This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
The Castlefest of Independent Professions
There seems to be a strange kind of misunderstanding about so-called “independent professions.” The titles “attorney” and “legal advisor” are not protected: in the Netherlands at least you don’t need to have undergone any training to call yourself a “attorney.” The same is true for the term “poet.”
But that doesn’t mean credibility doesn’t matter. If I receive a letter from the Letterenfonds in which someone calls themselves a “legal advisor” and I then see on the website that the person is actually listed as “Process Support and Information Management, Team Coordinator,” it gives the impression that “legal advisor” or “lawyer” at the Letterenfonds is a kind of role-playing game everyone takes turns in, like Dungeons & Dragons or Castlefest, where anyone can join in the costume play. If the man can pin the title “legal advisor” on himself, why does the website say something entirely different?
Do these people not understand the entire concept of credibility? On top of that, the man already flouts administrative law in the first letter, but more on that later.
No, calling yourself a “attorney” might not be illegal, but that’s about the extent of it. Especially in independent professions, context and credibility are of vital importance. Those who call themselves “poet” without a highly esteemed body of work (many these days) may only lose their soul, but that soul is precisely the only thing that matters.
I have reached page 326 in translating The Eternal Initiation. This is the middle part of the book where I translate and comment on poems by Yücel, Livaditis, and Tadić.
Dialogue between Spring and Death
I
My chest is torn apart,
solitude that lasted an eternity,
and managed to become words,
what a joy, oh Lord! Subjugated to pain,
continually weeping, brother, oh crying…
Nakkaş Tepe came to our meeting
in such a way, with its poppies
and Nazım Hikmet, to a geological prison.
II
I will explode the darkness within me,
pitch-black water will flow,
from my reed to the earth.
I shall birth a cat,
a cat with dog teeth, and
blackberries will foam from her mouth.
The more you eat them, the more sour they become.
Or a crow, deep purple left behind by my grandfather
the postmaster, will land on the top of the opposite side,
so stuffed by my enemies, no matter
how hard you pelt him, he won’t move.
The poem continues on the next page. I will cruelly deny free readers the rest here. Not because I think it will make any difference: you all won’t read it anyway, because there’s only interest in the quick dopamine of the matrix bubble where you waste your time in slumber. No, I stop here because I very postmodernly want to stop at this strange, deeply purple left-behind crow, the postmaster’s crow, who remains seated no matter how many stones you throw.
It’s a traumatic crow, deep purple like a wound. But at least it isn’t a crow wearing a “heron” badge. There isn’t yet a “culture” where birds pin all sorts of titles on themselves and revel in illusions of grandeur, as they do in our current world. This is the true crow, who is purple because he had to be purple; who remains seated because he knows resistance is futile, for the stones don’t hit him, nor will he ever succumb to the pressure of the trivial.
And in that unwavering silence, where the stones cause no echo, lies the essence of a world that refuses to be known, refuses to be tamed, but follows its course like a slow-flowing river, undisturbed by human madness. It is here, in this purple-inherited darkness, that I let the poem rest, withdrawing my words and leaving the reader only the shadow of what could have been. For it’s not the crow we pelt, but our own inability to embrace the unfathomable, to acknowledge the silence within us as the only truth.
And so, dear reader, I conclude, at this crow, this symbol of steadfastness, who, like all of us, merely waits for the moment when the wound-purple light finally gives way to night.
The first part of Ginneninne, the Celtic Opera. These are the first three pages of the poetry collection. I don’t know the timeframe within which the entire book will eventually be translated. The mist is still trickling. The crow says nothing.
“Trickling” to describe a fine, dripping fall. It’s an almost literal-phonetic metaphor. It also gives the distant association of blood to this mist, and perhaps the descent of the Holy Spirit.
The sacred-narrative working ground of the Opera – eventually, I want to have the work actually performed.
Regards,
Martijn Benders, 10-08-2024