Poetry from the Netherlands


Book Description

Dutch Poetry translated into English Edited by David Colmer. The issue features Martinus Nijhoff, Gerrit Achterberg, M. Vasalis, Hanny Michaelis, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Lucebert, Hans Lodeizen, Jan Arends, Remco Campert, Hans Faverey, Cees Nooteboom, Bernlef, Toon Tellegen, Neeltje Maria Min, Anna Enquist, Frank Koenegracht, Hester Knibbe, Joke Van Leeuwen, Benno Barnard, Elma Van Haren, Esther Jansma, Nachoem M. Wijnberg, Menno Wigman, Erik Lindner, Mark Boog, Hagar Peeters, Maria Barnas, Alfred Schaffer, Mustafa Stitou, Ramsey Nasr, Kira Wuck, Ester Naomi Perquin, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Donald Gardner and Jane Draycott. Translators for the issue include James Brockway, David Colmer, Donald Gardner, Vivien D. Glass, Michele Hutchison, Francis R. Jones, David McKay, Scott Rollins and Judith Wilkinson.




Landscape with Rowers


Book Description

This volume--featuring Coetzee's finely wrought English translations side-by-side with the originals--brings the work of six of the most important modern and contemporary Dutch poets to light.







100 Dutch-language Poems


Book Description

Poetry. Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent and John Irons. 100 DUTCH-LANGUAGE POEMS is a lovely selection of poems written in the Dutch language from the 11th century to the present day. For the poetry lover it is a comprehensive introduction to poetry from the Low Countries and provides a wonderful insight into the themes and issues that influenced generations of poets. The Dutch language and English translations are presented side by side making it a great resource for literature and language students and scholars. A detailed foreword by Paul Vincent and John Irons who selected and translated the poems, as well as an intriguing afterword by Gaston Franssen, assistant professor of Literary Culture at the University of Amsterdam, add additional value to this necessary anthology. PAUL VINCENT Paul received a BA (Hons) Modern Languages (German, Dutch, French) from University of Cambridge, UK in 1964. He undertook Postgraduate study at the University of Amsterdam during 1965-1966. He was awarded an MA from University of Cambridge in 1968. From 1967 to 1989 he was a full time Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Dutch Language and Literature at Bedford College, University of London, and afterwards at University College London. He left his academic career in 1989 to become a freelance translator of Dutch and German into English. He has translated many of the leading authors and poets from the Low Countries including Louis Couperus, Harry Mulisch, Willem Elsschot, Louis Paul Boon and Hugo Claus. He was the recipient of the first David Reid Poetry Translation Prize for the translation of Hendrik Marsman's famous poem 'Herinnering aan Holland' (Memory of Holland) in 2006, awarded by the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature. In 2012 Paul Vincent received the Vondel Prize for My Little War, his translation of Mijn kleine oorlog by Louis Paul Boon, published by Dalkey Archive. Paul Vincent is based in London. JOHN IRONS John Irons studied Modern & Medieval Languages (German, French, & Dutch) at Cambridge University and completed his PhD, The Development of Imagery in the Poetry of PC Boutens, at the same university. He worked as a senior lecturer at Odense University in Denmark. He has been a professional translator, from Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, German and French to English, since 1987. He was awarded the NORLA translation prize for non-fiction in 2007. John Irons has worked on a long and distinguished list of publications and he has been a translator for Poetry International Rotterdam since 1996. He has translated several of the leading authors and poets from the Low Countries including anthologies of Dutch-language poets Hugo Claus and Gerrit Komrij. John Irons lives in Odense, Denmark. http://johnirons.blogspot.co.uk/




The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz


Book Description

In 1578, during months of imprisonment for his reformist beliefs, San Juan de la Cruz composed a series of narrative poems inspired by the Biblical Song of Songs—and, the story goes, a popular love song overheard from his cramped cell—that take God as the beloved. Erotically charged, initially scandalous, his mystical poetry engages with the journey of the soul through the darkest trenches of suffering and despair toward an enlightened spiritual connection with God. For hundreds of years, these poems have resonated deeply with those who search for meaning in the dark, and have influenced generations of poets, artists, and philosophers. This bilingual edition of the Complete Poems—including “Dark Night” and both the Sanlúcar and Jaén manuscripts of “Spiritual Canticle”—presents an intimate and exceptionally collaborative new translation from María Baranda and Paul Hoover. Baranda, one of the most distinguished Mexican poets of her generation, lends her deft hand with expansive, meditative poetry. Hoover—the accomplished American poet, editor, and translator—offers his dexterity with form and the possibilities of language. The product is uniquely faithful to image and idea, and loyal to the ecstatic lyricism of this canonical text. A volume that hums with the soul’s longing to find solace, The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz is a collection to be treasured.




