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Frisian House, New Island Festival, New York.

Het kunstwerk DE STAAT VAN NEDERLAND van de Drachtster Potzenmaker Jan Ketelaar gaat de oceaan over om tentoongesteld te worden op Governors Island te New York van 10 tm 20 september 2009 tijdens het New Island Festival.

Ook werd ter gelegenheid van dit Festival een gedicht van Tjsêbbe Hettinga uit het Frysk vertaald in het Engels door de Drachtster vertaler Klaas Bruinsma.

NIGHT-APPLES in the Big Apple.
Poem from Equinox by Tsjêbbe Hettinga.

Under a black velvet pin-cushion bespattered
with light, the bustle of Old New York was buzzing
in the dark deep. Alone with her typical beauty, shining
dazzlingly in the wellbuilt gallery of a paintless night,
a fiery dance from villages in the pampa scalded the moon,
encaustic in a silver-spotted firmament.

And the shades of saxophone and strings only talked to her.
A smell of horn reigned; from a tight-lipped mouth welled
up night-drinking rivers, stream of pine-trees and death.
And tipping the incarnate earth only with her toenails,
hidden in black-varnished style, she touched twins of clouds
with knife-blade long stiletto heels into the floor.

Her well-shaped muscles strained her parallel
long legs to her centripetal axis.
Under summer-low full moon on the Hudson River,
she twisted slowly, as to tease, flowed, whirled to and from
her two-stream arms, which made her long and black-nailed
fingers reach to a tropical wet sky of a system-ceiling.

Coils and whirls contrary to her snake body sloughed
in silver mirrors, and the longest fingers, green brushes
wishing to be covered with her hair alone, stretched out
to a full family-tree with ample loads of pears,
that cling to slopes of nightingale’s  river-banks.

And barks of black mist swept the rippling stream to
its source:  the fields where does and roes are frisking.
She’s alone with her sunshiny night apples;
the flesh stems are pointing to the olive wood of self-control:
Manhattan Transfer.

Translated by Klaas Bruinsma, Drachten, Friesland.


 

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