Hunting Lizards in the Dark
During the killings unaware
we walked along the lakes.
You spoke of Szymanowski,
I studied a rook
picking at dog shit.
Each of us caught up in ourselves
surrounded by a shell of
ignorance
that protects our prejudices.
The holists believe that a
butterfly in the Himalayas
with the flap of a wing can
influence the climate
in Antarctica. It may be true.
But where the tanks roll in
and flesh and blood drip from the
trees
Searching for truth is like
hunting lizards
in the dark. The grapes are from
South Africa,
the rice from Pakistan, the dates
grown in Iran.
We support the idea of open
borders
for fruit and vegetables,
but however we twist and turn
the ass is at the back.
The dead are buried deep inside
the newspaper,
so that we, unaffected, can sit
on a bench
on the outskirts of paradise
and dream of butterflies.
© Niels Hav
Translated by P. K. Brask &
Patrick Friesen
Women of Copenhagen
I have once again fallen in love
this time with five different
women during a ride
on the number 40 bus from
Njalsgade to Østerbro.
How is one to gain control of
one’s life under such conditions?
One wore a fur coat, another red
wellingtons.
One of them was reading a
newspaper, the other Heidegger
- and the streets were flooded
with rain.
At Amager Boulevard a drenched
princess entered,
euphoric and furious, and I fell
for her utterly.
But she jumped off at the police
station
and was replaced by two sirens with
flaming kerchiefs,
who spoke shrilly with each other
in Pakistani
all the way to the Municipal
Hospital while the bus boiled
in poetry. They were sisters and
equally beautiful,
so I lost my heart to both of
them and immediately planned
a new life in a village near
Rawalpindi
where children grow up in the
scent of hibiscus
while their desperate mothers
sing heartbreaking songs
as dusk settles over the
Pakistani plains.
But they didn’t see me!
And the one wearing a fur coat
cried beneath
her glove when she got off at
Farimagsgade.
The girl reading Heidegger
suddenly shut her book
and looked directly at me with a
scornfully smile,
as if she’d suddenly caught a
glimpse of Mr. Nobody
in his very own insignificance.
And that’s how my heart broke for
the fifth time,
when she got up and left the bus
with all the others.
Life is so brutal!
I continued for two more stops
before giving up.
It always ends like that: You
stand alone
on the kerb, sucking on a
cigarette,
wound up and mildly unhappy.
© Niels Hav
Translated by P.K. Brask &
Patrick Friesen
In Defense of Poets
What are we to do about the
poets?
Life's rough on them
they look so pitiful dressed in
black
their skin blue from internal
blizzards.
Poetry is a horrible disease,
the infected walk about
complaining
their screams pollute the
atmosphere like leaks
from atomic power stations of the
mind. It's so psychotic
Poetry is a tyrant
it keeps people awake at night
and destroys marriages
it draws people out to desolate
cottages in mid-winter
where they sit in pain wearing
earmuffs and thick scarves.
Imagine the torture.
Poetry is a pest -
worse than gonorrhea, a terrible
abomination.
But consider poets it's hard for
them
bear with them!
They are hysterical as if they
are expecting twins
they gnash their teeth while
sleeping, they eat dirt
and grass. They stay out in the
howling wind for hours
tormented by astounding
metaphors.
Every day is a holy day for them.
Oh please, take pity on the poets
they are deaf and blind
help them through traffic where
they stagger about
with their invisible handicap
remembering all sorts of stuff.
Now and then one of them stops
to listen for a distant siren.
Show consideration for them.
Poets are like insane children
who've been chased from their
homes by the entire family.
Pray for them
they are born unhappy
their mothers have cried for them
sought the assistance of doctors
and lawyers,
until they had to give up
for fear of loosing their own
minds.
Oh, cry for the poets!
Nothing can save them.
Infested with poetry like secret
lepers
they are incarcerated in their
own fantasy world
a gruesome ghetto filled with
demons
and vindictive ghosts.
When on a clear summer's day the
sun shining brightly
you see a poor poet
come wobbling out of the
apartment block, looking pale
like a cadaver and disfigured by
speculations
then walk up and help him.
Tie his shoelaces, lead him to
the park
and help him sit down on a bench
in the sun. Sing to him a little
buy him an ice cream and tell him
a story
because he's so sad.
He's completely ruined by poetry.
Translated by P.K. Brask &
Patrick Friesen
© Niels Hav
Epigram
You can spend an entire life
in the company of words
not ever finding
the right one.
