Raptors E-Book

Toon Tellegen

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

With the economy of proverbs and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence Raptors depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grotesque and pathetic. Tellegen's mercurial imagination evokes the dark archetypes of European folklore and reanimates them with a sophisticated sense of the endless fluidity of relationships, the instability of interpretation. An improvisation on a theme, 'circling back to my father' at the start of each poem, Raptors builds to a story without narrative, its extravagant imaginative leaps into absurdity held within a framework of tender observation. Toon Tellegen's translator Judith Wilkinson has worked closely with the poet to create English poems that capture the startling clarity and inventiveness of the original Dutch. Raptors has the rewarding intensity of a modern classic.

Leseprobe

TOON TELLEGEN

Raptors

Translated with an introduction byJUDITH WILKINSON

‘Family life can be unbearable. Yet for all manner of reasons, we continue to tolerate it.’ This might be the message of Toon Tellegen’s poignant yet hilarious depictions of his own family, especially of ‘my father, my paltry father, my little Goliath’, whose character so dominates this witty and profound collection.

Robert Minhinnick

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction by Judith Wilkinson

Preface by Toon Tellegen

I

My father moved heaven and earth

searched for water

bit the dust

stuck to his guns

picked bitter fruits

applied a double standard

got into deep water

washed his hands in innocence

was in the seventh heaven

stewed in his own juice

played with fire

became down and out

was on cloud nine

knew how to live

retraced his steps

twisted the facts

wanted to alleviate suffering

was a book

was in the air, like a rumour

sat on a mountain

created the world

plucked up all his courage

looked for injustice

tied himself into a thousand knots

abandoned all hope

was speechless

looked for a needle

was wide of the mark

poured salt in wounds

stayed out of the picture

who rose and sank in esteem

screamed blue murder

did not let sleeping dogs

II

was in a terrible state

threw dust about

put on a show

let a cup

kicked down doors

washed the dirty linen in public

let the fire run its course

had the last word

blew such a big trumpet

was a human being

destroyed things

was happy

soft-soaped the guilty

was every bit

kept up appearances

acted in good faith and took the smooth

looked for someone, just one person

slept

dragged things by the hair

was in a tight corner

who blows up rocks, blows away people, blows out peace

looked in a mirror

thanked my mother

was immense and limitless

made things hot for people

how fathomless was the depth of his shame

there was a gaping hole in him

looked for love

was a mistake

died a thousand deaths

couldn’t comprehend himself any more

III

and then for hours, days

fished for answers

was everywhere

slept through headaches, hazards and uncontrollable

was gone

explained himself

behold the tears of my father

choked on his daily bread

created pain

bowed to the inevitable

talked gibberish

racked his brains

was already himself

promised everything, pledged everything

was nobody

is a tiny bit – one millionth – deader

begot surprise

didn’t waste his breath

wanted to love my mother

got under the skin

was at his wits’ end

buried his head

found happiness

saw ghosts

was so small

quite honestly, really wanted only one thing

didn’t know that he was in despair

smashed rocks, smashed mud

was in safe hands, was extolled to the skies

was coming to an end

began to confuse things

was something

My mother stood in the doorway

About the Author

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Poems included in this collection have appeared in the following journals:

Agenda, Carapace, Equinox, De Hofjeskrant, The Journal, The Manhattan Review, Orbis, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Seventh Quarry, Stand and Tzum.

The poem ‘My father/got under the skin’ appeared in the poetry section of www.languageandculture.net.

The poem ‘My father/was immense and limitless’ was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2008 by The Manhattan Review.

The poem ‘My father/there was a gaping hole in him’ won joint fourth prize in the Orbis Readers Award in 2009.

I am grateful to Toon Tellegen for his detailed scrutiny of the translations and for his comments and suggestions.

I would like to thank my parents and my brother Michael Wilkinson for their input, and Anthony Runia and Geni Fitzgerald for some useful suggestions.

I am enormously grateful to The Dutch Foundation for Literature for a translation grant.

Thanks also to Toon Tellegen’s publisher, Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij B.V., for permission to print this translation of Toon Tellegen’s collection Raafvogels, which was published in 2006 in Amsterdam.

Introduction

Toon Tellegen was born in 1941 in the town of Brielle, in the south-west of the Netherlands. He grew up in a family of four whose father was a GP. Tellegen later studied medicine himself, and spent some years working in a hospital in Kenya. Eventually he settled in Amsterdam, where he lives with his wife and where, until quite recently, he too worked as a GP. Tellegen’s earliest affinity was with poetry and he considers himself primarily a poet. Later, he also began to publish children’s stories, originally created for his own children, as well as novels for adults, plays, and a semi-fictional memoir of his maternal grandfather. Tellegen frequently gives readings of his work, often with musical accompaniment; in 2009 he read the whole of Raafvogels (‘Raptors’) – to a full house – at Amsterdam’s Perdu theatre.

His grandfather, who had spent the first half of his life in Russia, appears to have had an important impact on Tellegen’s childhood. Not only did he instil in Tellegen a love of Russian literature, but he was also an inexhaustible source of fantastical stories. This may go some way towards explaining Tellegen’s own unorthodox style of storytelling and his tragicomic approach to his subject matter. Not surprisingly, Tellegen has been likened to writers like Bulgakov or the Russian absurd writer Daniil Charms.

