Dutch Poet Research Articles

‘Sincere Simplicity’: Gerbrand Bredero’s Apprenticeship with Coornhert and Spiegel

Like many authors in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch poet and prose writer Gerbrand Bredero prided himself on his defence of the mother tongue. The main reason for Bredero’s preference can be found in his consideration for the ‘unlearned’ public, perhaps to be associated with his being ‘unlearned’ himself. In his appreciation of the mother tongue, he closely responds to predecessors like Dirck Coornhert and Hendrik Spiegel. Moreover, he shared ideas about purism and ‘language building’ with the leading voices of the Amsterdam chamber of rhetoric, of which Bredero was a member. In this article, it will be shown how and to what extent linguistic aspects of Bredero’s prose are in line with his Amsterdam predecessors. Some of the imagery used by Bredero fits in with the idiom of Coornhert, while Spiegel’s writing exemplified the use of innovative compound words and genitives. Though Bredero is far less extreme in his experimentation with both forms, he did not refrain from leaving his own creative mark on language use, as a supposed result of a direct and active focus on common, Amsterdam burghers.

Longings for Manila: Projections of Imperialism and Decline in the Poems of J. Slauerhoff

The Dutch poet Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898–1936) featured Manila in three poems written in the late 1920s. These poems present the city as the decaying remnant of a deceased empire. Manila appears as a memory site of Spain’s bygone world dominance, resonates with the discourse of the “decline of the West,” and bears parallels to an image of a decaying Dutch empire. The city functions as a screen against which cultural images derived from the author’s personal European context are projected: cultural pessimism and colonial decline. Keywords: Slauerhoff • cultural pessimism • culture and imperialism • Manila literature • poetry

Geven en krijgen rond het tijdschrift De Beweging (1905-1919)

Abstract Patterns of Giving and Receiving: the Case of the Cultural Magazine De Beweging (1905-1919) The Dutch poet Albert Verwey was editor of the cultural magazine De Beweging between 1905-1919. This article uses gift theory to investigate the alliances he forged with his publishers, with his readers, and with the writers he worked with, and takes stock of the ways he tried to keep the insolvent magazine financially afloat. Verwey struggled to find a balance between his own agenda and the interests of his associates, and had to tread carefully as he appealed to their clemency and goodwill. Following Aafke Komter, who differentiates between four types of gift relationship, this article demonstrates that Verwey positioned himself predominantly within the modes of what Komter calls community sharing and authority ranking.

New Perspectives of the Digitized Correspondence of Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687)

The prominent Dutch poet and secretary to Frederick Henry, Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), was a true homo universalis. He was also a diplomat, an art connoisseur, a bibliophile, collector, musician, and a scholar. Mainly by means of his correspondence, he maintained a vast network of contacts — reaching ‘everybody who mattered’ in the Dutch Golden Age. It is estimated that Huygens wrote and received more than 100 000 letters; of these only 10 000 have survived. In the early twentieth century, Huygens’s correspondence was published by J. A. Worp. While Worp’s work was exemplary, his editorial principles and practices fail to meet today’s current scholarly standards. For example, Worp sometimes published abstracts of letters, rather than the letters themselves. He also selectively omitted letters that he deemed ‘unimportant’. Several years ago the Huygens Institute of Dutch History began to create a new digital edition of Huygens’s letters. This online edition of Huygens’s correspondence reveals new perspectives on Huygens and on his work and writing. In addition to the newly discovered letters that now have been published, the digital edition also facilitates research on Huygens’s varied use of language in letters to people, depending on their social strata. New analysis of his letters also grants insights into how Huygens communicated with the women of his time.

Il trauma come “valore aggiunto”. L’opera letteraria di Gustaaf Peek

Gustaaf Peek is a Dutch writer and poet who translates art into words. His works are often harsh, difficult to understand for the reader and complicated. He hunts for unknown facts in history as well as in daily life, for instance, in his first novel Armin , with the monstrosity of the Lebensborn project in Nazi Germany, or in his second novel Dover where he discusses the reality of illegal immigration and warlords living in complete freedom in western towns. It is art for art’s sake. But the novels written by Peek also contain the red thread of traumatic experiences. All of his characters suffer from one or many traumas, and act consequently. To the author this was a kind of wake-up call, a new way to consider his work and a new way to engage in the literary world. The aim of this article is to try to explain where Peek wrote about trauma and how. His topics and writing methods have also been illustrated.

