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Poetry The Filth issue

[I will never do a lot of work…]

By Hans Lodeizen

Translated from the Dutch by Emma Rault
Acrylic painting by Hernan Bas. A waifish blonde boy leans against a lush tree adorned with hummingbird feeders. The feeders are filled with a rich red-purple liquid, and the boy holds out one additional feeder in the palm of his hand — a hummingbird hovers above to feed from it. The scene looks idyllic but also slightly morose and surreal. The boy’s expression is impenetrable.
Hernan Bas, Nectar (or the hummingbird enthusiast), 2020, acrylic on linen, 6 x 5’. © 2020 Silvia Ros. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
To read this poem in Dutch, click here.
Hans Lodeizen was a poet from Naarden, Netherlands. Born in 1924, he published one poetry collection, The Wallpaper Within, before dying of leukemia at the age of twenty-six. He is remembered as a “pioneering gay exponent of postwar experimentalism.”
Emma Rault is a writer and translator originally from the Netherlands who lives in Los Angeles, California. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her most recent book-length translation is of Hanna Bervoets’s We Had to Remove This Post.