The sea and poetry

The sea, like poetry, is essentially untranslatable.

   This does not mean that it cannot be represented. In photographs and poetry and prose, in paintings and drawings and, who knows, in sculpture, we set down the sea. We echo its rhythms and rhymes in music; we sing the whisper and crash of its waves.

   Our thoughts and feelings are mirrored in the shimmering water, floating like clouds in the drowned sky.

   Now paint this – the eternal movement hitched to the moon. Draw it – the dancing light above the deep. Write it down – poetry in the wet sand, stories on the breaking crests of waves. Take a photo, a pixeled portrait of colour and light.

   This is how we see the sea, but the sea itself it is not. Art, as representation, can only be the perfumed breath of an unspeakable poem.

Sea (watercolour by Marcella de Boom). See more at marcelladeboom.zenfolio.com

So, in the nature of the untranslatable, a poem in Afrikaans:

mens kan nie as die see só lyk
soos ’n metaalskrootwerf in die eerste son
waag om jou rug te draai nie
want ’n engel kan val,
stukkies souterige dons tussen die golwe,
sonder dat jy dit sien.
dus, pleeg jou poëem in die sand
(foster-parent to a poem)
tussen die slakke bloublasies seebamboese
sodat jy die see nog dop kan hou:
miskien plons ’n engel weer
en kan jy later, stadige skriba, skryf
met die ligpunt van sy veer.

(Ilse van Staden, from Watervlerk, 2003)