Ma Yuan's Painting Re-Visualized in a Dutch Poem

onder wolken vogels varen
onder golven vliegen vissen
maar daartussen rust de visser

golven worden hoge wolken
wolken worden hoge golven
maar intussen rust de visser

(English trans.:
under clouds birds sail
under waves fly fish
but in between rests the fisherman

waves become high clouds
clouds become high waves
but in the meantime rests the fisherman)

Entitled 'Visser van Ma Yuan' and delivered in an obviously e.e.cummings-ish gesture, this cute little thing popped out from TURNING TIDES, a bilingual anthology of modern Dutch and Flemish verse I was browsing today. No idea at all do I have how the Dutch poet Lucebert (Lubertus Swaanswijk) got to know Ma Yuan, a representative royal painter coincidentally from my hometown in South Soong Dynasty, and his work(s), but for sure, Lucebert precisely caught the blankness ('wolken' and 'golven'), the essentially dominant element of form in Chinese landscape painting in that era. Ma was a master of turning spaces into media for viewers' wild imagination. In his 'A Solitary Fisherman' (Han Jiang Du Diao Tu), his sublime expression of distance and infinity, which I assume was the prototype of this poem, there is almost no visible depiction of clouds and waves (though miserly lines around the boat sufficiently suggest the freezingly calm water), let alone birds and fish. The only protagonist is a fisherman in a sampan, a fishing pole in hand, leaving the rest of the picture empty and open and, meanwhile, perfectly fulfilling the ineffable theme of mankind in nature - so lonely yet so mighty.

Like many men of letters (wenren) in Ma Yuan's time in China, Lucebert, as a poet and painter himself, commute between these two forms of art, sucking out the marrow of both and inter-translating the visual and the verbal. An interesting echo of the oriental aesthetics, isn't it?