Just like a wretched fish
wrapped in Hungarian newspapers.
For one thing it is dead,
for another it doesn't understand
Hungarian.
© Niels Hav
Translation: P.K. Brask &
Patrick Friesen
My Fantastic Pen
I prefer writing
with a used pen found in the street
or with a promotional pen, gladly
one from the electricians,
the gas station or the bank.
Not just because they are cheap
(free),
but I imagine that such an
implement
will fuse my writing with
industry
the sweat of skilled labourers,
administrative offices
and the mystery of all existence.
Once I wrote meticulous poems
with a fountain pen
- pure poetry about purely
nothing
but now I like shit on my paper
tears and snot.
Poetry is not for sissies!
A poem must be just as honest as
the Dow Jones index
- a mixture of reality and sheer
bluff.
What has one grown too sensitive
for?
Not much.
That’s why I keep my eye on the
bond market
and serious pieces of paper. The
stock exchange
belongs to reality – just like
poetry.
And that’s why I’m so happy about
this ball point pen
from the bank, which I found one
dark night
in front of a closed convenience
store. It smells
faintly of dog piss, and it
writes fantastically.
© Niels Hav
Translation: P.K. Brask & Patrick
Friesen
When I Go Blind
Love makes blind –
and every single day as the blind
man
shuffles along with his cane
traffic comes to a complete stop
while God’s angels ascend and
descend –
and the eye specialist closes his
clinic.
Love makes blind, but sex is
harmless;
there’s nothing wrong with my
eyesight
I can see everything.
That’s why my love poems are such
failures.
Eyes closed I whisper into the
phone
and outside the train station the
blind man stands,
a holy evangelist
humming in the rain
– crippled by love.
The new lovers kiss each other’s
fingertips
I do know that.
© Niels Hav - Translated by P.K.
Brask
On His Blindness
1
Is it cheaper now, I wonder,
to write in ink, since Borges
dictated
his labyrinthine tales in Buenos
Aires?
The Homer of the Argentine
considered words to be
symbols we share with others. “I
believe abstract
aesthetics to be a vain
illusion,” he wrote
in one of his prefaces, where he
delighted in renouncing
originality. Almost without
affectation. Only after going
blind did he make eye-contact
with John Milton
in his Paradise Lost.
2
Love makes blind. But it took
forty years!
Forty years of preliminary
studies, imitation and outbursts
of rage when the dreamtiger
escaped. Now and then he’d
consult oculists, each time a
disappointment. He studied
Joyce, who must have loved Nora,
though he never went
completely blind. Only when
Alonso Quixano lost his
mind and called himself Don
Quixote did he leave his
father’s library; and not until
forty years after finding
love in Geneva did Borges go
blind –
as blind as Beethoven was deaf!
3
He worked in the dark and
polished his sentences
in memory until they sparkled
from sheer metaphysics.
“If one is a poet, one is always
a poet, and all the time
assailed by poetry.” Borges
absorbed nourishment
from his misfortune and replaced
the visible world
with sagas and Old English verse,
thereby transforming
blindness into a gift: Only now
did he come eye-level
with Homer, and only now was he
able to see deep
into the dark, wide world and
into the dizzying
moment that is eternity.
© Niels Hav
Translation Martin Aitken
Encouragement
Isn’t it an uplifting thought
that in a few decades we
and this whole confused epoch
with its cynical presidents,
wornout arguments,
mawkish TV hosts, dim
journalists,
and the complete crapitalistic
jubilant choir
will be gone? For all time!
We will disappear.
They will disappear.
I will disappear.
You will disappear.
It will all disappear.
Hurrah!
© Niels Hav
Translated by P. K. Brask &
Patrick Friesen
Sunrise in Bucharest
Blue and cloudy Sunday morning,
Bucharest
6 o'clock. Will it rain or not?
The sun is burning far away in
God's big factory,
no one in the streets
only that big queue waiting for
sunrise or for some heavy
fantasy-newspapers filled with
hope & glory
(we badly need them).
On a green motorbike Humphrey
Bogart riding along
Şoseaua Kiseleff under those
green tree-crowns.
Yes, I like this movie
without a leading part - only we
subordinate characters
working hard on our own destiny.
At night when everything is
perfectly clear
our brains are shinning, but at
dawn they are almost empty,
as in those few expensive minutes
in a taxi
driving through Bucharest, where
I was completely lost
and at home for a few days.
