Radna Fabias Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer
first i seek your body in the city i don’t find it of course but i’m not in a hurry so patiently i unscrew body parts from passers-by and quietly use them to assemble yours i manage pretty well i only need the color
i seek your color in the old brick paving of a dead, crowded street i seek you in the polished rails the train glides over i seek you in crow charcoal asphalt and everything black between 7 and 8 in the morning i find you on the skin of the electric wires over the entire city i go up on tiptoes but still can’t reach
you are in the hair of the woman crying in church, the beards of pious men, the soles of the shoes of the girl in the grass, the window frames of the old building where a bride is posing for a photographer i find you in bark tree trunks rocks and the sand at three different locations in my country of birth but customs won’t let me take your color back
i find you by the sea on the piles under the pier of course i find you by the sea first on the wing of a hungry gull then i find you above the sea in the night that falls to be like you
ik zoek je in de stad
ik zoek eerst je lijf in de stad dat vind ik natuurlijk niet, maar ik heb alle tijd dus ik schroef geduldig lichaamsdelen van passanten en bouw daarmee koest je lichaam op het gaat me best goed af ik moet het alleen nog inkleuren
ik zoek je kleur in de oude klinkers van een dode, volle straat ik zoek je in de geslepen rails waar de trein overheen glijdt ik zoek je in kraai houtskool asfalt en alle dingen zwart tussen 7 en 8 uur ’s ochtends vind ik je op de huid van de elektriciteitsdraden boven de hele stad ik ga op mijn tenen staan, maar ik kan er niet bij
je bent in het haar van de huilende vrouw in de kerk, de baarden van vrome mannen, de schoenzool van het meisje in het gras, de kozijnen van het oude gebouw waar een bruid voor een fotograaf poseert ik vind je in boomschors boomstam rotsen en het zand op drie verschillende plekken in mijn geboorteland maar ik mag van de douane je kleur niet meenemen
ik vind je in het onderstel van de pier bij de zee natuurlijk vind ik je aan zee je zit eerst in de vleugel van een hongerige meeuw dan vind ik je boven de zee in de nacht die valt om op jou te lijken
Translating this work I’ve been lucky enough to consult the poet, who has revealed references, explained images and clarified ambiguities. Here, for example, I translated “klinkers” as “brick paving," but was surprised to see that French translator Daniël Cunin had translated it as “voyelles,” “vowels.” Fabias explained that it could be either. I shouldn’t have been surprised. A translator might have to choose, but with Fabias it’s always both.
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"It wasn’t until almost 25 years later that I discovered that Officer Dickey had never sat in the pilot’s glass treasure hole of blue light—not on a mission, anyway. (Maybe he sat in there to pose for a photograph.) That the creator of this wonderwork—which, if there is any justice, will be read by lovers of language from here to eternity—had actually washed out of flight school on his first try at soloing as an aviation cadet."
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"The most influential genre of Classical Chinese Poetry is called ‘regulated verse’ (各路诗), and these forms gather the world into words and refold them into inter-resonant patterns on a cosmological scale. Each monosyllabic word must be stacked in relation to the one before and after, above and below until the whole rests upon a final balanced point, as relaxed and exact as a cairn of transparent quartz."
