‘Salve’: a poem

In yesterday’s post I noted that Johan Vanhecke’s biography of Johan Daisne includes a passing reference to a poem of his that I hadn’t come across before, with the title ‘Salve’, the name of Gerard Ceunis’ house in Gosmore Road, Hitchin. I wrote to Johan enquiring about gaining access to the poem and he kindly wrote back almost immediately, attaching a scanned copy of the poem, and much else besides (which I’ll write about in future posts).

The poem was first published in 1936, when Daisne was twenty-four years old, in his collection Breuken herleiden (literally, ‘brief fractions’), when it bore the dedication ‘to Vanna Ceunis’. It’s yet another of Daisne’s literary attempts to come to terms with the feelings of nostalgia and regret evoked by memories of the summer he spent with the Ceunis family in 1929, and in particular of his unrequited love for the artist’s daughter, Vanna (see here, here and here).

‘Salve’ is written in a freer style than some of Daisne’s other poems, with lines of differing length and metre, and with frequent ellipses. These reflect the way the poet’s thought meanders from subject to subject, taking off from the sight of mementoes in a box of letters, and running together a number of disjointed memories of his sojourn in Hitchin. Nevertheless, there is a more or less regular rhyming system. As always, it’s difficult to reproduce these features in an English translation, while at the same staying reasonably close to the sense of the original. Here’s my attempt:

‘Salve’

My great big letter box!…

A pack of envelopes, coloured stamps, sheets still fresh

With new writing, and snaps, and a dried rose –

Pastels, twice clean, from the Atheneum years!

.

Vacations… from staying with my parents’ rich friends…

The villa was called ‘Salve’ – along Gosmore Road;

The garden was full of wisteria and roses

On the terrace; the phono’ played ‘Bolero’…

.

It smelled of sun and fruit, English cigarettes,

We drank tea and ate cakes with jam;

The room was all fresh, with books, watercolours,

And Vanna had a bob of blonde hair, and a figure so slim.

.

The walks together! the dim-lit church,

And the almshouse, the market… – what fun we had!

And sometimes, on rainy nights, we read verses,

With strangely-soft eyes, warmly-close on the settee…

.

The years go by and letters follow letters,

When winter comes, Vanna will be married – another end…

And I think of Salve, full of wisteria and roses,

  – Good luck, my friend!…

The garden at ‘Salve’, with Gerard Ceunis’ wife Alice and their dog Jerry in the foreground

(see this post)

The ‘Atheneum’ mentioned in the first stanza is the Koninklijk Atheneum in Ghent, which was Daisne’s high school. The music played on the ‘phono(graph)’ was of course by Ravel, whom Daisne describes elsewhere as a particular favourite of Vanna Ceunis. Their ‘walks together’ in and around Hitchin are vividly described in Daisne’s other writings. The ‘dim-lit church’ (‘t Schemerige kerkje) would have been St Mary’s, in the town centre, while the ‘almshouse’ (‘t besjehuis – literally ‘berry house’) is probably the nearby Biggin, or medieval beguinage, which coincidentally, as I’ve noted before, was based on a Belgian model. The final line of the poem – the poet’s generous but achingly painful wish of ‘Good luck, my friend!’ to his lost love, as she prepares to marry another man, is in English in the original.

Ceunis on display

Yesterday we made a brief visit to North Hertfordshire Museum, here in Hitchin, primarily to take a look at the museum’s newest acquisition, William Ratcliffe’s ‘The Red Curtain’, whose affinities with Gerard Ceunis’ ‘Flemish Room’ I wrote about here. Apologies for the reflection in my photograph of the painting: it’s protected by a glass case.

As can be seen from the photo below, Ratcliffe’s exquisite painting is currently displayed next to Ceunis’ 1930 picture, ‘St Mary’s Square’:

In another case in the same gallery, I came across Ceunis’ portrait of his friend, the local historian and solicitor Reginald Hine (see these posts):

In fact, it was pleasing to see that rather a lot of Ceunis’ work is currently on display in the museum, mostly in the corridors around the building, where the stark white walls provide a perfect background for canvas print reproductions of the émigré artist’s depictions of scenes from his adopted home town:

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Hitchin Market’ and ‘St Mary’s Church, Hitchin, Floodlit at Night’

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Hitchin Marketplace’ and ‘St Mary’s Square’

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Hitchin Marketplace’ and ‘St Mary’s Church, Hitchin’

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Tree in Priory Park, Hitchin’

Ceunis on cards

Tessa Cathcart, Gerard Ceunis’ granddaughter, who has been such a great help to me in my research this year, has sent me a beautiful Christmas card, adorned with a reproduction of an oil painting – Canal at Ghent – by her grandfather that I hadn’t seen before. I’m not sure whether this picture was a product of the artist’s youth, when he was still living in the Belgian city, or the fruit of a return visit later in his life.

The treatment of water and the use of reflection has something in common with the painting of St Mary’s church in Hitchin that I’ve used in the past as a header photo for this blog. There are also similarities with one of the two black-and-white postcards that Tessa enclosed with her Christmas card, depicting sunset on a river with rowing boats. The other postcard has a reproduction of a painting with the title Hitchin Church (Winter) – St Mary’s again. This appears to have been painted from exactly the same position from which Ceunis drew one of the illustrations in Reginald Hine’s book The Story of Hitchin Town (see this post). Indeed, the two pictures have similar titles and might even have been created on the same occasion.

Gerard Ceunis and Theodor Kern

I’ve written a post, over at my blog on Theodor Kern, about the similarities and differences between him and Gerard Ceunis: both of them being émigré artists, from Austria and Belgium respectively, who settled in the provincial English market town of Hitchin.