To me, he was a bus stop long before he was a poet. Every morning, for the duration of my high school years, I took the 42-bus to the middle class Brussels suburb where my high school was located. Alighting in a hurry – I was usually late – I passed the stop’s sign without giving it a thought.
Some years later, while I was rummaging through Brussel’s iconic second-hand bookstore, Pele Mele, I was surprised to come across the familiar name: Marcel Thiry. It appeared on a thick, blue paperback and looked to be the first of three volumes dedicated to his poetry. Amused and intrigued, I bought it for the modest sum of six Euros.
It would take half a year for me to read the anthology, but when I did, I felt exhilarated. Perhaps it was because I was in Norwich by then, and his poetry made me long for home. Or perhaps it was that in the bleakness of winter, Thiry’s poetry transported me far from England’s cold shores. But one thing I knew for sure: I had stumbled upon a gem.
I wondered at Thiry’s ability to conjure up places. In Plongeantes Proues, one of the books of the anthology, he laid out of my homeland before my eyes in just two lines:
“The yellow constellation of streetlights / Lighting up in the green, melancholy evening”
In another two, I felt transported to pre-World War II Holland:
“Amsterdam with seagulls in its stations / And Java being sung on its tramways”
Even England, through his eyes, was tinged with romance:
“I still remember your red cliffs, / Folkestone, and the green of your English lawns”
Reading Thiry is like travelling the world while staying firmly in place. In his poetry, there are poetic fragments of Holland, England, Russia, Siberia, France, Spain and the US, all of which he travelled to as a soldier before he was 21. Long after he had returned to Europe for good, travel continued to lace his poetry like a leitmotif. One critic went so far as to suggest that if Europe had needed a poet to represent it, he would have been best placed to do so.
But Thiry’s best quality as a poet is not his ability to transport readers in time and space but to capture those small and fleeting moments that litter our lives: the curiosity sparked by a stranger sleeping on the train; the feeling of entrapment caused by office life; the riptide of emotion sparked by the changing seasons.
Nostalgia, in particular, looms large in his writing. A poem penned shortly after his return to Europe is representative of his lifelong obsession with a quickly receding past.
“I attached so many dreams, / To departing masts / And I regret the shore / The dunes where the bells chime”
This nostalgia, though occasionally heavy, confers a certain levity to his poetry. Most of us will have felt the dichotomy between the desire to live and necessity to survive, but few of us are able to articulate it quite so succinctly as Thiry does in his poetry.
This makes the fact that his poetry has never been translated into any language the more painful. Despite having written a bestselling poetry anthology, having been elected to the Belgian Royal Academy of Language and Literature, and recognized by several critics as one of the great francophone poets of his time, few know his name today. He is but one of dozens of other Belgian artists – poets, novelists, musicians – who never managed to climb out of Paris’s long shadow.
Though I still hope that someone will, someday, come along to translate his work, Thiry serves as a reminder of the history that surrounds us. Every street sign, bus stop placard and plaza name hide a story waiting to be told – a musician dead before their time; a politician instrumental in effecting change; a poet-turned bureaucrat. We simply need to look around.
Words by Elkyn Ernst
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