Chinese Whispers 2008
In the Chinese Whispers project a Dutch poem is translated from one language to another during the course of the festival week and finally back into Dutch on the final day, with often surprising and sometimes hilarious results. Michele Hutchison talks to Peter van Lier as his poem ‘Psalm 105’ is whispered from Dutch to English to Hindi to German to Japanese to French and back into Dutch during the 39th Poetry International festival in Rotterdam.
What was the inspiration for this poem?
I wrote ‘Psalm 105’ as part of a cycle about the psalms. I took a quote from the actual psalm which you see at the end of the poem in quotation marks and wrote a complete new poem around it. For me it was important to write a modern psalm. It looks a little bit like a fairy tale now — a completely imaginary story.
What aspect of the original psalm interested you?
The atmosphere of the original was something I wanted to maintain. This is because in the original psalm there is something like the sound of ringing bells and beating drums but also, what surprised me when I read it, of a lament. The tone of it reminded me of a lament.
This poem is a complete story in itself. It is a little bit inspired by the bible – I used the Protestant version of the Dutch translation and there the sentences are longer and old-fashioned in language, with complicated clauses.
Is your poem inspired by an actual event or personal experience?
It’s all an imaginary event as I said. I wrote six or seven psalms. What inspired me was language and mostly the tone, more than the content. The rhythm of the poem is the most important thing to me. I do that with enjambment. It doesn’t rhyme. Sometimes I do write poetry with a lot of white space or one word on a line, but this poem is more compact and dense.
Are you a postmodernist?
Some critics described these poems as postmodernism but I think I’ve come through that. I don’t like the fact that there’s no link to reality in postmodernism, that it’s only about language. I try to link all my poems to reality by using my imagination. I like a narrative structure in poems, that is also not very postmodern. Postmodernism is more fragmented.
What do you expect will be lost in the translations?
Some things are actually being added because of the background of the psalm which has its own baggage. For example, the Indian poet Mangaglesh Dabral who is working on it now asked me if the girls in the poem were Jews, but this wasn’t something I’d thought about. He had interpreted the poem as a Holocaust story. I told him only the quote is biblical, the rest is invented. It’s not a direct interpretation of the bible.
What do you think about poetry translation in general?
Translations of foreign poets into Dutch are very important to me. I can’t read French, only English and a little German. French poetry comes to me only in translation.
I’m not worried about my own work being translated. I’m always happy to be translated.
Even if things change?
Of course things change. But fortunately my poems do not rhyme. For the English translations of my festival performances I was in contact with the translator, so I had some input and an overview of the process. For me it’s still a luxury to be translated.
Are you a city or country poet?
Country poetry is more my style, but I also write about cities. Still, nature has a place in most of my city poems, I write a lot about parks, about people in parks.
