Poetry on Mantifang — minimal language, maximal charge.
A consuming balance held at the point of freezing.
Je vreet me op
ergens diep in je
we balanceren—
ik verstar
You eat me alive
somewhere deep in you.
We balance—
I freeze.
Two lines spin: rhythm as rescue, or as risk.
Twee strepen draaien rond
worden dol
ritmisch, wiskundig—
onze lijnen, onze hoop
onze redding
zullen ze ritmisch blijven?
Two lines spin,
go mad—
rhythmic, mathematical.
Our lines, our hope,
our rescue—
will they keep time?
A movement from “I” to “we”: a test of merge and separation under heat.
Ik ga over in jou
u transformeert tot wij
eens zal ik
mogen verdwijnen
in jouw ja
wij degradëren tot ik
u blijft in uw hokje
wanneer is eens?
I pass into you,
you transform into we.
One day I may
disappear inside your yes.
We degrade into I,
you stay in your box—
when is once?
A spectrum appears; colour as weight and unreachable splendour.
Ik zie een spectrum
kleuren gonzen
het maakt de lucht zwaar
kleur over kleur
pracht die ik niet kan grijpen
waarom kleur—
waarom zo zwaar
I see a spectrum,
colours hum—
it makes the air heavy.
Colour on colour,
splendour I cannot grasp:
why colour—
why so heavy?
A present without horizon; time folded to the size of a hand.
Ik heb geen toekomst
alleen maar nu
wat altijd is
daarnet, gisteren,
verleden jaar.
I have no future,
only the now—
what always is:
just now, yesterday,
last year.
Aging as a narrowing corridor: words searched for years, fear held in the mouth.
Je zoekt naar woorden
jaren lang
van al maar ouder worden
steeds vaag en bang
You search for words
for years on end—
from nothing but growing older,
ever vague, afraid.
The poems of The Red Lamp began in Rotterdam, 1985. Stripped lines, high temperature, no ornament. Each appears in the original Dutch beside its English translation — bare testimony rendered faithfully.
Language policy: poems are shown in the original Dutch with a precise English translation; stories are published in English only.
The Red Lamp began as a small bundle in Rotterdam, 1985. No decoration, no detour: short lines that breathe like steel under pressure. The city was grey, the Maas drew cold through concrete, and indoors one searched for warmth in another. The lamp on the desk gave red light but no comfort; it marked a boundary. Whoever came closer had to withstand fire.
The poems that emerged were not written with posterity in mind. They were not meant to be quoted, not composed for literature. They are field notes, registrations of a state of mind at a time when loneliness bit harder than hope. Yet they stand here again, nearly forty years later: Dutch beside English, sparse beside carefully translated. Their task is unchanged — to testify, to press forward, to hold speech in place when silence would be safer.
The mood of those years is still present in the rhythm: abrupt, economical, refusing to wander. Rotterdam in the mid-1980s was a place of hard labour, scarce work, and unspoken distances. The poems mirror that climate. They are not polished stanzas but compressed fragments, written quickly and under pressure, with the knowledge that tomorrow might demand a different register altogether. Reading them now is to revisit that tension: how words can resist forgetting, even when memory itself resists clarity.
Placed alongside the later stories, these poems form the spine of a larger project. Where the stories stretch out, crossing geographies and cultures, the poems fold inward. They compress experience into a few lines, shaping absence as much as presence. That contrast is deliberate. The Red Lamp was never about producing a single book of poems, but about setting a tone, choosing a discipline, and allowing that practice to inform everything that came after.
Each poem is therefore more than an isolated fragment. It is part of an economy of language that continues into essays on Korea, reflections on Buddhism, and narrative pieces on travel and encounter. The voice has aged, the settings have changed, but the principle remains: speak only what carries weight, and leave silence intact where words would betray.
Today these poems stand in a wider context. They belong not only to a Rotterdam room in the mid-1980s, but to a body of work that has since expanded into stories, essays, and reflections from Korea. Where the early lines exposed the self, the later texts turn toward encounter and construction. The line, however, is unbroken: the same economy of words, the same refusal of ornament, the same steady aim at what matters.
This page gathers the poems of The Red Lamp in their original sharpness and shows them beside their English translation. They are not reports of happiness but of endurance. Not memories to dream away with, but to stay awake to. They belong to a larger project that sets its heart on truth, connection, and compassion. In that light the red lamp still burns — not as relic, but as standard.
Readers are invited to explore the poems one by one, not as nostalgic artefacts but as living testimony. They may appear minimal, but each line carries the weight of its time and the trace of a vow: to remain honest, to resist ornament, and to continue speaking even when silence tempts. In that vow lies the continuity of the work — from Rotterdam to Korea, from the solitary desk to the wider world, always with his heart towards …
A critic’s eye on Hugo J. Smal’s work: from the stripped poems of The Red Lamp
(Rotterdam, 1985) — city, body, fury — to present-day prose that keeps its edge and moves with intent. The early voice witnesses cold and distance; the later voice sets a course and holds it.
Language: poems appear in the original Dutch with an English rendering beside them; stories are published in English only.
The Red Lamp began as a compact pressure chamber. Short lines, little ornament, a temperature that lives just under the skin. These poems refuse the balm of explanation; they stand as witness. Their materials are the hard facts of a northern city — wind across stone, money in short supply, faces that avert — and the soft facts that persist regardless: need, touch, the wish for a second voice. If the early refrain is a curse — let the world burn — the deeper movement is toward attention: to burn away what is idle so that what is necessary can remain.
Time distinguishes the poems from the new prose. The verses carry the weather of the mid-1980s and keep it intact; their grain is historical as well as personal. Yet they read without patina. The diction is economical, the syntax direct, the line breaks exact. Read them as field notes taken under pressure: minimal language, maximal charge. They are the backbone of the project, the place where the tone was set and the constraints were chosen — a self-imposed narrow corridor through which the later work would also pass.
The prose is recent. It keeps the early severity but moves outward — across streets, borders, and rooms — to the friction of encounter. Where the poems compress, the stories expand; where the poems witness, the stories work. They treat labour, ritual, and ordinary time with the same seriousness once reserved for crisis. The sentence lengthens, the lens widens, but the discipline remains: no sentimentality, no soft focus, no ornament that does not carry weight. The result is a line that can travel — between people, into institutions, through days — and come back with something exact.
Three strands define this current phase. Jijang’s Fractal uses a recurring frame to test what attention can do: return to the same shape, find a different truth. Bogwangsa collects work and worship on temple ground — sweeping, ringing, carrying — as a liturgy of small acts. Koreans and I brings faces into focus at close range, without exoticism, allowing language, food, and misstep to do their plain work. Alongside them run the koi pieces: pond prose about care, water, patience, and loss — not idylls, but studies in responsibility.
What remains constant is economy of diction and the refusal of easy light. What has changed is purpose. The early work burns to clear a space; the later work uses that cleared space to build connections — with places, with tasks, with others. The Red Lamp is not a relic but a standard: keep the words few, keep the heat high, keep the aim steady.
English
