The Low Countries. Jaargang 21
(2013)– [tijdschrift] The Low CountriesLeonard Nolens
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[p. 290] | |
song and vibrancy, swaddled me in a warmth that was later lost in this adult universe which has lost the ability to resonate’. This is a reference to the major role played by music in his childhood. In the well-to-do bourgeois family in which Nolens grew up, in the little Limburg town of Bree, the grand piano was a constant companion. At the same time, as he writes in one of the many poems in which Bree figures, his family was ‘a family of businessmen, teachers, priests, / Men who know the value of a word, the meaning of a number’. As so often, this apparently prosaic observation is a subtle amalgamation of concepts, with the juxtaposition of ‘meaning’, which in the first instance is associated with ‘word’, and ‘value’ which alludes to ‘number’ [in Dutch, the distinction is even finer, with berekent (= calculate) being switched with betekent (= mean)]. Nolens also repeatedly juxtaposes personal and possessive pronouns as a way of intimately linking personae, as in the final line of one of his ‘birth poems’: ‘I cannot leave my room of yours’. In recent collections, Nolens has increasingly become a commentator on his time and his generation. In Bres (2004), he presents a critique of the 1960s in poetic form. Where the slogan in 1968 was ‘all power to the imagination’, Nolens focuses attention on those who were striving for the same things at that time, but who wished to express themselves more subtly than through slogans: ‘We were not some poetic theme of Mao. / We thought, we are making our own poetry. / We thought, we are making history here / On the quiet’. And in his most recent collection, Zeg aan de kinderen dat wij niet deugen (‘Tell the children we're no good’, 2011), Nolens turns his attention to the legacy we will leave behind: ‘Tell the children we're no good. / They'll have to pay for the dung pit, the cesspit / That we dug in our field of clouds, they'll have to / Clear out the celestial sewers, that dumping ground / Of shit and azure that the Ancients sang of’. But even in this strongly ethical and socially critical poetry, music continues to dominate, the language dances. Nolens is like a dervish2. who dances his truth to life.
Ad Zuiderent Translated by Julian Ross |