David Colmer is an award-winning Australian translator who has translated over 15 volumes of Dutch-language poetry, including Even Now by Hugo Clauss, which was shortlisted for a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and Self-Portrait of an Other by Cees Nooteboom. In 2001 he received the James Brockway Prize, an oeuvre prize for translators of Dutch-language poetry established by the Dutch Foundation of Literature, for which the award jury noted “[Colmer] is particularly at ease with the colloquial, contemporary voice and does not hesitate to produce slang when the Dutch requires this. (…) He is a bold translator; he never automatically chooses the obvious but tries to tease out the maximum from every line.”
Colmer’s latest work of translation is a selection of the Dutch poet Nachoem Wijnberg, published earlier this year by The New York Review of Books. Wijnberg is an especially prolific poet, producing 20 volumes of poetry since 1989 and the NYRB collection includes poems from each of these titles. While there are noticeable developments in form and mode throughout the different volumes, Colmer’s selection captures what appears to be a constant in Wijnberg’s poetry: his use of the most plain spoken language to mystify and bewilder. These poems exist in a logic entirely of their own making and reliably undercut our expectations; they are disorientating in the way they can be at once of good humor and unnerving, straight forward and elliptical. “Laziness and Patience”, which reads almost as a parable, and “I Am a Doctor” are two poems which both achieve the extraordinary feat of ordinary mystification.
Laziness and Patience
The three sons of the father who says that when he dies,
the entire inheritance will go to the laziest son.
A judge has to find out which of the sons is the laziest.
The first son says: I go quiet when I think someone loves me.
That’s not bad, especially the haste, like someone
who has come to tell someone they don’t love them.
The second son says: my father has worked hard his whole life
to say that the inheritance goes to the laziest son
and that it’s up to a judge to find out which son
is laziest. If it was more I know what I’d do,
says the third son to the woman he spends the inheritance with
in just one night. The woman tells the judge.
The judge asks the son: how did you know that she was the woman
who would tell me about it?
I Am a Doctor
I let rain destroy my clothes
and stay up all night and fall asleep
on the backseat of my car, on my horse.
If I find a dead body on the street
I search the pockets for letters and keys
and try to find someone who recognizes the body
(sometimes it is the dog or the horse).
Look at me, I am a doctor.
Give me your hand, I am a doctor.
Let me through, I am a doctor, no, a cop.
No, a doctor and a cop were walking down the road.
Here are two envelopes.
One contains a joke that is twice as good as the joke
in the other.
You can keep one of the two jokes.
Choose an envelope, open it, read the joke.
The joke in the other envelope is twice or half as good.
If I let you swap, would you?
What’s it about, I asked everyone I found,
and they all told me the same joke about themselves
and they also gave me lists of their traits
as if they wanted to be in a better one.
It’s me, talk to me.
I am a doctor, people called me to be sure.
I’m going to make a joke that will stay good
for ten years.
I have all the ingredients.
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Author: Thomas Moody