100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared

76 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews Ashraf remarks: “funny how every short story is actually just the beginning of a really long one.” At his last meeting with Ashraf, Sethi finally extracts a chronology of Ashraf’s life. It seems, however, as if constructing the strict, linear order that the journalist Sethi has insisted upon somehow deprives Ashraf of a kind of freedom . He says to Sethi: “Now you know everything. What will we talk about if we ever meet again?” Jim Hannan Le Moyne College Kim Stafford. 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. San Antonio, Texas. Trinity University Press. 2012. isbn 9781595341365 Kim Stafford’s moving memoir of loss and guilt about the suicide of his beloved brother, Bret, at age forty is brilliantly conceived and fascinatingly written. Told in small chunks of narrative anecdotes, it becomes both an exhaustive catalog of memories of the brothers’ shared moments of intimacy and isolation and a valiant attempt to understand the talented Bret’s descent into darkness. They were the oldest children (two sisters followed) of two teachers —the father, William Stafford, a celebrated poet and professor; the mother, a successful elementary school teacher. Kim, an author and professor, followed his father to a career at Lewis & Clark College, while Bret, the oldest, went from job to job, place to place, a devoted pacifist, but never found the niche that would have grounded him, settled him down in the turbulent era in which he lived (1948–88). His altruism was summed up in his words, “I work for the future. . . . I work for a generation beyond us,” but he never could put his thoughts and actions together enough to give him the satisfaction and fulfillment that would have saved him. “He lost job, house, and happiness—and then he went into personal darkness, stopped sleeping, became immune to consolation, and took his life.” The brothers, from infancy on, were extraordinarily close. At night, from their side-by-side beds, they would chant their blessing poem, “Good night / God bless you / Have sweet dreams / See you tomorrow.” Kim observes, “We shared a room and a life as almost twins.” But long after Bret’s death, a friend of their father recalls Williams saying, ”I love all my children, but there is one who is myself—and that’s Kim”; readers also discover another clue into at least one aspect of the suicide: “My brother grew up in a house where he was not the son presumed by our father to inherit the kingdom.” So, as in all closely knit families, the suicide of one member haunts the others forever. The search for clues as to what went wrong is endless. Bret did, however, have some successes: a BA from the University of Oregon, an MA from the University of Victoria, and one from Oregon State. He loved the outdoors and worked for seven summers for the US Forest Service, later as a land-use planner in Hood River, Oregon. But it wasn’t enough. Once, when Bret was visiting his now-successful brother at Lewis & Clark, Kim imagines Bret thinking, “So, little brother, you are teaching here where our father taught. You have a job, a desk, an assistant, and a program. And I have nothing. I, your older brother, have nothing. I’ve thrown it all away.” In the telling of Bret’s story, Kim, so closely knit to his enigmatic sibling , also tells much of his own life— the long road through marriage and divorce and remarriage, through years of education to a PhD, and over three decades of teaching at Lewis & Clark. Both wanderers, restless seekers, often Nachoem M. Wijnberg Advance Payment David Colmer, tr. Anvil Press The inaugural offering in English from a renowned Dutch poet, Advance Payment includes poems from two previous collections. Nachoem Wijnberg is a scholar of business studies as well as a prolific writer, and his verse is marked by economic precision as well as erudite allusions. These charming poems place the obscure past alongside everyday reality. Mariapia Veladiano A Life Apart Cristina Viti, tr. MacLehose Press Mariapia Veladiano’s first novel is a clever take on the tale of the ugly duckling. The protagonist...

