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No Longing for Paradise
The Poetry of Rutger Kopland
The poems of Rutger Kopland (1934-) are very accessible and inviting, certainly in comparison with much other important twentieth-century poetry. They deal with familiar situations and emotions: taking children for a walk, addressing the beloved, melancholy, the wind turning the pages of a newspaper, etc. The tone sounds familiar too: a conversational pitch, the hesitant exploration of possibilities, and the interrogative form predominate in Kopland's work. One might be tempted to think that the poet Rutger Kopland does not find it easy to distinguish himself from the Groningen psychiatrist R.H. van den Hoofdakker he is in daily life. It sometimes appears as if all this is meant to put the reader at ease among the troubles of the world, as if there is no difference between a poem and a therapy session.
But those who think so are mistaken. Anyone who accepts the invitation to enter into these poems will quickly notice that they are not there to comfort the reader; rather they undermine ease and certainty from the very beginning. This is already the case in the first lines of Kopland's first collection, Among Cattle (Onder het vee, 1966), at the very beginning of the poem called ‘A Psalm’ (‘Psalm’):
The green pastures the still waters
on the wallpaper in my room -
as a frightened child I believed
The lovely landscape Kopland evokes in the first line would eventually play the part of a primeval landscape as the contours of Kopland's poetic universe became sharper. This poem is, therefore, the germ out of which the whole oeuvre grows. Its role is analogous to that played by the first poem, ‘Digging’, of Seamus Heaney's first collection, Death of a Naturalist (also published in 1966) in this Irish poet's work.
Kopland's landscape is the pastoral representation of Psalm 23 (‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters; He restoreth my soul’). A more idyllic world is hard to imagine, especially if complemented by the
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words: ‘on the wallpaper in my room’. But Kopland has no use for reassuring convictions, such as those of the singer / composer of psalms, as is already obvious from the fact that he reduces the full sentences of the original psalm to key words in the ‘A Psalm’ that is his own: he is a poet muttering to himself, full of hesitation. When he formulates a full sentence he does so to tell us that his former faith was based on fear and naiveté and, moreover, on a sheet of decorated paper, not solid reality, on wallpaper, not a wall. Wallpaper can be removed, the wall remains. In the same way the lovely representations of a pastoral can be removed without inducing any essential change.
The feelings expressed are therefore not those of being refreshed as in the Biblical psalm, but of being abandoned. This feeling never goes away again: in the final stanza, many years later, the former child now has a child of its own, and that child clings in fear to his father's hand on a walk through ‘God's pastures’ where ‘the enormous bodies / of the cattle grunt and snuffle / with peace’. In the next generation, too, feelings of being threatened are bigger than feelings of being at peace. In Kopland's work the world ‘among the cattle’, on wallpaper or in meadows, is not the pastoral world art has known from time immemorial.
This becomes finally clear in the series of poems Kopland devotes years later, in Before it Disappears and After (Voor het verdwijnt en daarna, 1985), his eighth collection, to the World War 11 concentration camp of Natzweiler in Alsace. The camp, too, is described by means of phrases like ‘very charming landscape’, ‘those green pastures’, ‘those peaceful waters’, ‘peaceful landscape’. Moreover, the camp has been freshly painted, so that it seems as if nothing has happened yet. How paradisical this empty monument to death looks. But it is a paradise from which men have been ejected by a strong arm: it is nothing but landscape. This turns the camp into a metaphor for paradise, rather than paradise into a metaphor for the camp. In Kopland's vision paradise must have looked like Natzweiler: a world of destruction, and also a world of appearances and deception, a world of ‘as if’. That world of ‘as if’ is identical with the world of the wallpaper from Kopland's childhood.
Rutger Kopland (1934-).
This vision of paradise (which is commonly supposed to be lovely and ideal), corresponds to what Kopland wrote in an essay about his own work in which he tried to defend himself against the conviction of many readers that his poems bore witness to a longing for a lost paradise. Paradise, he states, is not a world one should long for at all because relationships in that world are unequal in principle: ‘To me paradise is a tree with a man and a woman under it, and above them somebody who watches what they are doing and knows what they are going to do. The script of their lives has been written. To be known in that way amounts to being nobody, to live in someone else's shadow, no more, to adhere to the plan of a life, not to design it.’ Kopland's poems therefore do not express longing, but resistance: many of his poems deal with resistance to being known like this, with anti-mysticism.
Because almost everything Kopland has written is characterized by hesitation, his work can be considered a negation of the words that follow the quotation above in the Biblical psalm: ‘He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness’. Those are the paths of certainty in which Kopland is ill at ease.
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He prefers the winding tracks that confirm the necessity of the hesitant, the uncertain, the indirect.
Kopland lives in Glimmen, on the border of the provinces of Groningen and Drenthe, in the North East of the Netherlands. The landscape around Glimmen has given him one of his most gripping images for those winding tracks. Few small rivers in the Netherlands wind their way so beautifully, but - and this is the important part - also so invisibly through the landscape as the river called the ‘Drentse A’, which flows right by his house. In the course of the years he has found the inspiration for many a poem or sequence of poems in this real-life landscape that looks so lovely. The poems range from an almost anecdotal equation of the windings of the river with wrinkles in an old face to the abstraction of a perfect world that has to exist in that landscape, but we shall never know what we should call it since paradise is passé (‘the wholly undiscoverable answer / to the question which world that is’).
