Netherlands, (1937–2021)
Banana
-
When our country was still a bit untidier and so a bit more livable, at the back side of society stood bins of discarded food. People with pigs could take them away. I had two addresses: the kitchen of the police academy where I was a teacher and the Albert Heijn supermarket in the village where I live. At the school a great deal was eaten and so a great deal thrown away. Cooked and baked foods, soups and sauces, the pigs found it delectable. This food source was the first to be prohibited by the authorities, swine fever had been detected, the soups and sauces were blamed. For a while, the garbage bin of the Albert Heiin remained out of harm’s way. In it there were vegetables and fruit, carefully wrapped, from all over the world, a sum of cheap labor, the price of kerosene and honest entrepreneurship. So I know how a pig eats an apple, a pear, or an oyster mushroom, he sticks his snout into the trough and slobbers up the whole business like a dredger. Two exceptions, the banana and the acorn. I live at the edge of an oak forest, I used to gather acorns for the pigs. A pig holds an acorn very precisely in the front of his mouth, the way I imagine a lady in a literary salon eats a bonbon while she listens to a young poet. But the banana is his crowning achievement. He pushes it and moves his snout back and forth, very delicately, like an instrument maker, until the fruit bursts open over its entire length, and then he feasts with pleasure on the sweet, pale thing. If I ever, God forbid, end up in an old people’s home, that will be my glory, that I’m the only one of the mumblers who knows how a pig eats a banana.
© A.L. Snijders. Night Train: very short stories, translation by Lydia Davis. New York: New Directions Pub. Corp. (2016).
Suckling Pig
-
I often think about a photo that I’ve never seen. It was taken on New Year’s Eve in 1926 in Yugoslavia. A man in a tuxedo is enjoying himself in a night club with two beautiful women in low-cut evening dresses. Under his arm he is holding a suckling pig. The women are laughing and he is too, the pig is not laughing, it is holding its mouth wide open, it is probably squealing. Now that I write it down, I realize that this is an expression: “to squeal like a pig.” And I also realize that I never hear this expression anymore. The boy next door to us was often struck by his father, the walls were thin, at these times my mother would say: “He’s squealing like a pig again.” There was no television, she did not yet know which authority she should notify. Time slips away and takes language with it. The man in the tuxedo would become, in 1938, the father of the poet Charles Simic. He had acquired the pig through his dexterity. At midnight the lights went out, and to celebrate the new year a suckling pig was released. In the rising chaos within the fault zone of 1926/27 he was able to capture the little creature. The lights went on again, he was congratulated and got a piece of rope which he tied around the pig’s foot. After that, the party went on till daybreak and ended in a nondescript bar where a drunken priest was uniting a young pair of lovers in matrimony. He crossed a knife and a fork to bless them. Charles Simic’s father gave them the little pig as a wedding present. When I owned pigs, it could also happen once in a while that I spent the night sitting in the barn when piglets were being born. The wind rustled in the poplars and the owl hooted. A great contrast with the man celebrating in his Yugoslavian tuxedo. In my life almost nothing has happened, but I don’t know if I should be sorry about that.
© A.L. Snijders. Night Train: very short stories, translation by Lydia Davis. New York: New Directions Pub. Corp. (2016).
Acorns
-
The time when I kept pigs is long since over. They used to live outdoors in their own territory and sleep in a hut with lots of straw that I got from a friendly neighbour. To start with, I bought their feed from a firm that specialised in animal feeds, but after a tip from someone at a supermarket, I was able after five ‘o clock to get hold of food that could no longer be sold. The pigs thrived on fruit and herbs and vegetables that were brought here in huge aircraft from countries with exotic names and great poverty. Everyone who saw my pigs were struck by their distinctive behaviour. Once someone said that he couldn’t help thinking of animals from the epoch of the Akkadian Empire between the Euphrates and the Tigris, between 2350 and 2025 BC. The mysterious power those pigs then had has never since been observed. I had never heard of this and did not go into it any further. The old understanding remained that pigs like acorns. It would have been nice if I could have gone with them to the wood behind my house and let them graze on acorns beneath the oak trees. But pigs aren’t like that, they don’t listen to commands. I could only keep them on an enclosed plot of land. This they then churned open, and took great leasure in doing so. In autumn, the woodland paths were full of acorns and I used to collect them in buckets and take them to the pigs. I did so in order to soften their hearts. It took a lot of time that I really needed to keep the house in reasonable shape, but there was voice inside me that urged me not to consider the pigs as ordinary animals. All of this took place in the last century, I have forgotten about the mysterious power of the pigs, I actually don’t think about it anymore. This morning I was driving along the secondary road that runs through this self-same wood. The weather was fine, everyone was doing eighty. When an opposing car blinked its lights at me, I couldn’t see anything wrong, but I soon did when I saw a bike lying in the road that I was only able to avoid by braking sharply and swerving over onto the verge. The bike had fallen off a carrying rack and could have caused a nasty accident. This took place at a spot in the wood where earlier, in the last century, I had often collected acorns for my Mesopotamian pigs. I don’t find I can justifiably relate the one thing with the other, but it costs me the utmost effort.
Editor’s Note:
This translation of Acorns [Eikels] was provided by: John Irons of Svendborg, Denmark. Mr Irons is a professional translator from Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, German and French. https://johnirons.blogspot.com/
© A.L. Snijders. Eikels. Haarlem: De Hof van Jan (2020).
About the Poet:
A.L. Snijders ( pseudonym of Peter Cornelis Müller ), Netherlands, (1937–2021) was a poet, writer, columnist and educator. Snijders studied Dutch at the University of Amsterdam and worked as a Dutch teacher between 1965 and 1998 at various secondary schools and the De Cloese police school in Lochem.
Snijders was the creator of a new literary genre called the ‘very short story’ or “zkvs”, short for “zeer korte verhalen” – a term he invented. These ZKVs have been described as micro-fiction, mini-fables, vignettes, but a true zkv exhibits the dynamic effects of its shortness on the act of writing. How it compresses the mechanics, squeezing out any extraneous yammer, tightening the connective tissues, leaving a reader more room for reading – or, in Snijders’s words, for “autonomous cerebration.”
In the 1980s, Snijders began writing newspaper columns, and in 2006, his first collection of zkv’s was published, bringing him quickly to public attention. His columns became zkv’s and he began reading on regular radio broadcasts. At his death there were over eleven collections zkv’s and a staggering total of over 3,000 individual zkv’s. [DES-01/22]
From the Porkopolis Archive:
- In Suckling Pig above, the line “Charles Simic’s father gave them the little pig as a wedding present” refers to the Yugoslavia-born U.S. poet Charles Simic. His poems that concern pigs are at Porkopolis.org here.