Samle fersen

Enid Shomer The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Simon & Schuster Before Florence Nightingale founded modern nursing and Gustave Flaubert penned Madame Bovary, they traveled along the Nile River. Historically, the two never met during their Egyptian excursions, but firsttime novelist Enid Shomer imagines the two voyages as not only a chance encounter but also a beautiful friendship. Shomer creates an unassuming relationship between the female radical and the well-known womanizer. Ralf Rothmann Fire Doesn’t Burn Mike Mitchell, tr. Seagull Books Wolf, a self-absorbed writer who is pushing fifty, comes face-to-face with the inevitable specter of aging and mortality. When Wolf and his partner Alina move to a more prosperous area of Berlin, the differences between them, and between the remnants of East and West Berlin, are brought into sharp contrast (see WLT, Nov. 2009, 69). january–february 2013 • 73 Nota Bene expressed but, in most cases, has not sufficiently bothered to search for the stronger, fresher line. She has, to borrow from Yeats, failed to “lie down where all the ladders start.” Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University D. A. Tamminga. Samle fersen. Tineke Steenmeijer & Jelle Krol, ed. Ljouwert, Netherlands. Friese Pers. 2011. isbn 9789033009556 Douwe Annes Tamminga (1909– 2002) was the most significant Frisian poet of his generation. His legacy lives on in Samle fersen (Collected verse), a hefty volume of 743 pages featuring the work of his twelve volumes published between 1938 and 1984 (and more). The editors wisely, and necessarily , decided not to try to include all of Tamminga’s voluminous output. Hence they placed another 471 pages of verse in PDF form on CD, which is also included with this volume. Tamminga’s versatility is astonishing . He was a poet first of all, but he was also a novelist, playwright , journalist, critic, reviewer, and translator. This volume amply reveals the range of his poetic creativity : from occasional verse to epic, from ballad to lyric, from secular and sacred songs to sonnets, from satire to psalms. In every form, the poet displays his mastery of language, ingenuity, creativity, and craft. His translation of Poe’s “The Raven” is a technical triumph, equal to the original in its mesmerizing impact. Also impressive are his translations of Dylan Thomas’s “Winter’s Tale,” of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” of the Dutch poet Jacobus Revius in seventeenth-century Frisian, and of many others from other languages , including Heine, Baudelaire, Yeats, and Betjeman. But Tamminga saw himself first of all as a poet in service to his own people and culture; as he put it in one of his poems: “Make me of service . . . to say your endings in a song that never dies.” Accordingly, the reader will find many selections that honor fellow Frisian poets, familiar folktales , historical events, village and rural life; notable too among all these are his many contributions to the Frisian Hymnal for the Churches. More surprising, perhaps, are names such as Martin Luther King Jr., Shakespeare , Tristan and Isolde, and Don Quixote that pop up throughout the volume. Clearly, Tamminga’s interests and literary knowledge were not confined to his own province. The poet has sometimes been criticized for a poetry that is too cerebral , too self-consciously crafted, too restrained. But all agree that there’s a sweet lyricism in his love songs, and a depth of feeling and emotion in his “In Memoriam,” written after his only son’s premature death at age nineteen. Indeed, having won all of Friesland’s most prestigious literary awards, Tamminga will long be remembered as a poet of distinction, inside as well as outside of the Netherlands. As such, he continued what Gysbert Japix began three centuries earlier: through poetry, the rendering of Frisian into a fulsome cultural language. The editors did a superb job of making this volume reader-friendly. They included in the front of the book a general table of contents with the titles of the volumes collected; in the back the reader can find a complete summary of the contents 74 World Literature Today reviews in which all titles are cited, an alphabetical list of all selections, as well as an alphabetical index to the first line...

The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction by Rachel Haywood Ferreira

