After Ed Hoornik

Tinus van Doorn's Vlaamse kermis 'Flemish Fair' (1934), Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden.

Working Words
After Ed Hoornik, ‘Hebben en zijn’

Was it on the whiteboard or blackboard 
that I first saw the verbs avoir and être  
appearing as working words, shallow fjords 
to worklihood and spectre?

Having is nothing. Is war. Is not living.
Is of the world and its iconic reign.
Being is above things, elevated, giving –
so full it bursts semiotic in colic pain.

Having is hard. Is body. Is birth.
Is to hunger the earth. To thirst.
To sentence. To syntax. To mercurial might.

To be is soul. Awakening. Keeking
up at the stars; langsome seeking,
peeling a poem from paper, lulling it to light.

Angeline King


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The walls in Leiden's Lakenhal Museum

Hebben en Zijn

Op school stonden ze op het bord geschreven.
Het werkwoord hebben en het werkwoord zijn;
Hiermee was tijd, was eeuwigheid gegeven,
De ene werklijkheid, de andre schijn.

Hebben is niets. Is oorlog. Is niet leven.
Is van de wereld en haar goden zijn.
Zijn is, boven die dingen uitgeheven,
Vervuld worden van goddelijke pijn.

Hebben is hard. Is lichaam. Is twee borsten.
Is naar de aarde hongeren en dorsten.
Is enkel zinnen, enkel botte plicht.

Zijn is de ziel, is luisteren, is wijken,
Is kind worden en naar de sterren kijken,
En daarheen langzaam worden opgelicht.

Ed Hoornik

Hoornik, Ed. 'Op school stonden ze...' Het menselijk bestaan. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1952

The Lakenhal Museum in Leiden, hidden behind a courtyard.

This poem was inspired by a visit to the Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden. Leiden is famous for its poetry, which can be found on many of the gable ends, and here it was again inside this beautiful building. I had lived in three locations in Leiden from 2001 to 2004, and one of my apartments was on the Oude Vest across the road from the museum; yet I’d walked past it every day, never questioning what lay inside. It wasn’t until I was a tourist in Leiden years later that I began to explore the town’s impressive museums. 

Now, I attended Dutch classes for three years, but that was a long time ago and I learned conversational Dutch and not literary Dutch. I did not immediately understand the poem upon seeing it on the wall, but the simplicity of the title stood out for me, and the poem appeared to be sonnet in form with some staccato bursts that made it something like a transgression.

What I have written in English is not a direct translation. I open in a classroom, mirroring the original, but learning verbs is not something that children generally do in English-medium schools, unless they are learning a foreign language – or Irish. My first foreign language was French; hence ‘avoir’ and ‘être’. There is the further irony that I ended up living in the Netherlands by accident – after I’d applied for a job in France. (My only ambition in my twenties was to speak French for a living).

The translation for ‘werkwoorden’ is ‘verbs’, but I liked the literal translation ‘working words’.

A good poet never ever slips a rhyme in for the sake of it, but I couldn’t stop myself in this instance. I played with hoard, but that’s Heaney’s word and not mine. Ulfrecksfiord is an old Norse name for Larne, and I learned my verbs in Larne Grammar School, which overlooks the shallow fjords of Larne Lough and the Irish Sea. 

Two dead English cognates were resurrected in this response based on their Dutch equivalents. I went with ‘worklihood’ for ‘reality’, which is inspired by ‘werklijkheid’. I also resurrected ‘spectre’, the old Anglo-Saxon word for a trick of light or illusion.

In the second stanza, I responded to Hoornik’s central conflict directly: ‘Having is nothing. Is war.’ Ed Hoornik was arrested for anti-Nazi activity during the Second World War, and survived a concentration camp. War is still a good friend of ‘having’, of consumerism, of greed. A direct translation was important in this instance.

Hoornik used female breasts as reflections of having. I somehow came to an idea about the male sentence.

Did I stick to the rules of the sonnet? Not really. Ed Hoornik had already broken the syntax rules,  and Dutch verbs often have an extra syllable anyway.

Scots (also Old English) came in quite naturally in the last stanza: ‘to keek’ is a direct translation ‘kijken.’ Also this word has a sort of childlike connotation for me, as I was raised on ‘keek-a-boo’ instead of ‘peek-a-boo.’ At this point, I gave myself permission to indulge in an older Scots word — and indeed older English word, ‘langsome’, a good cousin for ‘langzaam’ in Dutch.

I wanted to end with the idea of tearing poems out of books. Poetry is so often hidden away in journals that only very ‘artsy’ people read. In Leiden, good poetry ends up on walls. And so I sing to poetry a lullaby to compel it out of darkness and into light. 

Halls of Museum De Lakenhal

De zelfopoffering van burgemeester Pieter van der Werff (The Self-Sacrifice of Mayor Pieter van der Werff) by Mattheus Ignatius van Bree (1816–1817), Museum De Lakenhal. The burgomaster is offering his body to the starving citizens of Leiden during the 1574 Spanish siege.