Memories of Holland
Hendrik Marsman
translation Ad Blankestijn
Thinking of Holland I see wide-flowing rivers
sluggishly passing through endless lowlands,
rows of unthinkably spindly poplars
standing like lofty plumes at the skyline.
And in that enormous space immersed:
farmhouses scattered through the land,
tree clumps, villages, trimmed towers,
churches and elms in a grand alliance.
The sky hangs low and the sun is slowly
smothered in gray multicolored vapors,
and in all departments the voice of the water
with its unceasing troubles is feared and heard.
Herinnering aan Holland
Denkend aan Holland zie ik brede rivieren
traag door oneindig laagland gaan,
rijen ondenkbaar ijle populieren
als hoge pluimen aan den einder staan;
en in de geweldige ruimte verzonken
de boerderijen verspreid door het land
boomgroepen, dorpen, geknotte torens,
kerken en olmen in een groots verband.
De lucht hangt er laag en de zon wordt er langzaam
in grijze veelkleurige dampen gesmoord,
en in alle gewesten wordt de stem van het water
met zijn eeuwige rampen gevreesd en gehoord.
[Hendrik Marsman]
Hendrik Marsman (1899–1940) was a Dutch poet and literary critic. Marsman studied law and practiced in Utrecht, but after 1933 he traveled in Europe and devoted himself to literature. Marsman often lived abroad, especially in France and Switzerland. He also was an important literary critic, who wrote in major Dutch literary magazines as "Forum" and in the national newspapers.
Marsman is considered the most important Dutch representative of expressionism in pre-war poetry. Under the influence of the German Expressionists, he made his literary debut about 1920 with rhythmic free verse, which attracted notice for its aggressive independence. His next collection, Verses (1923) expresses an anti-humanist, anti-intellectual rebelliousness, which the poet called "vitalism." Three more important collections would follow until his untimely death in June 1940, when the ship on which he tried to cross to England, to evade the war with Germany which had just broken out in Europe, sunk after an explosion.
Marsman hated Dutch narrow-mindedness. He once said: "Holland is and will remain misery. Anyone who stamps on the ground here will sink into the mud". He admired the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his book Also sprach Zarathustra, which he also translated into Dutch. He became however a fierce opponent and a principled fighter against fascism, after he saw what that led to in Germany.
In the 1930s his vitalist work gave way to a much more traditional and realistic poetry, such as the above poem "Memories of Holland" (1936), which became one of the best-known Dutch poems after the war, and at the end of the twentieth century was even voted the "Dutch Poem of the Century."
The expression "gray multicolored vapors" towards the end of the poem may seem contradictory, but that is what it says in Dutch!
[Marsman's Berlin poem on the wall of the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin]
Another famous poem by Marsman was addressed to the city of Berlin and now adorns one of the concrete walls of the Netherlands Embassy in that city:
Berlin
The morning air is a tarnished garment
a dog-eared page
a stain
the city
a woman her makeup half wiped off
but twitching she rears into the sky
like a blue horse by Marc in a harness of air
Berlin
the sun is yellow
("Marc" refers to the German painter Franz Marc, the founder of "Der blaue Reiter", who often painted blue horses)
The collected poems of Marsman (in Dutch) at DBNL. Marsman's work is in the public domain in the Netherlands (it is more than 70 years after the death of the author).
Photos: public domain via Wikimedia Commons