Kopland has transformed the meanderings of landscape into meanderings of language: winding sentences full of questions and with every word weighed, moving ever farther away from their anecdotal causes. It is a form Kopland has mastered with increasing perfection over the years. In the period encompassing his debut and the two collections that appeared soon after, Yesterday's Barrel Organ (Het orgeltje van yesterday, 1968) and Everything by Bike (Alles op de fiets, 1969), Kopland was known as an anecdotal, almost cabaret poet who knew how to delicately touch the sore spots of life with the finger of language. The great popularity of his early work was partly based on a misunderstanding on the part of readers who thought they immediately understood the feelings involved.
Kopland displayed an effortless mixture of the sober and the emotional in playing with genres like the pastoral, the tearjerker, and the anecdote that ends in a punch line. His power seemed to lie in mixing such genres, which allowed him to achieve humorous effects of a melancholy, not a satirical nature. A good example of this is the poem ‘Young Lettuce’ (‘Jonge sla’), which has achieved great popularity. In that poem a series of melancholy observations is abruptly broken off, allowing Kopland to tap both into a layer of feeling and into a layer of ironic distance in his reader.
Kopland realized the dangers of this too easy identification with the anecdotal layer of the poem: after those three collections he has definitively exchanged easy sentiment, along with the ironic undercutting thereof, for a sharper formulation of his hesitant stance. The anecdotal has been reduced to a minimum, and the suggestive has been increased accordingly. The final line of one of his poems, which has become a slogan, is therefore a valid characterization of Kopland's later work: ‘Give me / a question, no answer’.
For Kopland poetry is a way to ask questions, and to keep on asking them. He is not satisfied with the unique and the subjective; by asking questions he wants to find out what we think about life, how we feel, how we observe and how we remember, but also how we ask. Kopland has kept ‘digging’, in a manner very different from Heaney's, but in poetry of the same quality.
ad zuiderent
Translated by André Lefevere.
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List of translations
An Empty Place to Stay and Other Selected Poems (Tr. Ria Leigh-Loohuizen). San Francisco, 1977.
The Prospect and the River (Tr. James Brockway). London, 1987.
A World Beyond Myself (Tr. James Brockway). London, 1991.
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Five Poems by Rutger Kopland
Natzweiler
And there, beyond the barbed wire, the view -
very charming landscape, as peaceful
They would need for nothing, they would
be laid down in those green pastures,
be led to those peaceful waters,
there in the distance. They would.
I trace the windows of the barrack huts,
watch-towers, gas-chamber.
Only the black reflection of distance
in the panes, of a peaceful landscape,
The dead are so violently absent, as though
and the landscape were folding their invisible
arms around my shoulders.
We need for nothing, they are saying,
we have forgotten this world.
The yellowed photos in the display cases,
their faces ravaged by their skulls,
what do they see, what do they see?
I look at them, but for what?
Their faces have come to belong
to the world, to the world
So this is it, desertion, here is
the place where they took their leave,
far away in the mountains.
The camp has just been re-painted, in that gentle
grey-green, that gentle colour
it is as new, as though nothing
From Before It Disappears and After (Voor het verdwijnt en daarna, 1985)
Translated by James Brockway.
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An Empty Place to Stay IX
Just give me the wide, sluggish rivers,
the force you don't see but suspect,
the willows drinking, the senseless dikes,
a dead-still town on the bank.
Give me the winter, the desolate
landscape, the field without signs
of life, the force of resilient heather.
Give me the cat when he's looking
before he leaps, to fight or to run,
to mate or to hunt, when he's looking.
Give me a galloping horse, but one on
his side in the grass. Give me
From An Empty Place to Stay (Een lege plek om te blijven, 1975)
Translated by Ria Leigh-Loohuizen.
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A Psalm
The green pastures the still waters
on the wallpaper in my room -
as a frightened child I believed
when my mother had said prayers for me
and I had been forgiven for one day more
motionless horses and cattle,
a foundling laid in a world
now that once again I have to go
through god's pastures I find no path
to take me back, only a small hand
clasped in mine that tightens
of the cattle grunt and snuffle
From Among the Cattle (Onder het vee, 1966)
Translated by James Brockway.
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Young Lettuce
the shrivelling of beans,
flowers dying, I can watch
the potato patch being dug up
and not shed a tear - I'm
real hard in such things.
But young lettuce in September,
just planted, still tender,
in moist little beds, no.
From Everything by Bike (Alles op de fiets, 1969)
Translated by James Brockway.
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The Valley
You see us again sitting in the grass;
those faces of ours, looking
as though they were seeing something
that makes them extraordinarily happy,
like the faces of the blind, unaware
of how they are seen, unsuspecting, looking
In my notes you read very little
been to the valley again, looked a long time,
And then you see again what
we were sitting looking at:
grey edge of the wood, the wickerwork
fencing drenched in twilight,
about us the very slightly undulating
soft-green meadows and in the hollow
the little row of spindly alders straying
along the invisible stream.
Then this is what must have made us
so extraordinarily happy.
You see how often these photographs have
looked at, how often, too, the slip of paper
has been read, on which was written it was still there,
how spotted and thumb-marked they are.
That whole perfect world that must be
there - the wholly undiscoverable answer
to the question which world that is.
From Before It Disappears and After (Voor het verdwijnt en daarna, 1985)
Translated by James Brockway.
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