denkend aan holland

If you can read this, you probably don't have a pressing need to learn Dutch. Not only do a very limited number of people speak Dutch, but most of those who do speak other languages as well, usually English or French. Moreover, the few English phrases that refer to the Dutch don't exactly show them in a good light. Double dutch means gibberish, a dutch uncle is hardly avuncular, dutch courage is the kind that comes out of a bottle, and a dutch treat is no treat at all. Similarly, the monyet belanda, or dutch monkey of Borneo is primarily known for its rarity, not its beauty.

But because I like learning useless things, I was looking at a site that introduces English speakers to Dutch, and I found the text and audio of one of the best-known (in the Netherlands, anyway) Dutch poems. I listened to it again and again, trying to match the unfamiliar sounds to the unfamiliar words. The poem is called Remembering Holland, and the beginning describes a riverside landscape of trees and towers, churches and farms, all intricately bound together. But the last four lines reveal the menace underlying the scene, the precariousness of the tranquility, the threat that looms in the background: the ever-hungry sea.

The Dutch have a saying that G-d made the world, but the Dutch made Holland. They pushed back the sea and held it in place with polders and dikes. But polders and dikes weren't always enough. Sooner or later, storms and floods would try to reclaim the land that had been stolen from them. And often they'd succeed.

If you let the words of the poem wash over you, they have an eerie beauty, like the phantom chimes of the bells in the lost churches from the villages swallowed by the sea. And the words have an added resonance because the poem was written in 1936, when it was not only the sea that threatened to engulf the Netherlands. You read the poem knowing that the peaceful countryside it describes will be destroyed, that, in the end, the sea will win. In 1940, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the author, Hendrik Marsman, fled the country. Crossing the English Channel, Marsman's ship was hit by a German torpedo and he drowned.



Denkend aan Holland
Thinking of Holland

zie ik breede rivieren
I see the broad rivers

traag door oneindig
slowly through unending

laagland gaan,
lowlands they run

rijen ondenkbaar
rows of impossibly

ijle populieren
delicate poplars

als hooge pluimen
rise like long feathers

aan den einder staan;
at the horizon

en in de geweldige
and the enormous

ruimte verzonken
expanses encompass

de boerderijen
all of the farmsteads

verspreid door het land,
spread through the land

boomgroepen, dorpen
tree clusters, villages

geknotte torens,
foreshortened towers,

kerken en olmen,
churches and elm trees,

in een grootsch verband.
all joined as one.

De lucht hangt er laag
The sky hanging low

en de zon wordt er langzaam
and the sun being slowly

in grijze veelkleurige
covered by haze

dampen gesmoord,
in the colors of greys

en in alle gewesten
and in all of the regions

wordt de stem van het water
the voice of the water

met zijn eeuwige rampen
with its endless disasters

gevreesd en gehoord.
is feared and obeyed