This article is based on this Dutch article by Martijn Benders
In her book *The Resounding Forest of Theodore Roethke*, Jenijoy La Belle summarizes Roethke’s greatest challenge as a “conscious imitator”: “The modern poet must step away from the romantic idea of personal expression… He must, as it were, march through the history of poetry — rewriting the poems of the past — so that at the end of his journey, he becomes a poet who has fully absorbed tradition and is thereby able to take a step forward and contribute to that tradition.”
Those who embark on this almost impossible task — a task that often ends in failure — are the ones you call great poets, assuming they succeed. Yet, as seen with Menno Wigman, there are voices that accuse such a poet of lacking personal expression.
The irony is that this very *personal expression* is in fact the foundation of the romantic approach: the idea that one’s personal concerns could contribute something essential to the vast corpus of poetry. Yet these critics project that onto the poet who boldly attempts to internalize tradition: they suggest it is romantic, but nothing could be further from the truth.
What would you call people who accuse Sisyphus of being romantic?
Interestingly, Roethke’s stance also mirrors that of Laibach, or perhaps the reverse. In the 1980s, they proclaimed that enough songs had already been written — it was time to reinterpret the existing ones. In hindsight, they belong to the most influential groups of that decade, partly because — what initially seemed like an art school joke — they managed to sharply expose and reflect the totalitarian structure of Western music.
Roethke and Trakl are poets who, in my view, have much in common, yet neither has been seriously translated by a Dutch poet. True, Roethke indirectly by Wigman, but without any acknowledgment of the source. And Trakl is often translated as a finger exercise by individuals at the beginning of their literary ‘career’: a way to show off that they can handle a ‘serious figure.’ But Trakl is not the kind of poet one translates without experience; why don’t we see that it’s precisely those at the end of their ‘petty career’ who should attempt translating Trakl?
After all, what was that ‘career’ in service of? Precisely.
Of Roethke, there is only one book made by someone who attended a ‘translation school,’ and I have already ordered it: Roethke. Theodore. Five poems, translated by Katelijne De Vuyst. Bilingual edition.
But isn’t that a terribly paltry offering, even if this translation turns out to be fantastic? (Which I doubt — these are not poets who should be used as a testing ground for a translation school.)
In short, every reason for me to get thoroughly absorbed. My collection Beneath the Applause and the Light Dust of Lamps will feature two sections with Roethke and Trakl translations, between which I might embed my own poems, like a river flowing through them.
