Lost in Translation

by Joseph Gastiger

"De taal van radar en mats

de taal van vlees en been"

--Sybren Polet

Dutch ovens are cast-iron kettle one loads with potatoes, turnips and onion, tomatoes and tough, stringy beef. Many of those funeral urns contain only rocks. In the woods you find Dutch clover, Dutchman's breeches, Dutchman's pipe. Not the skeleton of the Industrial Promotion Hall. A Dutch door splits in half, and a bare-breasted woman leans out into lamp light. As seventy thousand buildings whirl into rubble. As the odor of fresh baked loaves wafts out, but the poor black dog can't run away. A boy sits by a dead horse in a field of watermelons. Carpenters call a wedge driven into a frame a dutchman; it hides a badly-made joint. Sometimes it means a nest of South American wasps. Kyoto, they say, was our first choice. Air raid sirens had sounded the all-clear. A few human shadows were left: painter on a ladder dipping his brush, a peddler with on one foot, snatching his cap off, whipping a horse. Sewing needles had been made here for three hundred years. A Dutch uncle is someone who scolds you mercilessly. Kyoto was our first choice. It is raining gasoline, screamed the women, running toward the river. Dutch courage is recklessness brought on by gin; a knife or a chair leg snuffs it out quick. Air raid sirens had sounded the all-clear. A Dutch wife is a pillow between your legs in your bed in the tropics, soaking up sweat as you sleep. We dropped no leaflets to warn the people. Dutch cure. Dutch gold. Dutch widows. Their skin hanging off them like shreds of their kimonos. One baby's head looked like a boiled Octopus. To heat the Dutch means to do something extraordinary. Would it not be wondrous, he asked, for this whole nation to be destroyed, like a beautiful flower? To dutch means to clarify, to harden quills by passing them through fire or roasted sand. Mizu, mizu, they cried: water, water. Air raid sirens had sounded. We dropped no leaflets. Dutch gold is no gold at all, only copper and zinc and tin, rolled into foil. Almost instantly, the flash, the boy. The horse. Double dutch is a language deliberately misused to make no sense to anyone. Air raid sirens had sounded. Birds ignited in mid-air.