Instead of Silence  – reviewed by Ken Head

Instead of Silence:  Selected Poems:  Miriam Van hee
Translated by Judith Wilkinson
Shoestring Press, 2007  
www.shoestringpress.com
ISBN 13:  978 1 904886 45 7
ISBN 10: 1 904886 45 0
Paperback £8.95 , 74pp

Miriam Van hee was born in Ghent in 1952 and is widely regarded as one of Belgium’s finest poets, although she writes both in Flemish and Dutch. Having studied Slavic Philology at the University of Ghent, she has since worked as a lecturer in Russian at the Interpreters’ Academy in Antwerp. She has published eight collections to date, together with translations of the work of other important poets including Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. She has also won a number of awards and seen her work translated into French, Polish, Swedish and Lithuanian, with Austrian and Mexican collections in preparation. Instead of Silence offers poems selected from six collections published between 1980 and 2002 and represents not only the first translation of her poetry into English, but also an acknowledgement of the standing of her translator, Judith Wilkinson, a poet herself, whose first chapbook of translations from Flemish and Dutch poetry, In An Unguarded Moment, was published online in 2006 by www.languageandculture.net

In her introduction to this edition, Wilkinson remembers an email from Van hee in which the poet states her preference for plainer, more everyday translation and says of her work in general that she likes “a certain bareness”. The truth of this becomes apparent, because many of the poems have no titles, make no use of the upper case and are punctuated entirely by rhythm, line breaks and the flow of thought. They are spare but at the same time highly focused, sober but allusive, brief but needing to be read with care. Nothing is made easy and it remains for the reader to explore the spaces between the words, where interpretation takes place. A good example is the second of two short poems jointly entitled The Camp, from the 1980 collection Interior and quoted here in full:

that I never walked there
in the mornings in the fog
that I have always worn
clothes that fitted nicely that I
have read books that belonged to me
that I have never stolen

that I have never had to choose.

Rather than explain that overwhelming last line with its rare and very deliberate use of the full-stop after the final crucial verb, this reviewer would remind the reader of William Styron’s great novel Sophie’s Choice and say no more. Good poems make demands on their readers, take us to places we might not always choose to visit and one of the effects of Van hee’s economy and brevity is to create perspectives that encourages such difficult but important journeys. As she writes in Photograph, “a film does not end/without an explanation”. Our lives are intricate patchworks quilted by many hands and these clear-sighted, compassionate poems explore with unflinching concentration the sometimes painful complexities of the stitching. They meditate, both sombrely and lyrically, upon the business of being human, crossing many landscapes, bearing moving witness to the effects of war and social change, of loss and dispossession, laying bare the experience of modern urban life, of love and family. They deserve to be widely read.

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