This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders: https://martijnbenders.substack.com/p/elegie-van-de-makeup-loze-ogen
Elegy of the Makeup-Free Eyes
On page 200 of the Piranha, I arrive at the poem Elegy of the Makeup-Free Eyes by Csoori:
Elegy of the Makeup-Free Eyes
I have never met you, do not know who you are.
I do not know which dreams you serve
or what kind of citizen you are. Burly? Tall and thin?
A wandering fine mist-man from England? A friend of horses,
dogs? Or of the seagulls
hinging around the scalloped bay?
I read a few of your poems tonight
from a brand-new crackling book.
Snow, snow everywhere,
wherever you step, wherever you walk,
where God lets his handkerchief fall to the ground.
Perhaps you invented the snow-white nightfall
around Essex, you who for years made pilgrimages
to a hospital bed.
There is nowhere on the countryside of your land, England,
a proper longitudinal mourning line.
Nowhere a leafless black tree, a black fence, a black forest.
Nowhere a black flock of birds
carrying an easy little coffin. Tell me,
who is that mysterious living-dead woman in white
lying there on the bed? Your mother? Girlfriend? Wife?
The Ophelia of a paradise
undermined from the outside?
It seems as if I have known her,
those wounds on her head and chest,
that abyss in her eyes.
Her black, fallen hair
still enters the city’s exhaust fumes,
spinning around the tow hooks of cars,
hissing, weeping,
twisting and leaping hastily over shoulders
to go to work and then finds me,
up here, in the trembling room,
where the makeup box for her eyes
lies like an extinguished volcano
or a dried-up lake.
Later, when we see each other again,
I will tell you too, in a snowstorm,
the story of those eyes
that had to do without makeup
and of hospital candles blown out too soon.
Of course, the Piranha provides some context, where I discuss the difference between glazed and transparent poetry.
*
Yesterday, I also translated a work by Montale:
Summer
Eugenio Montale
The crossed shadow of the kestrel
goes unnoticed by the young shrubs
over which it skims.
And the cloud sees? A bubbling spring
carrying countless faces.
Perhaps, in the silver flash
of the swimming trout
moving upstream, perhaps
you too return to my feet,
my dead child, Aretusa.
See the burning shoulder,
the lump of gold,
churned up in the sun,
the maddened cabbage whites,
the spider’s threads,
stretched above the boiling foam—
something that leaves, there is so much
that does not pass through the eye of a needle…
Too many lives dissolve into one.
*
In Wilma de Rek’s farewell column in the Volkskrant, I counted no fewer than twelve errors. That puts her effortlessly ahead of Jos Joosten, who, with his already impressive average of eight errors per piece, seemed a formidable competitor. But De Rek does not just use her departure to stumble linguistically; she also takes the opportunity to introduce her successor: none other than the eminent Joost de Vries.
Yes, indeed, the Joost de Vries. The man who will soon single-handedly decide which literature deserves media attention, only to then determine at the Dutch Foundation for Literature how much subsidy the books he ignored in the paper will receive. A fine example of a double role, where conflicts of interest and literary power merge into a construction that would be deemed too crude even in a banana republic. One might almost think it is a deliberate parody, were it not that reality needs no satire—it provides it itself. Eminent!
*
A new mantra from Veronique. I use a particular trick in the mastering process where I invert the polarity of the microphone on certain sections. This causes the voice to phase differently with the rest of the music. A technique I came up with myself—at least, I couldn’t find anything on Google indicating that others do it the same way.
My usual compressors—the P11 Abyss, the MHB Green. Often an Eiosis on drums and, of course, the Kirchoff. The benefit of self-experimentation rather than learning everything from tutorials is discovering tricks that perhaps no one else uses, allowing you to create your own sound.
The P11 Abyss cannot be praised enough (nor can the MHB Green, for that matter)—it’s a machine with a learning curve, but once you understand how it works, it becomes indispensable.
Greetings from your button fetishist,
Martinus Benders, 15-03-2025