If you exchange a daydream for
reality
you have lost a good daydream.
And so what! Some day you will
get another one
like this singular
Sunday-morning-movie
shot in Bucharest, daybreak.
Everything can happen now, and it
will!
From now on that filmstrip will
run in my head
every time I see the weather
forecast on TV.
Will it rain or not? I don't
know,
but God really has to make up his
mind!
© Niels Hav
We Are Here
I got lost in a strange part of
town.
All streets ran steeply upward,
quick-footed people
ran by me dressed in
light-coloured clothes
and looking as though they were
carrying light things in their bags.
I stopped someone for directions
and immediately I stood in the
middle of a clump
of friendly faces. - Where do you
want to go?
I began explaining. They
listened,
smiling, as if for the first time
they were hearing a dead dialect.
Then they began speaking one on
top of another
and pointing in all directions.
I pulled out my map. Eagerly it
was opened
and studied with interest. -
Where are we?
I asked with a finger on the map.
They looked at me and as a chorus
repeated my question.
Then they all broke into hearty
laughter,
I laughed too, we were witnessing
high
comedy. – Here, said one of them
and pointed
to the ground where we stood. –
We are here!
© Niels Hav
Translated by P.K. Brask &
Patrick Friesen
Wittgensteins Cat
For two years Wittgenstein sat in
Vienna
drawing up a house plan for his
sister.
‘Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent.’
He tried to draw it!
And silence took the shape of a
house.
So he went off to Cambridge to
teach
and puzzle over the pleonasm of
language.
Plagued by nonsense. ‘In this
world
everything is what it is,
and everything happens as it
happens.’
The cat miaows at the door.
He lets her in.
© Niels Hav
Translated by Heather Spears
The anesthetists discuss Astronomy
The anesthetists
discuss astronomy
elevating in the lift
while patients arrive in taxis
accompanied or not by family.
The universe
consists of 100 billion galaxies.
If there are sentient civilizations
on just a millionth of those planets
we are far from alone.
Outside: cold rain,
December.
A sick person
sitting in the waiting room
among frayed magazines
with his threadbare life
has only one single prayer.
elevating in the lift
while patients arrive in taxis
accompanied or not by family.
The universe
consists of 100 billion galaxies.
If there are sentient civilizations
on just a millionth of those planets
we are far from alone.
Outside: cold rain,
December.
A sick person
sitting in the waiting room
among frayed magazines
with his threadbare life
has only one single prayer.
© Niels Hav - translated by P. K. Brask
* First published in A New Ulster Magazine
Raised on a farm in western Denmark, Niels Hav today resides in the most
colourful and multiethnic part of the capital. He has travelled widely in
Europe, Asia, North and South America.
In an
interview Niels Hav recently says:
“I'm trapped in the Latin alphabet. Even if I
communicate in English, I'm still isolated from half of the world. How many
alphabets are there on our planet? Nobody knows for sure, but alone Chinese,
Hindi, Bengali and other Asian alphabets are used by more than one third of the
planet's population. And then there is the Arabic alphabet used by a billion.
Many Arab and Chinese writers have the advantage over European colleagues, they
are able to handle two alphabets. I wish my ignorance wasn't so extensive.”
“... Niels Hav's We Are Here,
... brings to us a selection from the works of one of Denmark's most talented
living poets and is all the more welcome for that reason...” - Frank
Hugus, The Literary Review.
Bibliography
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Şî'ri bo trisnokekan
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Al-Rooh Tarqos Fee
Mahdiha,
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Tehran 2015.
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2013.
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stories translated
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2011.
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U Odbranu Pesnika. Poetry translated by
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Nenadeina
Sreka. Poetry translated by Zoja Drunova. Spektar Press,
Macedonia1997.
Når jeg bliver blind. Poetry - Gyldendal, 1995.
God's blue Morris. Poetry translated by
Patrick Friesen & P.K. Brask, Crane
Editions, 1993.
Den iranske sommer. Short stories - Gyldendal, 1990.
Ildfuglen, okay. Poetry - Hekla, 1987.
Sjælens Geografi. Poetry - Hekla, 1984.
Øjeblikket er en åbning. Short stories - Hekla, 1983.
Glæden sidder i kroppen. Poetry – Jorinde & Joringel, 1982
Afmægtighed forbudt. Short stories - Hekla, 1981.