Ginsberg goes Dutch: Poetry in translation
Ginsberg, Allen. Vinkenoog, Simon, trans. Mimeograph of face-à-face translations of “Plutonian Ode,” “Punk Rock Your My Big Crybaby,” “Don’t Grow Old,” “Land O’ Lakes, Wisc.,” and “The Rune.” Undated [circa late 1970s].
4to.; 13 mimeograph leaves; center-fold; slight smudge at tail of first leaf; stray mark to tail of final leaf; rectos and versos; in a brown manilla envelope with Graham Z. Seidman [Beat photographer] letterhead; labeled “ALLEN GINSBERG” in Simon Vinkenoog’s hand and addressed “For Gregory Corso” in Allen Ginsberg’s hand.
In the beginning of September 1957, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, traveling through Europe after having visited William S. Burroughs in Tangiers, arrived in Paris. They were planning to stay with Gregory Corso, who was exploring Europe on his own; he had rented a small room in the attic of a nameless hotel at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur, the location that in literary history would become known as the “Beat hotel.” Always unpredictable, Corso had suddenly left for Amsterdam, however, leaving a note for his two friends which suggested that they join him there for a month, after which the three of them could return to Paris. Ginsberg and Orlovsky did not immediately act upon Corso's suggestion, but ultimately the lack of money which plagued their travels forced them to travel north, where prices were cheaper.
Ginsberg’s three-week stay in Amsterdam was relatively uneventful. The poems that Ginsberg, as well as Corso, wrote in Amsterdam are fewer in number and less original than the ones they would write after having returned to Paris. The exception is Ginsberg's “POEM Rocket,” written on October 4, the day the Russians launched the first Sputnik, and later published in Kaddish and Other Poems [San Francisco: City Lights, 1961]. Like its longer companion piece, “Moon Prevention,” written on the same day, “POEM Rocket” was partly a collaborative effort of Ginsberg, Corso, and Orlovsky. What is not generally known is that two Dutch writers, Simon Vinkenoog and Adriaan Morrien, were also present when the poem was written and that they, too, contributed to it. Sitting in the rather posh Cafe Americain, they answered questions that the three Americans threw at them, and their answers were immediately incorporated into the poem. The writing session ended when both the Dutch and American poets were asked to leave, because they were growing too exuberant. [Vinkenoog 1999]
A few days earlier, someone had drawn Vinkenoog’s attention to the fact that every evening three Americans, “also poets,” were to be found in a jazz club called Bohemia, which had recently opened on one of the Amsterdam canals. It was there that Vinkenoog first approached Ginsberg and his friends. Soon the Dutch poet and his new American friends were engaged in a lively conversation. Vinkenoog and Ginsberg hit it off in particular: they started visiting each other, sharing an occasional “smoke” and, after Ginsberg had left Amsterdam, the two maintained a personal and literary relationship for decades. They met not only in 1957, but also in 1965 and during Ginsberg’s visits to the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s. On each of those visits Vinkenoog served as Ginsberg's translator, after having published the first, and still the only, substantial Dutch translation of Ginsberg’s poems, Proef m'n tong inje oor [“Taste my mouth in your ear”; Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1966].
These drafts of translations of Ginsberg’s poems from the late 1970s, ultimately published in a limited edition as Plutonian ode = Plutonische ode / Allen Ginsberg [Heerlin : Uitgeverij, 1980], were passed on for revision to Gregory Corso by Ginsberg (in Beat photographer Graham Seidman’s stationary envelope). The English sides of “Punk Rock Your My Big Crybaby,” “Don’t Grow Old,” “Land O’ Lakes, Wisc.,” and “The Rune” are all in their final published state, but the text of “Plutonium Ode,” a 1978 lament against the arms race heavily inspired by Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion [Boston: Beacon Press, 1958], differs significantly from the copy found in Plutonian Ode: And Other Poems 1977–1980 [San Francisco: City Lights, 1981]. Most of the revisions are small—a change in capitalization or the dropping of an “O” at the beginning of a line—but some are more substantial and affect the meaning and even structure of the poem. For instance, line 38 in the draft becomes lines 42–3 in the published version: “... tones are honey & milk in libation poured on the stone-block floor” is replaced by “... tones are honey and milk and wine-sweet water / Poured on the stone block floor, these syllables are barley groats I scatter on the Reactor’s core.”
The story behind “Plutonian Ode” is nearly as epic as the poem itself. After learning that plutonium-239’s half-life and the Platonic zodiac year were both 24,000 years long, Ginsberg wrote without ceasing through the night of June 12, 1978, completing a draft of the poem just before dawn. After a few hours of sleep, he was awoken by fellow members of the Rocky Flats Truth Force, a grassroots nonviolent antinuclear group, who informed him of imminent action on the train tracks leading to the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg, along with Orlovsky and a few others, spent the rest of the day chanting and meditating on the tracks to block a shipment of fissile materials to the factory. After the train rounded the bend, braking at the sight of the protestors, Ginsberg experienced his first arrest for direct action in the antinuclear movement. When asked to defend his non-guilty plea during his arraignment later that month, Ginsberg responded by reading “Plutonian Ode.” In the years following, during the peak of antinuclear protests in the United States, Ginsberg continued to revise and perform the poem.