Review
Rutger Kopland A World beyond Myself
RUTGER KOPLAND
A World Beyond Myself
Trans. by James Brockway
Enitharmon £7.95
"Rutger Kopland" is the pseudonym of Professor R.H. van den Hoofdakker, born 1934 and a neurologist at Gronigen University. A pamphlet of Kopland's work appeared in English in 1987; this is the first substantial volume to be made available. James Brockway has chosen from all nine of Kopland's books, the emphasis falling on the later collections. This is surely right, as it is certainly the case that Kopland gets better as he gets older - something that cannot be guaranteed with poets. The first half dozen or so of Kopland's poems are unassuming, unrhetorical pieces, quietly observant, evincing no sense of surprise at natural phenomena or other people. 'On the death of my father' is the most impressive, circling nicely round to the fact of the poet's own fatherhood and hence the way experience repeats itself. Kopland implies that his daughters will in their turn come to the same perception of mortality he himself has arrived at.
Jeremy Hooker comments that Kopland's poems strike him with their faithfulness to the manmade landscapes of Holland. My own sense of those landscapes is restricted to looking at Dutch paintings and Van der Valk on TV, but on that slim, second-hand evidence I should be inclined to agree. 'No Reply' was the first poem that evoked this landscape for me, but it does more than represent: it ties a description of wintry, desolate dykes and towns to a state of mind that remains satisfied with presence and action (the action of thoughtless, instinctual animals) rather than analysis. 'Painting' expands on the same theme, accumulating material but moving towards only the insistent posing of questions that cannot be answered. The emptiness of the world outside the window evoked by the painting (the window of the painting, now the window of the poem) is at the same time an inner emptiness, an emptiness that seems to .ask questions about the mystery of human identity.
As the book goes on, Kopland becomes more intellectual, analytical, restless, but always conscious of the limits of what can sensibly be asked. 'The Surveyor' is a typical poem, teasingly seeming to offer definitions, but slipping away from the reader again, leaving clear phrases but no boundaries:
He wants to know where he is, but it's his consolation
to know that the spot where he is standing exists only
as his private formula, he is a hole in the shape ofa man in the landscape. With boundaries that he draws,
sharper, more distinct, the grass and the trees grow
vaguer and everything that lives, declines and dies.
James Brockway calls Kopland's "a spare poetry of metaphysical questioning “. I would go further and call it existential poetry. "Suppose”, with its imagining of what it might be like to be a mountain, reminds me strongly of C.H. Sisson's 'Ham Hill'. 'In the Mountains' probes distances, terminations, the boundaries of what can be thought and said. The last of the poem's four sections seems to offer an account of what the poem itself seeks to grasp, its own provisional elusiveness:
The idea of the perfectly open
ending, that something ceases even
before it ends,
disappears before it
has gone, is lying before
it lies down,this exists.
'A River' is very fine, probing, subtle, and wondering almost with the desire to be as the river itself is. Jeremy Hooker talks about Kopland's objectivity, but with a poem like 'Bay' it is the absoluteness of his subjectivity that strikes me. It very much requires a mind, human and attentive, to observe and mediate like this -and there's feeling here too. 'Natzweiler' is a haunting piece: a past is evoked, in a landscape still in existence, present and not present, or it might be the future even, a cyclic world about, in the midst of quietude, to re-enact remote ferocities. 'Conversation' provides a convincing entry into a certain psychology. Here is a desire not to be human, to be absolved of all human responsibility, its perennial burden; but it is, of course, couched in language, and so it deconstructs its own desire. Again an intensely existential poem, in the sense in which Geoffrey Thurley has defined the English existential tradition. 'Portrait' is even better, if possible, and totally original, so far as I know.
James Brockway's translations seem exemplary - though I have no way of testing them against the originals. They are cast in conversational English, in a relaxed and easy free verse, but Brockway, who is bilingual and has lived in Holland for half a lifetime, refuses to take credit for this, declaring that it's Kopland's “parlando” Dutch that has eased his way. A poet in his own right he works closely with Kopland, so it seems safe to assume that his versions meet with the latter's approval. In fact they read like original poems in English, and to say as much is doubtless to pay the translator the highest of compliments.
Page(s) 62-63
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