Germain Droogenbroodt

Germain Droogenbroodt, was born in Rollegem, the Flemish part of Belgium, where Dutch is one of the official languages. In 1987 he moved to the Mediterranean artist village of Altea and integrated in Spanish literary life.

Germain Droogenbroodtis an internationally appreciated poet, translator, publisher and promoter of modern international poetry. So far he wrote nine poetry books and translated – he speaks six languages - more than thirty collections of German, Italian, Spanish, English and French poetry, including anthologies of Bertolt Brecht, Reiner Kunze, Peter Huchel, Miguel Hernández, José Ángel Valente, Francisco Brines and Juan Gil-Albert and rendered Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian and Korean poetry into Dutch.

As founder and editor of POINT Editions (POetry INTernational) he has published more than eighty collections of mainly modern, international poetry. In 1996 he set up a new poetic movement, called neo-sensacionismo with the famous Chinese poets Bei Dao and Duo Duo

Germain Droogenbroodtorganised and co-organised several international poetry festivals in Spain. He has been advising poets for the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Granada, Nicaragua and of the Struga Poetry Evenings, Europe’s oldest and most famous international poetry festival. He was “special collaborator” of the International Festival de Poesía de Rosario, Argentina and General Secretary of the WAAC (World Academy of Arts & Culture) and the World Congress of Poets,  as well as and founder and president of the Cultural Foundation ITHACA Droogenbroodt-Leroy of the Valencia Country and reviewing editor of “Contemporary Poetry”, the oldest Chinese poetry magazine in Hong Kong and of The Poetic Bridge, a Japanese-English poetry publication.

His poetic oeuvre is many-sided. After his début with “Forty at the wall” (1984), defined as neo-romantic poetry, he published “Do you know the country?”, Meditations at Lake Como (Italy), a collection of nature poems. In 1995 he was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship (Scotland) where he wrote “Conversation with the hereafter”, poems about death, awarded with the P.G. Buckinx-Prize and “Palpable absence”, a bilingual (Dutch-Spanish) collection of love poems. A critic of the Dutch Information Office for Libraries described his love poems as “virtuoso poetry”. At the end of 1997 appeared “Twenty-five and two love poems”, and in 1998 “Between the silence of your lips”, his collected love poems.

During his sojourn at the Palace-Fortress “Neemrana” in Rajasthan he completed the poetry cycle “The Road”, (read TAO) a poetic bridge between the East and the West, inspiring the Flemish artist Frans Minnaert and the Indian painter Satish Gupta, who enriched “The Road” with their drawings. This rather philosophical, mystical poetry is so far his most popular book, published already in 18 languages in 22 countries, translated by such famous poets as Bei Dao (Chinese), Fuad Rifka (Arabic), Jana Stroblova and Josef Hruby (Czech), Milan Richter (Slovak), Emilio Coco (Italian), Ganga Prasad Vimal (Hindi), Mongolian etc.  In 2001 he wrote in Spanish “Amanece el cantor” (The Singer  Awakes), a homage to the deceased poet José Ángel Valente, followed by “Counterlight” written in Ronda (Southern Spain) in 2002. This book has been published in Spain by Calima Ediciones, in Romania by ex Ponto, in Belgium by POINT Editions, in both Mongolian languages by GCompress Co., Ltd. Ulaanbaatar, in Arab by Albayat (Morocco), in Hong Kong by “Contemporary Poetry”, and in Taiwan by Poet Culture. Corp. The latter publication includes also “Counterlight “.

He latest poetry book “In the Stream of Time”, Meditations in the Himalayas, was published in 2008 in Belgium and as part of “Selected Poems by Germain Droogenbroodt”, 2008 in Shanghai and in Spain, laureate of the XXIX Premio de Poesía Juan Alcaide 2008. Struga Poetry Evenings published a selection of his poetry in their “Pleiades” in 2010. “In the Stream of Time, selected poetry of Germain Droogenbroodt has been translated in Japanese and was launched at the Kyoto City International Foundation in Kyoto, Japan in 2010 and in Gaelic (Irish) in 2012. A selection of his poems have been published as well in Bangla in Bangladesh (2012)

Germain Droogenbroodtis frequently invited to give recitals and conferences at universities and international poetry festivals all over the globe. He has been honoured with a Doctor of Literature, h.c. in Egypt in 1990 and awarded several prizes. In addition to the publication of international poetry he also has an internationally well visited website: http://www.point-editions.comin English, Spanish and Dutch with articles in Arab and Chinese, bimonthly updated, publishing modern poetry from over 70 countries, as well as information on book fairs and international poetry festivals. The site has so far been visited over 100.000 times. 

Poetry, the Breath of the Soul

Readingby Germain Droogenbroodt

As we all know, breath, although invisible, is a signal of life and in several religions even the creation or the beginning of it. In the Christian Genesis we read that God formed man of dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and men became a living human being with soul.

