literature

P.C. Evans’ Choice: Sasja Janssen and K. Michel

Every month, a translator of Dutch into English gives literary tips by answering two questions: which translated book by a Flemish or Dutch author should everyone read? And, which book deserves an English translation? To get publishers excited, an excerpt has already been translated. Amsterdam-based Welsh poet and translator P.C. Evans treats us to beautiful verses by fellow poets.

Must read: 'Virgula' by Sasja Janssen

Two recent collections that I particularly admire are Habitus by Radna Fabias, profiled on this site by Egan Garr and translated by David Colmer, and Virgula by Sasja Janssen, translated by Michele Hutchison.

Janssen’s collection is a case study in originality: her anthropomorphism of the Virgula, the Latin comma transforms it by turns into a friend, goddess, she-devil, confidant and muse. Her ambitious poems are a lashed raft of disparate imagery and fragments of life propelled on a current of dependant and independent clauses as she taps into a stream of dynamic expressionism.

‘and everything cracks with dryness as though it’s raining / it cracks with wrath, enough evil for the calyxes / to be nipped in the bud, enough late evenings / for the bees, they come with its sugary death, / can’t even be counted, all those openings, / they spirit away my eyes’

If you would like to read my review of Virgula, please see the current issue of PN Review. I also recommend the September 2021 issue of PN Review for Hutchison’s interview with Radna Fabias, Gloriously Filthy Tongues.

Sasja Janssen, Virgula, translated by Michele Hutchison, Prototype, London, 2024, 64pp

To be translated: 'Speling zoeken' by K. Michel

Two of the most important Dutch-language poets currently writing are Eva Gerlach and K. Michel. Neither has yet published a full collection in English.

Gerlach is a poet of the intense short lyric – formal, personal, and frequently with a dark undercurrent. She composes her poems under the pressure of a refracted observation of reality; the perspective is precise, disconcerting, alienating, but compelling.

Michel is by turns intelligently absurd, comical and philosophical. His images and phrase-making are the most startlingly original in the Dutch language. He was an editor of the influential magazine Raster, and has translated Octavio Paz.

The following translation is taken from my anthology of Dutch poets, Grand Larcenies (Carcanet).

Rule of Thumb

If the house is infested, or so the saying goes
in the village that my grandparents called home
lock a pig in it for the night
and the bad spirit will crawl into it
and by morning the house will be clean

In the construction that each life is
a day will arrive that is known
as ‘good advice doesn’t come cheap’. A leak
will have daubed the walls with Rorschach forms
and there’ll be a reek of something once
stashed away in a distant game

If that is the case, take a look around the table and try
to figure out who the shmuck may be
which is a golden rule for a poker player
and if you can’t make out who the mark might be
that leaves just one possibility

So on this new day I say
to the face in the shaving mirror
if you find yourself in a hole quit digging, know
it may be time for you to say ow & ok
take a look around, rifle through every room
and if you can’t find the pig
it’s you

K. Michel, Speling zoeken (selected poems), Olympus/Atlas Contact, Amsterdam, 2016, 240pp

• K. Michel
• P.C. Evans
• sasja janssen