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Sipke de Schiffart – December

Sipke de Schiffart was RIXT-poet of the  month December 2019. You can read his original Frisian poems of that month here. The translation of one of them – ‘generation gap’ – is published below.

generation gap

my dad was an old-fashioned farmer,
every morning he went to work
at half past three
and expected the same of me

but I was half a century younger
and went to bed late,
after having watched TV,
Veronica and the VPRO,
so, I would get up later in the morning

now I think: getting up between five and six,
that’s still quite early
for a boy of around twenty years old

in the mornings I struggled
to wake up, every morning
my father got angry with me,
because I didn’t hurry up

one morning (now I think: middle of the night)
in December of 1980 he came
to my bed at half past three
to announce that Mick Jagger
had been shot in New York

the message had its intended effect:
I was immediately wide awake,
satisfied my dad went back to the barn
to feed the cattle

but when I heard on the clock radio
that it was John Lennon who was shot,
and not Mick Jagger,
I rolled over
and went back to sleep

© Sipke de Schiffart
Translation: Trevor M. Scarse

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RIXT poet Syds Wiersma travels through Ireland for four months

Photo: Syds Wiersma

Syds Wiersma was travelling through Ireland last summer for two months, working there on a new poetry collection. His travel and work was subsidised by the Dutch Fund for Literature. In April-May 2020 Wiersma intended to do the second part of his travel, through Northern Ireland. Unfortunately this was postponed by the corona crisis.

One of Wiersma’s stays last summer was in Galway, which is one of the two cultural capitals of Europe in 2020. Besides writing poetry, he connected there with a few Irish poets and invited them to exchanges and collaborations with Frisian poets. Wiersma submitted this exchange project to the programmers of the Leeuwarden/Fryslân City of Literature project. Here again corona was a spoiler.

Since Wiersma intends to write about meeting people, places, spaces, and time, he chose alternative ways of travelling: hitchhiking, walking, cycling, and if necessary public transport. About his experiences he wrote a few travel stories for the Frisian literary magazine Ensafh.

You can find the links to the five stories here:

Thoor Ballylee
Letterfrack
Brandon Creek
Galway (1)
Galway (2)

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Jan Kooistra – November

Jan Kooistra was RIXT-poet of the  month November 2019. You can read his original Frisian poems of that month here. The translation of one of them – ‘words not deeds’ – is published below.

Photo: Geart Tigchelaar


words not deeds

recently I read that the Poet
Laureate wants to make the woods
dark again and that Greta Thunberg

is autistic, that once more the Kurds
leave everything behind

I was in Sachsenhausen the other day
where I heard horrible stories
I saw a young man crying

saw large numbers of ashen rooks
I heard the echoes in the distance

wanted to move to a village where
you can still see the stars
where the swallows fly in summer and
owls sit on the trusses in winter

sometimes I yearn for the courage
of that lassie from Sweden
and reclaim the dark from the woods
tell those tales again and
unseat all those false blowhards

but I shouldn’t step into
the garden late at night
and look up at that
infinitely glittering sky
because then I will be reduced
to tears like a little boy

© Jan Kooistra
Translation: Trevor M. Scarse