According to the mythology of the Evenks, Khadou created the soul and Mamaldi – similar to the Christian God - blew life in it. In fact, the Latin word spiritus not only means breath, but also means soul as pretended the Latin poet of Spanish origin Aurelius Prudentius Clemens. But also in the East breath plays an important role, not only physically but also spiritually. As it appears, Taoists not only breathe atmospheric air, but also solar, lunar and stellar emanations. Chuang-zu pretended ironically, that ordinary people breathe through their throats whereas saints do it through their whole body, starting from their heels. As to practitioners of yoga they recognize four states of consciousness, waking, sleep with dreams, sleep without dreams and a state of cataleptic consciousness, each of them having its own respiratory rhythm.

However, being a poet, although greatly interested in philosophy, I rather will stick to my trade although life itself raises philosophical questions such as: When does a fetus start to breathe and should that be the moment life enters or is it already a human being before it breathes? Is breath nothing but air? Rumi, the famous Sufi poet even questioned: Does the soul breathe? Or are our feelings, sadness or happiness, the breath of our hearts? As to the Korean poet CHO Byung-hwa life is the air breathed in and out and the flesh is the holder of it. At a conference I had during the international poetry festival in Copenhagen last May, the Mexican poet Alberto Blanco, interested in Buddhism, asked me a description of the void and showed ostentatiously an empty bottle of juice, pretending that it was empty. But how could it be empty as it was placed in a room filled with an audience, all of them breathing. Although invisible, the breath of the people present not only warmed the air but most surely filled it with hundreds of living elements: viruses!

However, there is not only a great difference between Western and Asian cultures and thinking, including in the approach of breath. It reminds me of a reading at an international poetry festival I organized in Spain with Chinese, European and Indian participants. The Belgian poet, professor of philosophy gave a reading about the poet as a swimmer and his perception of water. “But what would the water feel, being stirred and agitated by that human?” asked the Indian participant.

A large number of poets referred to breath or breathing in their poems, including Shakespeare where King Lear pretends to known who is dead or alive and says: “I know when one is dead, and when one lives; she is dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass; If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, Why, then she lives”:

But inhaling or breathing air may cause disease and even death as the great poet Paul Celan did in his dramatic poem Fugue of death about the Jewish kept by the Germans to be extinguished in their gas chambers.

In order to make the poem even more dramatic Celan replaced breathing by drinking as goes the poem: “Black milk of daybreak we drink it in the morning/ we drink it in the evening/we drink it at noon and in the morning, we drink it at night, we drink and we drink…”. Alike Celan, the Arab poet Sa’di Yusuf also replaced breathing by drinking his short poem entitled “Water” where the Palestine children drink the smoke of the missiles as since two years do the people of Syria. But there are less dramatic descriptions of breath in poetry, even by the Jewish poet Rose Ausländer (1901-1988) who was born, like Paul Celan (born Paul Antschel) , at Czernowitz in Bukovina (now Chernovtsy, Ukraine). Although she had known the horrors of the Holocaust, she believed that the beauty of the world was invincible. In “Motherland”, one of het first poetry collections, she writes: My Fatherland is dead./They buried it/in fire // I live/in my Motherland/Word. Many of her poems are of great beauty and simplicity. She used the word breath so often as no other poet did before. Including in neologisms or composed words like breathstrong, breathstream, breathlong, breathtime, breathhouse, the way Paul Celan did, whom she has met several times.

In the poem Language II (Sprache II) she writes: Hold me in your service/lifelong/in you I want to breathe. Or in the small delicate poem entitled “My poem”.

My poem”

My poem
I breathe you
in and out

The earth breathes
you and me
in and out

Born from its breath
my poem

Also in the other short poem Dust and wind (Staub und Wind) she abundantly uses the word breath:

Wind and dust fraternize
flying from breath to breath

They also knock
at your breath

You open for them
breathe them in

She even has a poem entitled “Breath”

Breath

We live
from breath to breath

In all plants and animals
beats its air-heart

We
bound to its being
pass-away with it
in the breath of the earth.

In my own poetry I did not use so abundantly the word breath as did Rose Ausländer, but as Goethe pretended, having two souls in his breast, I certainly have as many souls as the German master had, a Western and an Asian one. To end this reading en beauté as the French say, I would like to recite a poem published in my first poetry collection, a poetic “breath” between Eastern and Western cultures

LOTOPHAGUS *

Drowning
in its own blood
the tropical sun
showers sparks
over Siam’s temples.

above the scimitars of the roofs
the vulnerable evening
must give birth to the night.

the frail swell
of exotic girls’voices

dissipates the remnants of mist
merging with an invisible cricket chorus
which till deep in the night
sings Buddha’s psalms.

inaudibly
my mind breathes
through a thousand and one lotus mouths.

* Reference to the Lotuseaters in Homer’s Odyssey