fijn, het internationale poëzie-event poetry international in rotterdam is weer opgestart.

van 9 tot 13 juni.

ik volg het allemaal op livestream.

van elke voordrachtsessie pluk ik 1 gedicht van 1 auteur.

met eventueel nog enkele aparte commentaren...

EXALTATIONS IN SLEEP

How deep we sink when the light goes out
and the heaviness falls from our shoulders.

Like that the armour that fell from the weary knight,
who’d fought so long in the danse macabre.

Hoc corpus meum. Under cover of night
he’s caught up in himself, free in dreams, chained.

Of all life’s states the most extreme is sleep,
it envelops, overwhelms, leaves us behind.

Extreme: in sleep we struggle with our dreams,
like Don Quixote, until the body finds its rest.

In sleep, how many positions do we assume?
the foetus, the crucified, Laocoön, Holy Shiva.

Lying stiffly on my back, it comes to me –
‘Once I was a tapir, on the banks of the Orinoco’.

© Durs Grünbein
From: Strophen für übermorgen
Publisher: Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2007
© Translation: Karen Leeder
First published on Poetry International, 2015

Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet of his generation in Germany. A modern poeta doctus, his streetwise, ironic style belies at first the deep seriousness of his project and the emotional resonance at its core. His poems range across the most eclectic of material: from classical sources to quantum physics; from the Anglo-American poetic tradition to contemporary neuroscience; from a philosophical celebration of Descartes to an elegy for Dresden.

dit is een foto van durs toen hij nog jong was.

nu is hij een prachtige rijpere man met een baard!

Zie http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/2212/Durs-Grunbein