Cees Nooteboom

Late in the Autumn
weather turned
storm pounced on the palm trees
rushed down the hotel corridors
final visitors packed their bags —
the English couple on their last legs
the beautiful girl and her mother
who smoked long cigarettes
and waited for something that never came
the tennis star past his prime —
I lingered on
a nuisance to the staff

in this hotel I was dreadfully unhappy
as usual that just happened
but I stayed put
the book I’d not yet started
like a huge egg in my arms
self-imposed trial of strength
nobody had asked for

I thought of you on your island
or en route between two continents
gone before you’d even landed
seeking safety in movement
so unlike me, yet just the same

at that thought
stuck in that foreign eyrie
suddenly I found wings
I got better, I was cured

STREET THEATRE

In the balmy afternoon wind
I was sitting on a bench
on the Boulevard du Général Leclerc
next to an old gent
who’d fought in Indochina
rosette in his buttonhole
white cravat round his wizened neck
at his feet a little mutt
watching everything
when suddenly Sophie Marceau
actress I recognized from the papers
stepped out of a limousine
followed by her photographer
and holding her sun-hat in place
gave us an eyeful
of her cream-white armpit

the mutt yapped
and the old gent and I
stood up in unison
sang a ditty
did a couple of dance steps
and waggled our bottoms

she didn’t see us