OF PROSE
A FRAGMENT[30]
[30] Translated from the Dutch by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos.
By LODEWIJK VAN DEIJSSEL
I love the prose that comes towards me like a man, with sparkling eyes, with a loud voice, breathing hard and with great gestures of the hands. I want to hear the writer laugh and cry in it, to hear him whisper and shout, to feel him sigh and pant. I want his language to loom up before me like a tangible and resounding organism; I want him, when I read him in my room, to reveal to me, from the characters that shimmer before my eyes, a spirit that enters into me and seems to ascend within me from out of his pages.
I love the prose that comes rolling up from the infinity of the artist's soul, like a sea of sound, flowing calmly with its wide waves, drawing nearer, nearer, ever nearer, smooth and broad, suddenly illumined by intense gleams of light.
I love the prose that clashes towards me, rushes up to me, thunders down upon me in a raging torrent of passion.
I love the prose that is motionless and awful as mountain ridges.
I love the prose that plays and rejoices like a waving forest filled with birds in summer.
I love the prose which I see standing there before me, with its sentences, like a city of marble.
I love the prose that descends upon me like a golden shower of words.
I love the sentences that march like troops of broad-backed men, walking abreast, shoulder to shoulder, following one on the other in ever-widening ranks, up hill, down dale, with the tramp of their footsteps and the heavy movement of their strides. I love sentences that sound like voices underground, but come rising, rising, louder and in greater numbers, and pass and rise and ring and echo in the heavens.
I love words that arrive suddenly, as though from very far, shooting forth in golden brilliancy from a rift in the blue sky, or toppling high in the air, like dark rocks discharged from a straining volcano.
I love words that bang down upon me like falling rafters, or words that hiss past me like bullets.
I love words which I see standing there unexpectedly, like poppies or blue cornflowers in a field.
I love words that suddenly waft a perfume to me from the course of the style, like incense from a church-door or scent from a woman's handkerchief in the street.
I love words that in a moment rise softly, like a child's murmuring voice, from under the droning style.
I love words that just gurgle, like little stifled sobs.
I love the prose that blazes its joy and its rapture like stars above me, that lights glowing suns of love, that carries me over the thin ice of its disdain, through the rough black nights of its hatred, that clangs down upon me the green, copper voice of its irony and its laughter.
If you would please me, then stretch over my head a rainbow of language in which I shall see red anger raging, blue gladness rejoicing and yellow mockery laughing.
Take me up and carry me where you will: I crave for nothing more than to be powerless against the power of your Word.
Strike me with your Word, torture me with your Word and then let your Word fall down upon me like a rain of kisses....