dart

Ik lees momenteel een lang gedicht over een (Engelse) rivier: Dart van Alice Oswald. Voor het daadwerkelijk begint, legt Oswald kort uit:

‘This poem is made from the language of the people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I've been recording conversations with people who know the river. I've used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters – linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people of even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river's mutterings.’

Het is niet makkelijk, niet alleen de stem veranderd maar ook de vorm, de toon, de snelheid; een rivier veranderd eveneens van inhoud, diepte, snelheid, breedte. Niet makkelijk, wel de moeite waard. Ik onderstreep veel zinnen. Ik ben nog lang niet bij de zee, toch alvast een aantal regels (geplukt van pagina's 1 t/m 21):

trying to summon itself by speaking . . .

in each eel a fingerwidth of sea

seeing the cold floating spread out above the morning

turning the loneliness in all directions

the whole / unfolding emptiness branching and reaching / and bending over itself

but there's roots growing round my mouth

a white feather on the water keeping dry

I've seen him / taking the shape of the sky, a bird, a blade, / a fallen leaf, a stone

I let time go as slow as moss, I stand / and try to get the dragonflies to land / their gypsy-coloured engines on my hand

all the way from Iceland, from the Faroes, / a three-sea-winter fish coming up on the spate, / on the full moon, when the river spreads out // a thousand feet between Holne and Dartmeet and he climbs it, / up the trickiest line, maybe / maybe down-flowing water has an upcurrent nobody knows / it takes your breath away, / generations of them inscribed into this river

I walk across the weir, on the phone in the middle of the river

you can hear water / cooped up in moss and moving / slowly uphill through lean-to trees / where every day the sun gets twisted and shut / with the weak sound of the wind / rubbing one indolent twig upon another

It's Spring, you can work in a wood and feel the earth turning

They say all rivers were once fallen trees.

Oaks whose arms / are whole trees

the surface looked mad

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