Mapping Modernism: Gaining in Translation – Martinus Nijhoff and T. S. Eliot

Abstract

A number of recent attempts to reconfigure comparative literature have been concerned with upgrading the role played by translation in the drawing and re-drawing of the literary world map.1 In one way or another this is a basic premise at the heart of Susan Bassnett’s Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction, Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900, David Damrosch’s What is World Literature?, and Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone.2 The present article is meant as a small contribution to this ongoing debate. Specifically, I want to focus on the role that translation played in the œuvre of the man who is today considered the greatest Dutch modernist poet, Martinus Nijhoff (1894–1953). As with his fellow Modernists Adriaan Roland Holst (1888–1976) and J. J. Slauerhoff (1898–1936), Nijhoff ’s translational activities have been consistently construed as merely ancillary to his ‘creative’ activities. In reality, I think their translational activities functioned as agents of change for the latter. Of the three Dutch authors mentioned, Roland Holst stayed within the narrowest translational bounds, translating from English only, and exclusively from the works of W. B. Yeats. His case is also clearest as regards the relationship between his activities as a translator and his creative work.3 Estimations of the precise impact of Slauerhoff’ s translations from the French, Spanish, and classical Chinese on his own creative practice vary considerably.4 Nijhoff translated a lot, mostly from the French, German and English. Wiljan van den Akker and Gillis Dorleijn, when discussing Nijhoff ’s working methods in