Oberlin College Press

Herman de Coninck

THE PLURAL OF HAPPINESS Selected Poems (translated by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown)

Paper $14.95 (ISBN 0-932440-30-4)

"The translators have shaken his work into unforgettable poems in an English voice that startles and reminds the reader that translation is a magical process that never abandons the original text. Herman de Coninck should be read by a wider audience of American poets and readers who want to see the heights that poetry can reach."
--Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review

"Reading this book, I was amazed again and again by the skill of Bosselaar and Brown. They are both fine poets in their own right and that helps a great deal. They make it hard to imagine that these strange, original, and absolutely fabulous poems were written in any other language but English."
--Charles Simic, from the Foreword

Belgium's leading poet for many decades, Herman de Coninck has never been translated into English and collected in a single extended volume until now. Witty, tender, trenchant, wise, de Coninck's poems range from playful, terse love lyrics to darkly ironic, somberly truthful observations about human experience. The ability to compress huge subjects into small, formally sculptured poems is a hallmark of his style; conversely, what might seem too small to write about is often transformed by his imagination into the very essence of things. De Coninck's tragicomic vision is conditioned by his understanding of war, and of how psychological imperatives and social roles may trap us in self-destructive fates.

"HE HAD HOPED IT COULD BE DONE WITHOUT AUTUMN"

He had hoped it could be done without autumn.
Sudden snow. Ascetic white. Precise cold.
Less thinking about its significance,
more attention to the healing from it--

and get it over with. Not this months-long
stripping of dead boughs, the sorting out,
cleaning up, such endless unraveling of loss
it makes him want to go re-hang leaves on every branch.

Without bitterness, he had hoped it could be done.
But the whole garden rots from hourly blasts
of rain, then seethes from a minute of sun.
Oh, if everything could just expire, and nothing needed to last.

*****

FINGERPRINTS ON A WINDOW

I believe poetry is like fingerprints
on a window, behind which a child who can't sleep
stands waiting for dawn. Mist rises from the earth,

a sigh of sadness. Clouds
provide for twenty-five kinds of light.
In fact, they hold it back: backlight.

It's still too early to be now. But the rivers
are already leaving. They heard the hum
of the sea's silver factories.

My daughter stands next to me by the window. To love her
is the best way to remember all of this.
Birds find, in the forge of their sound, the word

gone, gone, gone.

--Herman de Coninck
translated by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown

Translation copyright c 2006 by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown. May not be reproduced without permission.