The Low Countries. Jaargang 6

A Season of Dutch and Flemish Poetry

Winter 1997-1998 was a good season for Dutch and Flemish literature in English translation. In November, young Dutch author Arnon Grunberg flew into London for the launch of the English translation of his novel Blue Mondays (Blauwe maandagen, 1994) at the Dutch Embassy, while the Flemish actress Tine Ruysschaert gave a performance of the medieval tale of Beatrijs at the Belgian Ambassador's residence. In December, the Belgian organisation Behoud de Begeerte / Saint Amour staged a multimedia event of ‘passion and desire’ at the Bloomsbury Theatre, an international programme of literature, music and film, with readings by Martin Amis, Helen Fielding (Great Britain), Alessandro Baricco (Italy), Andrei Makine (France), Hugo Claus, Leonard Nolens and Kristien Hemmerechts (Flanders), Adriaan van Dis and Connie Palmen (The Netherlands), accompanied by simultaneous screen projection of their work in English translation. In February, the special Dutch and Flemish Issue of Modern Poetry in Translation was launched at a lively literary event in King's College, with readings and discussions by poets Anna Enquist, Tonnus Oosterhoff and Stefan Hertmans and their translators Francis Jones, Deborah ffoulkes and Yann Lovelock. In March, the Anglo-Dutch Piano Platform presented an evening of music and literature around Dutch author Louis Couperus. At the end of March, this was followed by Low Leans the Sky in London and in Edinburgh, to celebrate the first five years of the yearbook The Low Countries.

April saw the publication of Kaleidoscope, a bilingual anthology of Dutch poetry translated by Martijn Zwart and Ethel Grene. The book presents some 90 Dutch poets from the medieval period to the middle of the twentieth century, in a highly personal selection that contains many surprises. There are strong transla-

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tions here of medieval poems such as the heartbreaking ‘An Old Song’ of a young girl who finds her lover dead and has to bury him all alone, or the cruel gothic tale in the ‘Song of Hallewen’, the original Bluebeard who is beheaded and slain by a fearless princess. But equally, the reader is presented with a cutting political poem by Golden Age poet Vondel or a modern classic such as Van Eyck's ‘Death and the Gardener’. The parallel texts in this volume enable the reader to work from the translation to the original, and to ascertain that, as claimed in the preface, poetry ‘is one of the strongest areas of Dutch writing’.

The collection in Modern Poetry in Translation (mpt) on the other hand, focuses entirely on contemporary poetry, both from Flanders and the Netherlands. The 22 poets and their 17 translators are introduced with short biographical notices, and at the end there is a valuable bibliographic checklist of Dutch and Flemish poetry published in English translation between 1977 and 1997. Each poet is represented by a substantial body of work that gives a good idea of his or her particular voice. In addition, the volume offers an inspired essay by James Brockway on translating the poetry of Rutger Kopland. Another gem is the dialogue of Judith Herzberg with her translator Shirley Kaufman on the way they work together. The last part of the book is devoted to the ‘Jellema Experiment’: nine different translations of a sonnet on art by Dutch poet C.O. Jellema, accompanied by the translators' comments on their interpretations. The amazing range of their new versions and viewpoints highlights the manifold challenges involved in the art of translating poetry. The book as a whole is an outstanding edition, a worthy successor to the mpt volume of Dutch poetry that was edited by James S Holmes in 1976. Here I quote from one of Hugo Claus' poems of 1993, in the translation of Theo Hermans and Yann Lovelock. It is a tribute to Shelley.

When his fragments died
and he was interred as ode and pamphlet
The Courier noted: the heathen has drowned.
Now he knows whether there is a god or not.

He bounced the bawd of euphony
on his knee.
His paganism: a remedy
against winter's coming
on the west wind.

reinier salverda

Dutch Poetry in Translation: Kaleidoscope. From Medieval Times to the Present (Tr. Martijn Zwart and Ethel Grene). Wilmette, il: Fairfield Books, 1998. 256 pp. isbn 0-9660016-0-5.
Theo Hermans (ed., with the assistance of Yann Lovelock), Modern Poetry in Translation: Dutch and Flemish Issue. New Series no. 12, Winter 1997. London: King's College, 1998, 278 pp. issn 0969-3572.