This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders.
For the ‘normal man,’ the idea of waking up around five every morning to work on poetry for hours, and considering that a great privilege, is indistinguishable from madness. The average person has only two drivers to do anything: money and sex. If your motivations differ, you’re seen as suspect—either you belong in an asylum (“incomprehensible reasoning!”) or at the very least, you’re a writer possessed by the devil. After all, who else would put so much effort into something when the usual incentives are absent?
This morning, I wrote the poems ‘Porcelain’ and ‘Venice, August 2024,’ and I also translated two poems, one by Berryman and another by Auden.
While writing, I came across this picture of Auden in Venice, attending the premiere of The Rake’s Progress. Suddenly, it dawned on me to translate it as Harkenvooruitgang.
The libretto Auden wrote for Stravinsky is something I cite in my collection, and I’ve also translated “No, Plato, No” in connection with another poem.
The judges call it genocide, while we, the politicians, have a different opinion. That’s a peculiar phenomenon, especially when those same politicians start comparing minorities to a zit that needs to be popped, use terms like “Moroccan scum,” and when the Black Lackey then comes forward to declare that all of this must remain secret. Another political play, and the curtain’s already closing.
To me, it feels more like a nightmare than a state ruled by law. But then again, I’m just a little poet who inexplicably toils away at something even more incomprehensible every day at five in the morning. I really should have been born in a garlic country, as I’m not particularly fond of the parasites of power who constantly provoke minorities while trying to sell it to us as some kind of popular form of judgment.
“Move along, nothing to see here…”
Ah, and then a brilliant new title strikes me:
‘The Cheat Sheet King’
So now, I have two new books in the pipeline: ‘Harkenvooruitgang’ and ‘The Cheat Sheet King.’
My new collection is really turning out great, or at least that’s how it feels to me. I’ve already managed to write and translate about 200 pages. I read that Wilma de Rek has left Volkskrant after 3000 years. ‘Harkenvooruitgang,’ a near-perfect title.
Maybe it was a missed opportunity that I didn’t go to Venice to see the opera, although it wasn’t playing at all—and the premiere was in 1951, twenty years before I was born.
Politicians, always residing in their inverted pyramid, will likely argue that 1971 is the year Benders died. But that’s incorrect.
Benders didn’t die. He watched, he wrote, he collected cheat sheets and rakes.
Chorus: He watched, he wrote, he collected cheat sheets and rakes.
Regards,
Martinus Benders, 16-11-2024