point, the book is so slender (only twenty-three poems are represented) that it seems important to clarify which poems were chosen and why. Having the original Polish on each left-facing page is, however, very welcome , and allows us to see how closely Florczyk translates the original text. In all, this is certainly a volume worth reading, and Swir’s humane yet unsentimental poems are among the best “war poetry” written during the twentieth century. Magdalena Kay University of Victoria Toon Tellegen. Raptors. Judith Wilkinson , tr. Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2011. isbn 9781847770837 Toon Tellegen’s Raptors is one of those books for which very little can really prepare you. Partly, we suppose we already know too much. It takes a book like this, seemingly hurled through the ether, to crack us on the head and wake us. This extraordinary long poem, with its startling inventiveness , tests our coma-inducing apathy to all things experimental. In his preface, the Dutch poet opens: “Years ago I invented someone whom I called my father.” Raptors is the product of those inventions. Each poem begins with the words “my father”; each circles, contorting around its theme of the inconstant patriarch. Each is a portrait in miniature of a man both comical and tyrannical, grotesque and pitiable: “My father / was a book // my brothers leafed through him, / pointed out the pictures to each other: / ’look, here we are superfluous / and there our souls have been trodden on / and there, look, there it would have been better not to have existed!’” The sudden momentum swings of Tellegen’s unorthodox narratives are marks of the poem’s explosive power. Tellegen invents then quickly re-invents, draws then realigns and draws again in a series of constantly shifting scenes. And yet the reappearing figure of the father is coherent and convincing in much the manner Tellegen ’s translator, Judith Wilkinson, describes him in her introduction: a dominating and intense force “with his ominous, manic energy . . . His grandiosity, his constitutional hubris, his wild flights of fancy, coupled with a consummate neediness . . .” Again and again, Tellegen visions him afresh: “My father / was something / no one could put their finger on // nice, said my mother, / but he wasn’t nice,/brave,everything,/buthewasn’t brave and not everything either.” It’s one of the immense pleasures of this book that just when you think you’ve got the measure of the poem, Tellegen somersaults over your hand and off the page. His beautiful reversals and abrupt tempo shifts point back to a beginning, a new start, a fresh view, and the pace and elastic play of Wilkinson’s English compels us to want to re-read a book we’re still in the process of reading: “then my father fell on the ground, / changed his character and froze // and my brothers hacked a hoe in him, / fished in him for comfort and resignation, / built houses on him, and little palaces // and my father spread // like restlessness and standoffishness / despite himself.” George Messo Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia Miscellaneous Rachel Haywood Ferreira. The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction. Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2011. isbn 9780819570826 In 2003 Wesleyan published one of the most exciting anthologies of Latin American fiction in years. Edited by Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina Gavilán, Cosmos Latinos presented previously untranslated stories by writers from Spain, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, Venezuela , Peru, and Cuba. These twentyseven stories, dating from 1862 to 2001, shed new light on both Latin American fiction and on world sf. Aware of the book’s space limitations, the editors concluded their introduction with a mouth-watering list of authors whose works they would include in a subsequent volume. That book, alas, never appeared. Now Wesleyan has brought us The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction. Neither anthology nor literary criticism, it’s an engrossing, readable history of the genesis of modern Latin 74 | World Literature Today wltreviews Julian Stannard The Parrots of Villa Gruber Discover Lapis Lazuli Salmon Poetry This is the last installment in poet Stannard ’s Genoese trilogy; Rina’s War and The Red Zone were the first and second collections in the series, respectively. With a...

Raptors by Toon Tellegen

point, the book is so slender (only twenty-three poems are represented) that it seems important to clarify which poems were chosen and why. Having the original Polish on each left-facing page is, however, very welcome , and allows us to see how closely Florczyk translates the original text. In all, this is certainly a volume worth reading, and Swir’s humane yet unsentimental poems are among the best “war poetry” written during the twentieth century. Magdalena Kay University of Victoria Toon Tellegen. Raptors. Judith Wilkinson , tr. Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2011. isbn 9781847770837 Toon Tellegen’s Raptors is one of those books for which very little can really prepare you. Partly, we suppose we already know too much. It takes a book like this, seemingly hurled through the ether, to crack us on the head and wake us. This extraordinary long poem, with its startling inventiveness , tests our coma-inducing apathy to all things experimental. In his preface, the Dutch poet opens: “Years ago I invented someone whom I called my father.” Raptors is the product of those inventions. Each poem begins with the words “my father”; each circles, contorting around its theme of the inconstant patriarch. Each is a portrait in miniature of a man both comical and tyrannical, grotesque and pitiable: “My father / was a book // my brothers leafed through him, / pointed out the pictures to each other: / ’look, here we are superfluous / and there our souls have been trodden on / and there, look, there it would have been better not to have existed!’” The sudden momentum swings of Tellegen’s unorthodox narratives are marks of the poem’s explosive power. Tellegen invents then quickly re-invents, draws then realigns and draws again in a series of constantly shifting scenes. And yet the reappearing figure of the father is coherent and convincing in much the manner Tellegen ’s translator, Judith Wilkinson, describes him in her introduction: a dominating and intense force “with his ominous, manic energy . . . His grandiosity, his constitutional hubris, his wild flights of fancy, coupled with a consummate neediness . . .” Again and again, Tellegen visions him afresh: “My father / was something / no one could put their finger on // nice, said my mother, / but he wasn’t nice,/brave,everything,/buthewasn’t brave and not everything either.” It’s one of the immense pleasures of this book that just when you think you’ve got the measure of the poem, Tellegen somersaults over your hand and off the page. His beautiful reversals and abrupt tempo shifts point back to a beginning, a new start, a fresh view, and the pace and elastic play of Wilkinson’s English compels us to want to re-read a book we’re still in the process of reading: “then my father fell on the ground, / changed his character and froze // and my brothers hacked a hoe in him, / fished in him for comfort and resignation, / built houses on him, and little palaces // and my father spread // like restlessness and standoffishness / despite himself.” George Messo Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia Miscellaneous Rachel Haywood Ferreira. The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction. Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2011. isbn 9780819570826 In 2003 Wesleyan published one of the most exciting anthologies of Latin American fiction in years. Edited by Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina Gavilán, Cosmos Latinos presented previously untranslated stories by writers from Spain, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, Venezuela , Peru, and Cuba. These twentyseven stories, dating from 1862 to 2001, shed new light on both Latin American fiction and on world sf. Aware of the book’s space limitations, the editors concluded their introduction with a mouth-watering list of authors whose works they would include in a subsequent volume. That book, alas, never appeared. Now Wesleyan has brought us The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction. Neither anthology nor literary criticism, it’s an engrossing, readable history of the genesis of modern Latin 74 | World Literature Today wltreviews ...

