Lloyd Haft Blog 漢樂逸: Here Seens (Poems from Where Is the Body...)

Brief bio sketch

Lloyd Haft (1946- ) was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin USA and lived as a boy in Wisconsin, Louisiana and Kansas. In 1968 he graduated from Harvard College and went to Leiden, The Netherlands for graduate study in Chinese (M. A. 1973, Ph. D. 1981). From 1973 to 2004 he taught Chinese language and literature, mostly poetry, at Leiden. His sinological publications include Pien Chih-lin: A Study in Modern Chinese Poetry (1983/2011; published in Chinese translation as 发现卞之琳: 一位西方学者的探索之旅 in 2010) and A Guide to Chinese Literature (with Wilt Idema, 1997). His liberal modern Dutch reading of Laozi's Daode jing was published as Lau-tze's vele wegen by Synthese in September 2017. His newest books in English are translations: Herman Gorter: Selected Poems (Arimei Books, 2021), Zhou Mengdie: 41 Poems (Azoth Books, 2022), and Totally White Room (Poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar, Holland Park Press, 2023). He has translated extensively into English from the Dutch of Herman Gorter, Gerrit Kouwenaar, and Willem Hussem, and from the Chinese of various poets including Lo Fu, Yang Lingye, Bian Zhilin and Zhou Mengdie.

Since the 1980s he has also been active as a poet writing in Dutch and English. He was awarded the Jan Campert Prize for his 1993 bilingual volume Atlantis and the Ida Gerhardt Prize for his 2003 Dutch free-verse readings of the Psalms (republished by Uitgeverij Vesuvius in 2011). His newest books of poetry in Dutch are Intocht (Introit) and Beluisteringen (Soundings), published by Uitgeverij Van Warven in November 2023.

After early retirement in 2004, for a number of years Lloyd Haft spent much of his time in Taiwan with his wife Katie Su. In June 2019 he was named a Distinguished Alumnus of National Taiwan Normal University. In addition to writing and translating, his interests include Song-dynasty philosophy and tai chi. For many years he sang in the choir of a Roman Catholic church of the Eastern Rite in The Hague.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Here Seens (Poems from Where Is the Body...)

(1) Dog on the Stoop

I know he is dying because he calls to me:

animal I never knew. Stranger to this

street myself, to hear him falls to me:

dweller in dark, home in stillnesses.

Nights he also tried, cried to the air

to come across the roofs and bring him kin,

find him a facing body hid somewhere

in the shut hovels, housings of din.

But where do we meet except light is in it?

Where except in morning, where the form

calls to another that has also been it,

also stood with breath steaming warm-

widening out, welcomer out, more

heard crying open, crying door?

(2) Forecast

Falling from heaven haltingly, so slow

it seems staying, dwelling as if for good,

creation happens. Like unarmored snow

withering through a sooted neighborhood

it lingers, dirtying where it is at all...

but clinging, seen in its moment of surrender

to marriage into mud, giving its fall,

that is its light, to dark the never-ender.

Not that its flakes are pretty where they touch

and die, and give their little light to dying.

But each is seed, scattered out of much

so quickly into nothing but its trying,

its tying into nothing, where it’s met

by nothing that can hold it, nearly, yet.

--Lloyd Haft (from Where Is the Body That Will Hold?, 1998)