Rotterdam in the mid-1980s: context, weather, economy — the pressure that shaped The Red Lamp.
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 desk, a lamp, a vow
At a bare desk under a red shade, a vow takes shape: not fame, but a city where people can live honestly and free—and words as stones toward it.
The brown wood of the desk gives calm. My hands lie awkward beside the white paper. The pens are picked. Everything is ready for a compelling story or a kink of thought no one can follow. The A4 sheets do not frighten me.
That hand only has to pick up the pen. Put the pen to the paper. Words will appear. A story will form. Dim light pours from the red lamp, pressing shadows into the wood. I feel its warmth on my face. It shines as far as the mind.
I take the lamp in both hands and set it so the beam falls exactly in the middle of the paper. Not easy. It is a metal thing: two hinged tubes, a trapezoid shade. All the screws are stripped so the contraption keeps sinking, almost invisibly, until the cap touches brown wood or white paper. Good thing it wasn’t expensive.
I roll a cigarette. The matchbox is empty; the ashtray is not. Damn, again not prepared. This way nothing good will reach the paper. Why do this at all—stake your life on calling yourself a writer? There is hardly a sillier trick. I sigh, get up for matches, and dump the ash into the bucket on the balcony. The wind blows the ash back in my face. Why, as an ex-sailor, don’t I mind the wind?
My thoughts push me onto the deck of the training ship *Prinses Irene*, anchored on the Veerse Meer. One of those mist-still mornings that only exist on water. Sounds arrive hollow, as if from another room in the world. I drop the bucket on its line over the side, pull it up, and throw the contents across the deck—against the wind. From the wheelhouse the captain laughs, hard and mocking. I stand there drenched, staring at the flag.
Life was uncomplicated. I was not a writer yet. My hands return to the desktop. Smoke drifts through the cone of light. The lamp has already sunk a few centimeters.
Back then I did not feel required to do anything about the world’s wrongs. Now it is the only way to justify my life. Years ago I wrote a small poem, a trifle—not so bad—and found that it was a way to speak, a way to be honest. The idea of being a writer took hold. I declared myself one to anyone I met and started to write for real.
Now being a writer is not important. It is not the end; it lies further on. Somewhere in the corners of my mind there is a book that will change things. In that book is a city where people can live honestly and free. That is my end.
My hands tremble a little. A bead of sweat falls onto the white paper. Fear-sweat? There is so much to learn and to lay aside. So much still to live through.
For the sake of that book and that city I sit at this desk. Not to write it now—the knowledge is not large enough. Everything thought or written now is practice for that book. Stones for the city.
My hand takes the pen. The lamp has sunk to five centimeters above the paper. I should have spent more money on it. Why is it that I always do things halfway? Well then—back then the lamp hung crooked.
I get up and go to the bookcase. I take Sartre’s *The Age of Reason*. *The Roads to Freedom*—a road toward my book. I set the arm right again and know that nothing will appear on the paper today.
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.
Early work (1985). The Red Lamp: “Existence 1” — a bare, unfiltered fragment: survival, need, and a curse hurled at a world that devours intimacy.
Deze wereld
vol geld makende
psychiater betalende
ploerten
verbrand.
Laten we in de zon
gaan zitten
hou me even vast
kus me
ik heb je nodig.
This world
full of money-making
psychiatrist-paying
brutes
May this world burn.
Let’s sit in the sun,
hold me for a moment,
kiss me —
I need you.
English