The Sonnets of Het Bosken by Jan Van der Noot

Jan Van der Noot (c.1540–c.1601) is a central figure in Dutch literature, widely regarded as the first true Renaissance poet in the Netherlands. He was the earliest Dutch poet to imitate Ronsard, B...

The Paradox of Paragone: Painters and Poets in Constantijn Huygens’ Ooghen-Troost

In this contribution, we focus on two apparently unspectacular (though␣often misread) extracts from the Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens’ poem Ooghen-troost. In these passages the author relates the binary framework of his poem to the paragone between the ‹sister’ arts of poetry and painting in an interesting way. We suggest that, in these passages, Huygens forges an opposition between two forms of seeing that are central to his conception of the paragone and that inform much of his other writings on the visual arts: the seeing that involves the mere looking at a painting (the gaze at a marvellous image that remains mere superficiality) and the reading of a text that involves a more valid (and more valuable) way of perceiving that hinges upon—and literally looks through—the distinction between surface and depth, external appearance and inward truth. Central to our analysis of Huygens’ discussion of the paragone is the poet’s use of the prototypically Christian motif of Nature as ‹the second book of God’. Books are there to be read, not to be gazed at in blind awe—Nature is, after all, not a divine painting that can be taken at face-value, but a text whose meaning only becomes clear for a reader who has carefully and profoundly thought through and interiorized what lies beyond that which is to be seen.

Die poësie van Elisabeth Eybers: 'n Digterskap van sewentig jaar

The celebration of Elisabeth Eybers' 90th birthday on 26th February 2005 was a fitting occasion to take stock of this remarkable poet. She celebrated this occasion by publishing her twenty-first volume of poetry Valreep / Stirrup-cup , a poetic farewell to a life lived to the full. Her Versamelde gedigte (Collected Verse) spans a period of sixty-three years, from the publication of Belydenis in die skemering (Confessions in the twilight) in 1936 to her latest volume of poetry. My intention is to pay homage and to reappraise her work. In reappraising her work I follow in the main the method of close reading, a methodology, which despite its shortcomings, is “the best technique for revealing beauty and meaning in literature” as Camille Paglia rightly maintains in Break, Blow, Burn (2005). Furthermore, my approach follows Eybers' concept that poetry is closely linked to music and that a good poem should comply to the rules of rhythm and purity of sound. I shall follow as point of departure her seven poems set to music by the South African composer Hendrik Hofmeyr in his song cycle Die stil avontuur (The quiet adventure). In discussing Eybers' middle period, i.e. her collections published between 1950 and 1958, I argue that her poetry is as eloquent in its expression of joy as it is of sorrow. Following her emigration to The Netherlands in 1961, her most productive period followed. Her stature as a poet was confirmed with the award of the P.C. Hooft Prize in 1991, the highest honour to befall a Dutch poet. With the initial alienation from her native country and her eventual homecoming in another country, her poetic range expanded enormously. All along her connection to South Africa was not broken. She continues writing in Afrikaans, and her poetry bears testimony to the ongoing creative processes in search of selfrealization. Keywords: Elisabeth Eybers, Afrikaans poetry, music in poetry, the poet as immigrant Tydskrif vir Letterkunde • 43(2) • 2006: 57-78