In the Netherlands Tellegen is practically a household name. The extent of his work is astonishing, ranging from his enchanting, quietly philosophical children’s books – enjoyed by children and adults alike – to his other prose works, as well as more than twenty collections of poetry to date. He has won many major prizes, including two recent awards for his entire oeuvre. If anything, his work seems to have been gathering momentum and resonance, as he constantly experiments with new forms and techniques. Outside the Netherlands, his reputation is growing as his work is beginning to appear in translation. In Britain, an opera, The Cricket Recovers, based on Tellegen’s children’s stories, was performed in 2005 at the Aldeburgh Festival and later at the Almeida Theatre in London. Boxer Books has published a number of Tellegen’s children’s books. Raptors is the second collection of his poetry to appear in Britain.

Tellegen has spoken of the poems in Raptors as improvisations on a theme, the theme of ‘My father’, adding that, as in jazz, there seemed infinite scope for further improvisation, further changes too. He felt he could have continued improvising on ‘raptors’ indefinitely. Even for a writer who is constantly reinventing himself as Tellegen does, Raptors was a startlingly fresh departure. It is as if its subject matter were an explosive source of energy. The book has been hailed as one of the highpoints of his oeuvre.

Tellegen has always been at home with the sequence form, but the poems in this, his longest, work well on their own, too. Cumulatively, they build a tragicomic picture of an extravagantly dysfunctional family, each poem except the last beginning ritualistically with the words ‘My father’. Tellegen’s approach to his subject matter is, as always, unconventional: without filling in details about the characters’ lives, without a plot, without carefully setting the scene, each poem plunges in with a saying or an idiom that sums up some aspect of the father’s nature. There are no gentle shifts, no gradual unfoldings: each verse is a new leap, a new moment of creation. Discussing Tellegen’s collection About Love and About Nothing Else in The Manhattan Review, the American poet and critic John Brehm commented on this originality in Tellegen’s poetry: ‘it is hard to overstate his uniqueness’. Brehm emphasises Tellegen’s ‘diagnostic curiosity about the human condition’, arguing that ‘it is a fallen world Tellegen’s poems take place in, a world of painful absurdities where we are free to explore the many ways we are trapped; a world where abstractions stalk the earth’.

The Dutch poet and critic Tom van Deel has remarked that Tellegen often needs some kind of linguistic agreement with himself regarding the shape of a sequence: he frequently relies on a recurrent opening phrase or verbal pattern that forms the catalyst of the writing process or an anchor for his imagination. Each poem of his collection In N, for instance, set in the imaginary place ‘N.’, begins with the words ‘In N.’. Van Deel points out how effective this mode of writing is in Raptors. In beginning each poem with an idiom or proverb that evokes something of the father’s make-up and temperament, Tellegen taps into the lifeblood of language, while at the same time offsetting the father’s reveries and exalted conceits with something altogether more mundane and earthy. Other critics have commented on Raptors’ peculiar mixing of everyday, domestic imagery with surreal description (‘my father flew away’, ‘he climbed into a vase’), and the piling up of abstractions that seem to clash and bounce off each other (‘gluttony and shabbiness’, ‘simplicity and ambivalence’). It is as if the language itself – restless, hyperbolical – has been infected by the picture that is portrayed. And yet the poems do not spin off into chaos, for there is always a logic, a psychological coherence, that holds them together.

The world in which the characters interact in Raptors is contorted. Nature itself has become chaotic, discordant: it is a place where ‘sparrows howled, swallows blared’, or where ‘magpies screeched in overwhelming sycamores’. The father, with his ominous, manic energy, dominates all those round him. His grandiosity, his constitutional hubris, his wild flights of fancy, coupled with a consummate neediness, slowly drain the life out of his family. And he remains profoundly unaware of his impact on others: see, for instance, the poem ‘My father/slept through unrest and sorrow’, where sleep seems to have become a metaphor for a kind of wilful unconsciousness. The whole family is, as it were, held hostage, a prey to the father’s whims and fluctuating moods. Gradually one sees how the sons, starved of attention and consistently upstaged by their father, are torn between ‘saving’ and abandoning their father, and in the course of the book their frustration mounts. The mother, once ‘young and luxuriant’, becomes ‘scrawny and mute’, exhausted bit by bit in her efforts to support her husband and bear his melodramatic outbursts (‘my mother slowly slept her way downstream/from upland plains’). With great psychological insight the whole dynamics of this family is exposed; each in turn unleashes some measure of cruelty on the other. And yet the picture painted is still compassionate, and the narrator is not without empathy.

The translations of the poems in the sequence evolved over a period of about a year, in close consultation with Toon Tellegen. His queries and suggestions made for much rethinking and discussion. He encouraged me to take liberties in order to preserve the strangeness and rawness of the language, which at times is almost breaking at the seams, and he drew comparisons with Francis Bacon’s work and the distortion used in his portraits. Occasionally, where Tellegen was in retrospect slightly dissatisfied with the Dutch, he asked me to make a few minor changes. Among other things, this involved changing the layout and thereby shortening two of the poems. I tried to keep the English as idiomatic as the Dutch and to find English proverbs and expressions that matched the Dutch as much as possible. Surprisingly often, a match existed, or at least a close equivalent, but where there was no real equivalent I looked for solutions that allowed for a similar play on imagery as in the Dutch.

In Raptors we see an artist at the height of his powers. Using minimal brushstrokes and a large canvas, Tellegen gives us this complex portrait of a family, in language that is tantalisingly apt, tantalisingly strange.

Judith Wilkinson