(© Stephan Vanfleteren)
Hugo Claus is counted among the international greats of post-war literature. At one point, he was undoubtedly close to winning the Nobel Prize. And yet, worldwide, he was and is not read as often as many of his colleagues. The first extensive English anthology of his poetry has only just appeared.
Hugo Claus: Even Now
POETRY | Even Now ●●●●
Hugo Claus David Colmer (selection & translation), Archipelago Books, 245 p., ArchipelagoBooks.org
Hugo Claus (1929-2008) was and remains the king of Flemish letters. The prodigy published his first novel (Sister of Earth) at the age of 21, and subsequently had one great success after another. Until he started suffering from Alzheimer’s and chose his own peaceful death. But the author of The Sorrow of Belgium, dozens of other novels and plays, as well as innumerable poems was from a small language region and, moreover, created a very distinctive literary idiom that makes him difficult to translate. But now, finally, we have Even Now, an anthology of poems selected and translated by David Colmer and published by Archipelago Books in New York. This is not the first translation of Claus’s poems. None other than J.M. Coetzee once translated a number of them for his anthology of Dutch poems entitled Landscape with Rowers. But Colmer – an award-winning Australian who lives in Amsterdam – has drawn from no fewer than 22 collections Claus wrote between 1948 and 2004. Whenever a poetic oeuvre of 1,500 pages is reduced to just over 200 pages, the picture must be incomplete, but this did leave Colmer sufficient space to leave the truly untranslatable untranslated and to select the cream of the crop. Claus’s poetry is anything but academic; it is highly personal and occasionally experimental. It probably evolved gradually from his energetic but sometimes difficult early work (The Oostakker Poems) to poems that occasionally even contained simple nursery rhymes. In any case, a number of his poems made it into the canon. From the love lyricism of “I Write you Down” (“And in your ear I promise brand-new horoscopes, / Preparing you again for trips around the world / And a stay somewhere up on an alp”), to undressing his critics in “Interview” (“Outside I point up at the moon. / He keeps staring at my finger”), the sketch of his homeland in “West Flanders” (“Feverish summer land when the sun / Spawns its young in the corn”), recalling the transient in “The Traces” (“The traces of his father’s coat that was once a tent for him and his broken tomahawk”), to his challenging of death in “Rehearsal” (“I wish I was dead. / Like forty-five per cent of Belgians”). The classic collection with the compelling work “Even Now” has been included in its entirety, and justifiably so. Colmer always opts to render the vitality and the natural power of the language rather than slavishly copying the rhymes, alliterations, and meanings. In the epilogue, Claus’s Dutch colleague and friend Cees Nooteboom asks to be haunted by him once in a while, as he is by this collection.
THE POETRY OF HUGO CLAUS (book presentation): 26/11, 20.00, €5/7, NL & EN, Passa Porta, www.passaporta.be
Hugo Claus David Colmer (selection & translation), Archipelago Books, 245 p., ArchipelagoBooks.org
Hugo Claus (1929-2008) was and remains the king of Flemish letters. The prodigy published his first novel (Sister of Earth) at the age of 21, and subsequently had one great success after another. Until he started suffering from Alzheimer’s and chose his own peaceful death. But the author of The Sorrow of Belgium, dozens of other novels and plays, as well as innumerable poems was from a small language region and, moreover, created a very distinctive literary idiom that makes him difficult to translate. But now, finally, we have Even Now, an anthology of poems selected and translated by David Colmer and published by Archipelago Books in New York. This is not the first translation of Claus’s poems. None other than J.M. Coetzee once translated a number of them for his anthology of Dutch poems entitled Landscape with Rowers. But Colmer – an award-winning Australian who lives in Amsterdam – has drawn from no fewer than 22 collections Claus wrote between 1948 and 2004. Whenever a poetic oeuvre of 1,500 pages is reduced to just over 200 pages, the picture must be incomplete, but this did leave Colmer sufficient space to leave the truly untranslatable untranslated and to select the cream of the crop. Claus’s poetry is anything but academic; it is highly personal and occasionally experimental. It probably evolved gradually from his energetic but sometimes difficult early work (The Oostakker Poems) to poems that occasionally even contained simple nursery rhymes. In any case, a number of his poems made it into the canon. From the love lyricism of “I Write you Down” (“And in your ear I promise brand-new horoscopes, / Preparing you again for trips around the world / And a stay somewhere up on an alp”), to undressing his critics in “Interview” (“Outside I point up at the moon. / He keeps staring at my finger”), the sketch of his homeland in “West Flanders” (“Feverish summer land when the sun / Spawns its young in the corn”), recalling the transient in “The Traces” (“The traces of his father’s coat that was once a tent for him and his broken tomahawk”), to his challenging of death in “Rehearsal” (“I wish I was dead. / Like forty-five per cent of Belgians”). The classic collection with the compelling work “Even Now” has been included in its entirety, and justifiably so. Colmer always opts to render the vitality and the natural power of the language rather than slavishly copying the rhymes, alliterations, and meanings. In the epilogue, Claus’s Dutch colleague and friend Cees Nooteboom asks to be haunted by him once in a while, as he is by this collection.
THE POETRY OF HUGO CLAUS (book presentation): 26/11, 20.00, €5/7, NL & EN, Passa Porta, www.passaporta.be
Read more about: Expo
Fijn dat je wil reageren. Wie reageert, gaat akkoord met onze huisregels. Hoe reageren via Disqus? Een woordje uitleg.