POETIC REFLECTIONS

Poetry by
GERMAIN DROOGENBROODT

International Poetry Prize Fuente Vaqueros 2023

Translation by the author and Stanley Barkan

Compiled and Edited by

Jyotirmaya Thakur

Introduction

For the reader who does not know him yet, Germain Droogenbroodt is a Belgian poet, from the region of Flanders (Rollegem, 1944), although based in Altea (Alicante) since 1987, whose work has been translated into 28 languages, being also a recognized translator and editor of the best modern poetry from all over the world. He has translated into his own language, Dutch, more than thirty books of German, English, French, Spanish, and Latin American poetry, and has made adaptations of Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Japanese and Korean poetry. He published, since 1984 seventeen books of poetry, among others the collections of poems, such as Conversation with the Hereafter (1995), The Road (TAO) (1998), Counterlight (2002), In the Stream of Time (2009), Unshadowed Light (2012), The Ephemeral Flower of Time (2016) and The Road of Being (2022). In 2014, he published an extensive anthology of his poetic work, The Dewdrops of Dawn, with drawings by Satish Gupta, the most important contemporary Indian poet and wrote Dewddrops, a collection of a hundred haiku, which was presented in 2016 in Kyoto. Annually, he is invited to the most important international poetry festivals where his poems have been awarded dozens of international poetry prizes.

The present collection of poems is a continuation of The Road of Being, his former poetry book, specifically, with its central part, “Witnesses of an Era.” The clear predominance of a critical approach to the current reality and the deterioration of the planet at all levels, latent in all his work but so evident now, does not mean a renunciation of the presence of nature, philosophy or metapoetry, fundamental throughout his already long career. Rather, on the contrary, what intensifies here is a manifest concern for the degradation of the environment, humanism, the capacity to think, silence . . . in short, it is the enormous unease for the perhaps irreversible deterioration of our civilization and for the legacy to future generations that runs through these Poetic Reflections from beginning to end.

Man has "disturbed nature" as a result of immoderate greed, selfishness, and unsustainable short-sightedness. Drought, pollution, exploitation at all levels, the abyss of inequality, xenophobia or insensitivity to deaths, such as that of the Syrian child Aylan, lead us to a dawn that "finds neither hope nor life." That dawn that today can be supplanted by an artificial intelligence and that we feel more as an overwhelming threat than as a liberating channel. Or where the inhumanity of wars is imposed on our rampant forgetfulness. These are difficult times in which we lose the ability to listen to the other, to the others, to that Afghan woman begging in the street or to that beggar whose empty hand places us before our own emptiness, because "even greater / than the thirst of the desert / is the unquenched thirst / of justice." A time absolutely propitious to personal and collective alienation, to control and surveillance by technocratic devices. A time in which even birds lose their original freedom. In an ambivalent progress, of shaded light, "whose shadow is greater / than the light." And before a disheartening future: "But what will remain / for those who come after us, / as a trace of us," laments the poet in another poem.

A situation of radical uneasiness that led the poet to ask himself in the previous book, The Road of Being, "So, is a life / that is not worthy / still life?" A path, that of life, saturated with mental and emotional discomfort, which is now shown to us in this book completely disoriented, no longer finding "direction or meaning." It offers us nothing but thorns, darkness and meaninglessness. A path that, in the face of the prevailing mercantilism obsessed with results, success and profitability, should not focus on reaching an expected goal because, in life, "the Road is the Goal," as the poet tells us. Once again, nature does not fail to offer us its imperishable lesson of serenity: an autumn leaf, detached from the tree, before its imminent end "does not grieve and whirls / enjoying its brief flight / towards unification with the earth."

Germain Droogenbroodt foreshadows the symptoms of what is to come or appreciates in the gray ash of the volcano "a sign / for man." The premonitory and unmistakable warning that it is necessary, in the face of the unreflective and vain reflection that the selfie offers us, to stop and retake our capacity for reflection if we do not want to succumb to the steamroller of immediacy and its imposition of non-thinking. A reactive attitude of cosmic humility is necessary to free man from all that vanity, disposing him towards respect and generosity, so characteristic of nature and so lacking among us. And although we are immersed in a world where deafening noise reigns, it is necessary to find that "healing silence," more revealing than the word itself. Because if there is one thing we must not lose, it is hope: "There is no night / that does not know the dawn." And it is here that Germain's gaze converges with that of the South Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who closes his book Contemplative Life (2023) with these encouraging words: "In the kingdom of peace to come, human beings and nature will be reconciled. The human being will no longer be more than a fellow citizen of a republic of living beings to which plants, animals, stones, clouds and stars will also belong."

Droogenbroodt’ s style, not exempt from an evolution that goes from the hermetic to an expressive naturalness full of great maturity and depth, is characterized by brevity, the shortness of the words, thus enhancing the strength of images as emphatic as suggestive, always open to that resonance that penetrates and reverberates within us to the point of moving us. It is not in vain that his work has been appreciated by such outstanding poets as Francisco Brines, who defined it as "poetry that yearns to know." or by the recently deceased Anise Koltz, poet from Luxembourg, who characterized it as "a poetry that belongs to all continents and to all times, that calls attention by its wisdom and its balance." To keep it short, I conclude with the words of Antonio Enrique, poet and critic from Granada, for whom Germain's poems "are beautifully plastic, absorbing, almost obsessive." And, in the words of the jury that awarded this book the III International Poetry Prize of Fuente Vaqueros, we are before "a beauty that dazzles." Check it out without delay.

Rafael Carcelén