The ‘whole’ oeuvre of René Van Valckenborch is surrounded by mystery, perhaps of his own making. Published in fugitive publications in places as far apart as Cape Town and Montreal over the last decade, the poems of this Belgian are composed in Flemish and Walloon, and the stylistic divide between the two sets seems to reflect the societal and linguistic divide of his troubled nation (although he never refers to this fact). The two translators, Annemie Dupuis and Martin Krol, worked independently of one another at first. Their subsequent meeting, marriage and removal to Brussels form such an incredible tale that they have occasionally been accused of manufacturing the controversy of Mr Van Valckenborch’s discovery, of fabricating their translations and of inventing their author. But in fact they are ‘fictional poems’, a category defined by Gerald L. Bruns. ‘To speak strictly, a fictional poem would be a poem held in place less by literary history than by one of the categories that the logical world keeps in supply: conceptual models, possible worlds, speculative systems, hypothetical constructions in all their infinite variation – or maybe just whatever finds itself caught between quotation marks, as (what we call) “reality” often is.’
Read Eric Canderlinck’s introduction here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/introducing-rene-vanvalckenborch.html
Read early poems (both in Walloon and Flemish) here:
http://www.theadirondackreview.com/VanValckenborch.html
Watch Patricia Farrell and I perform part of ‘Background Pleasures’, one of VanValckenborch’s poems from the Walloon:
http://vimeo.com/13739658
More Walloon poems, this time from Van Valckenborch's versions of Ovid:
http://holdfirepress.wordpress.com
Read and listen to the Walloon ‘Cow’ poems, his final Walloon poems, perhaps written in the same spirit as Magritte, when he entered and quickly departed, his ‘Periode Vache’ (see an example at the top of this. Isn't he adorable?):
http://theclaudiusapp.com/3-sheppard.html
text
http://theclaudiusapp.com/3-amp.html
audiofile
Read a piece of Van Valckenborch’s critical prose (not to be included in the collected Van Valckenborch project), an account of the cinema of forgotten Belgian film-maker Paul Coppens:
http://lyndondavies.co.uk/w/655/robert-sheppard-frozen-cuts-of-light-the-scratch-cinema-of-paul-coppens/
Turning to the poems supposedly in Flemish, read ‘Van Valckenborch’s Cube’:
http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/issuethree/authors/sheppard.pdf
Read his Twitter feed at
http://twitter.com/VanValckenborch
or read all 100 collected together and then some separately with photographs (after the link to his ‘Cube’) here on Pages at
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2010_12_01_archive.html
See some of the collaborative prints made with Pete Clarke using poems from the Van Valckenborch project at
http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/events-in-may-june/manifest/
and, more clearly, at
http://www.poetrybeyondtext.org/clarke-sheppard.html
Read Dylan Harris’ account of a close encounter with the enigma himself:
http://dylanharris.org/prose/poetry/rvv.shtml
Other texts have appeared in print in Tears in the Fence AND, Sunfish, Roundyhouse, VLAK, Form & Fontanelles and Poetry Wales. The whole project is intended for publication in 2013.
The whole thing may be bought as A Translated Man here:
Then came Twitters for a Lark
