Landscape With Rowers: Poetry From The Netherlands (English And Dutch Edition)

Landscape With Rowers: Poetry From The Netherlands (English And Dutch Edition)

Though the Netherlands has been the site of vigorous literary activity since at least the Beweging van Vijftig (Movement of the Fifties) poets, the status of Dutch as a "minor" language spoken by only twenty-two million people has kept its rich poetry more or less a secret. This volume--featuring J. M. 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. Ranging in style from the rhetorical to the intensely lyrical, the work here includes examples of myth-influenced modernist verse, nature poetry, experimental poetry, poems conscious of themselves within a pan-European avant-garde, and Cees Nooteboom's uncompromising reflections on the powers and limitations of art. In addition to Nooteboom, the poets represented are Gerrit Achterberg, Hugo Claus, Sybren Polet, Hans Faverey, and Rutger Kopland--a who's who of contemporary Dutch poetry. In Youth, Coetzee's main character claims that "of all nations the Dutch are the dullest, the most antipoetic." With these marvelous translations, the author proves his protagonist wrong.From BooklistIn this dual-language edition, Afrikaans novelist Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel laureate in literature, introduces and translates one poem each by five twentieth-century Dutch poets and three by a sixth. His choices all have the capacity to pique poetry readers' interest in more by these striking, thoroughly European modernists. Coetzee says that Gerrit Achterberg's "Ballad of the Gasfitter" expresses the myth of Orpheus; certainly it contains death, resurrection, and second death within a workaday urban setting. Sybren Polet's "Self-Repeating Poem" is a strident 1960s protest, much more artful than most. Hugo Claus' "Ten Ways of Looking at P. B. Shelley" dissects an earlier radical poet in the manner, paradoxically enough, of Wallace Stevens. Cees Nooteboom's "Basho" follows the peripatetic Japanese as "through him the landscape is turned into words." Rutger Kopland's "Descent in Broad Daylight," even more repetitive than Polet's piece, questions the senses and whether the mind can ever apprehend natural reality. The three poems by Hans Faverey are paradoxical, abstract, the most engaging pieces in this enjoyably challenging little sampler.Ray OlsonCopyright