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.



Monday, December 9, 2019

Poems on China in 1979 from 'Icons by Daylight'



[In the fall of 1979, I was sent to Mainland China for three months to conduct research on the current status of foreign literature in the PRC. Sights, scenes, and sentiments garnered during that trip inspired me to write a sequence of poems in Dutch that were later published in the literary magazine De gids and still later as part of my first book of poems, Ikonen bij daglicht, which was published in Amsterdam by Querido in 1982.
In fall 2019, I finally made the following English translations, followed in some cases by background notes.
As always, to emphasize that poetry should not be bound by the actualities of public time, I transcribe Chinese place-names not by the contemporary Hanyu pinyin system but using the older established English spellings.]

Hail
   Peking

It can happen so suddenly:
a skyful of stones
arisen from water.

Did it come from lakes in the South,
deserts to westward? Seek no explanation
on earth: where we are now

is reality. Look:
every human here
wears a mask. Calm, patient,

far above the crossings
of the Ten Thousand Streets stands
one white bus dead still.



(On ‘Hail’)

In strophe 3, the ‘masks’ were suggested by the sight of denizens of Peking wearing white masks to shield their noses, mouths, and throats against the combination of winter cold and the dust or coal particles in the ambient air.

In the last strophe, there is a slight technical echo of classical Chinese poetry, in which ‘parallelism’ is a standard structuring device. An element which has already been mentioned is ‘paralleled’ by a following term which is either similar or opposite to it in some respect. In this case, ‘Ten Thousand’ – in itself a parody of translations from Chinese in which it actually just means ‘numberless’ – is contrasted with ‘one.’ The inveterate seeker for significances might note that in this case there is only ‘one’ bus covering ‘ten thousand’ streets – an image of scarcity (?).



Peasant baby
   Chengtu

The white-haired androgyne who’ll be
your grandparent
already has teeth.

For you it’s still to come:
breathing, crying,
knowledge as to Coca-Cola, Sony,

and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Take it slow: a lifetime. These days
are here to stay.

The androgyne beyond all years,
standing on the threshold
toothbrush in hand

clears her throat on a swig of morning sun,
spits on her own shadow.



(On ‘Peasant baby’)

Such ‘Western’ or ‘capitalist’ things as Coca-Cola or Sony were new-fangled in the China of 1979 in which I as a traveler got the inspiration for these poems. They had to be fitted in somehow with the continuing orthodoxy of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
In the fourth strophe, the androgyne stands ‘toothbrush in hand’ because she is one of the many people one could see early in the morning brushing their teeth outdoors, typically with a metal or pottery mug in the other hand.
The last two lines could be taken to imply that the androgyne, who is already ‘beyond all years,’ stands above the come-and-go of worldly politics. To her, the ‘morning sun’ is not Mao Zedong, whom a popular slogan called ‘the reddest red sun in our hearts,’ but just something to clear her throat on.



Earthquake
   Peking

When the ground uprises
it looks as if the threshold
was lowered.

Make no mistake: what peels off
is paint: the walls
stay standing.

It is true
that the light has lifted:
grass still grows only

on the driest roofs,
and the only remaining green
is a garbage can.



(On ‘Earthquake’)

In Peking one could indeed see grass, at least a few blades of it, growing on roofs. It had rooted in the windblown soil that had found its way up there.
For me personally, this harked back to THE poem which had first turned me on to modern Chinese poetry – Bian Zhilin’s ‘Grass on the Wall’, which I had first read in Kai-yu Hsu’s translation.
The relevant lines (from Hsu's Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry, p. 165) were


Just think, there are people who spend all their days
Dreaming a little and watching the wall a little,
While the grass on the wall turns tall and then yellow.

In Peking in 1979, garbage cans were green.


To the ferry-pilot girl
   Hangchow

How many centuries have you waited
to bring me to the other side
this afternoon?

I, who just this autumn
became for you a foreigner
to see you –

we’re off! Lift that apple-red
scarf a little higher: cover your cheeks
or I’ll see your lips.

O wield that rudder slowly –
lest all too soon the shadow line
of yonder shore be clear, be merely willows.




The Altar of the Moon
   Peking

The Altar of the Moon
is a clump of old men
playing chess.

Now the last goddess
has been driven out, all the gates
are open. There’s even

a sun: pale, still learning,
helped out here and there
by leaves on autumn trees.

Unseen women
shuffle, drag long brooms,
watch the ground before them.

No man will live here long enough
to make new moves:
every one on feet of stone already,

pinned in place securely
by the long-as-ever nails
of a banished maiden.


Pumpkin soup
   Peking

‘An army marches on its stomach’; dream trucks
slide across the bottom
of a bowl of boiling water.

And the girl by the roadside
watches: herself in Army dress,
the unpaved intersection. September

by sunlight: pumpkin time,
silent as a full truck
lurching, raising dust, smelling sweet...

There they come, the bearers:
the unbelievable procession of real children,
each carrying a bowl in both hands.



(On ‘Pumpkin soup’)

‘An army marches on its stomach’ is a famous dictum by the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831). In other words, success in warfare depends on being able to solve homely logistic problems like keeping the troops fed.
In 1979 when I was in China, women and girls still regularly wore military-style uniforms.




Summer Palace
   Peking

Here, in olden times
they built a whole Palace
from the scent of cinnamon –

sharp? heady? ‘Pluck a few leaves...’
Walk along the pond. See
locked pavilions, lotus leaves

beyond imagining. No Buddha
is watching you. ‘Rubbing these,
the Essence emerges...’ Or are you really hungry?

(Hiding under grey hair
the girlfriend of someone’s youth is selling
sweet, lukewarm buns.)

Go ahead, try standing in line
with thousands of living beings,
all with bowl-shaped hands.

‘Thus, o Monks,
was all that had once been desired
called into being.’



(On ‘Summer Palace’)

The parts in quotation marks form a sub-text in the style of English translations of Buddhist scriptures.

In China in 1979, because I could speak Chinese I was allowed to roam the cities alone, and had at least the illusion that my movements were not being monitored. In other words, not even a Buddha was watching me.


Monday, October 7, 2019

Gedicht: 'In den vreemde logerend, denk ik aan mijn naderende drieënzeventigste verjaardag'


Het wit van deze volle maan
doet mij denken aan destijds
een jarretelgordel.

Dat nu al herfstwind schuurt
over de verlaten vlonder
is niets nieuws.

Ik heb geen jacht dat dobbert
dat de wind vannacht
zal keren.

Wáár mijn toekomstige graf al
klaarligt, mag voor nu
nog Joost weten.


--Lloyd Haft