Of Great Importance


Book Description

OF GREAT IMPORTANCE is Nachoem Wijnberg's 16th volume of poetry. One of the most prominent living Dutch writers, Wijnberg's poetry is known for its deceptively plain language and his poems, according to the poet himself, can be read well by anyone who can read a newspaper. The poems in OF GREAT IMPORTANCE engage with statecraft, economics, and world history, lyricizing taxes and debts, stocks and flows, citizenship and labor contracts, notaries and accountants, factories and strikes, freedoms and fundamental rights, banks and railroads, property rights and codes of honor, sieges and treaties, gods and generals, how to make money and how to win elections, when to declare war and when to found a new state. Wijnberg's engagement with these and other related topics is based on his belief that economics, politics, and history - and all of the tangled relations therein, no matter how asymmetrical - concern how people live together, and his poetry is a creative form of historiography that attends to tracing the theater of an affective commonwealth, in which he builds upon the best work of those thinkers and poets who came before - including Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Heinrich Heine, Czeslaw Milosz, and especially C.P. Cavafy. Ultimately, Wijnberg understands that "Something important that changes the world only happens if there is a lever with a fulcrum you cannot know enough about," and yet his poetry gorgeously illuminates this fulcrum. VAN GROOT BELANG, a substantial part of which has been translated in OF GREAT IMPORTANCE, was shortlisted for the Dutch VSB Poetry Prize. According to the jury report, the book "constitutes the pinnacle of [Wijnberg's] individualistic oeuvre to date, [and] is a painfully consistent and uncomfortably accurate analysis of power, economic and social structures, and mechanisms that are at the root of the corrupted world in which we wake up each morning. In a highly individual poetic jargon, so bright that it causes a daze, he demonstrates the logic of the illogical and pares the illogical away from the logical." For his entire body of work, Wijnberg has also received the most prestigious Dutch literary award, the P.C. Hooftprijs, in 2018.




The Lonely Funeral


Book Description

Every year, people living in our towns and cities - the homeless, suicides, old people living alone - are found dead. Their funerals are held without relatives or friends. In Amsterdam in 2002, F Starik established a network of poets who would write a personal poem for the deceased and read it at their funeral as an affirmation of their existence.




Rise and Float


Book Description

Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like “wrist skin when a grater slips,” a “laugh as good as a scream,” pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to “trying, these days, to believe again / in people,” another concedes that “defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.” Look: the chair is just a chair.” But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy “torn open” by dogs and a suicide, “two beautiful teenagers are kissing.” Between screams, something intimate—hope, however difficult it may be.




Poems of Guido Gezelle


Book Description

The Bruges-born poet-priest Guido Gezelle(1830–1899) is generally considered one of the masters of nineteenth-century European lyric poetry. At the end of his life and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Gezellewas hailed by the avant-garde as the founder of modern Flemish poetry. His unique voice was belatedly recognised in the Netherlands and often compared with his English contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). In this bilingual anthology, award-winning translator Paul Vincent selects a representative picture of Gezelle’soutput, from devotional through narrative, to celebratory and expressionistic. Gezelle’sfavourite themes are childhood, the Flemish landscape, friendship, nature, religion and the Flemish vernacular, and his apparently simple poems conceal a sophisticated prosody and a dialogue with spiritual and literary tradition.However, an important barrier to wider international recognition of his lyric genius up to now has been the absence of translations that do justice to the vigour and musicality of Gezelle’sWest Flemish idiom. Two of the translations included go some way to redressing the balance: ‘TheWatter-Scriever’ by Scotland’s national poet Edwin Morgan and ‘A Little Leaf . . .’ by Francis Jones. Both translators make brilliant use of their own vernaculars (Glaswegian and North Yorkshire respectively) to bring Gezelleto life for the non-Dutch-speaking reader.




The Kissing of Kissing


Book Description

In this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent¬—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen. They move with and within the beautiful nothing (“of buzzing light”) from which, as she elaborates, everything jumps. In language that is both bracingly new and embracingly intimate, Emerson invites us to “dive down to the beautiful muck that helps you get that the world was made from the garbage at the bottom of the universe that was boiling over with joy that wanted to become you you you yes yes yes.” These poems are encounters—animal, vegetal, elemental—that form the markings of an irresistible future. And The Kissing of Kissing makes joyously clear how this future, which can sometimes seem light-years away, is actually as close, as near, as each immersive now. It finds breath in the woods and the words and the worlds we share, together “becoming burst becoming / the waking dream.” With this book, Emerson, a nonspeaking autistic poet, generously invites you, the reader, to meet yourself anew, again, “to bring your beautiful nothing” into the light.