On how not to be Lisbon if you want to be modern – Dutch reactions to the Lisbon earthquake

Contemporary Dutch reactions to the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 mostly followed the general European pattern, explaining the event from a philosophical and theological stance. Still, the one Dutch poet to write extensively on the disaster gave a peculiarly Dutch twist to his interpretation. In essence, he used the Lisbon disaster to vent his views on the Dutch Republic's position at the middle of the eighteenth century, and to urge it to reclaim its rightful place in the scheme of things of what we in the meantime have come to call modernity. Some two centuries later, a major Dutch modernist poet again fastened upon the Lisbon earthquake to define himself in relation to that same modernity. However, he did so in a sense opposite to that of his eighteenth-century predecessor.

De winter kaatst grijs uit je ogen

Selected texts derived from the edited diaries of an eighty year old man shed a light on the troubles of old age, declining health and wellbeing in a year prior to death. The author, Hans Warren (1921-2001) is a well known Dutch poet . Despite his poor physical condition and his mental frailty he confides his daily anguish and his lonely sufferings to his diary, resulting in an upsetting story of unhappiness and frustration. Although quite a few doctors are consulted, their advice seems inadequate or futile. The author’s relationship with his supporting partner, who is nearly forty years his junior, suffers under the strain of daily conflicts and humiliating dependency. Despite all this they share moments of love and friendship until the end. The author expresses thankfulness for all things of beauty he can still enjoy.

Bilderdijk's Head Meta-medical Reflections of an Afflicted Poet

The controversial Dutch poet and thinker, Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831), filled his letters with observations on his own health and well-being. These frequent appraisals of his physical and mental condition served as 'meta-medical' reflections by which he enhanced his self-understanding and 'constructed' his own self. In more than 1,500 published letters that Bilderdijk wrote to different correspondents in the course of five decades, he makes it clear that he regarded his head as the main locus and source of his many afflictions. His head-related complaints enabled him to draw together medical, cultural, biographical, psychological, religious, philosophical and aesthetic strands in his life and thought. His life's motto semper idem, his indebtedness to Leibniz, his practice of spontaneously 'ejaculating' verse and his ability to contact the metaphysical world, centred on his head as both the focal point of adversity and the seat of the soul. While evidently inspired by well-known medical-cultural traditions - melancholy or hypochondria and the scholars' illness (the morbus eruditorum, on which he wrote a lengthy didactic poem) - Bilderdijk's meta-medical reflections on sickness, identity, and poetry at the same time illustrate the complexities involved in the often highly individual, early modern understandings of illness. © The Society for the Social History of Medicine 2005, all rights reserved.

Waardepeilings van die digkuns van C.M. van den Heever

Evaluations of the poetry of C.M. van den Heever This article traces the assessments of the value of the poetic work by the Afrikaans author C.M. van den Heever since the second quarter of the twentieth century. Appreciation of him as poet mainly revolves around his role as transitional figure in the important renewal of Afrikaans poetry in the 1930s, as can be seen from two rather divergent critiques by D.J. Opperman (completed in 1946 and 1952, respectively). An outstanding contribution by Van den Heever in this regard is the introduction of elements of Dutch poetry from around the turn of the nineteenth century to the Afrikaans literary world. A critic such as T.T. Cloete, in an article dating from 1957, convincingly argues that aspects of Van den Heever’s poetic style and technique, which other critics had sometimes judged harshly, are largely functional in co-communicating the specific (passively transcendental) attitude towards life and reality conveyed in Van den Heever’s work. Local and international shifts in the dominant literary approaches, however, have caused singularly confessional poetry – such as the bulk of Van den Heever’s poetic output – to be increasingly marginalised since the mid- 1930s. In this respect he shares the fate of Dutch poet A. Roland Holst, whose poetry was influential in shaping the characteristics of Van den Heever’s.

Time Travel in the Forbidden Realm: J. J. Slauerhoff's "Het verboden rijk" Viewed as a Modernist Novel

The article analyses Het verboden rijk (1931) by the Dutch poet and novelist J. J. Slauerhoff (1898-1936) as modernist fiction which is experimental, narrated from multiple viewpoints with a complex handling of time. It focuses in particular on the narrative's movement between the twentieth and sixteenth centuries, and between a radio operator and the Portuguese poet Camoens. The text is read as thematizing cultural identity, rejecting history, which is used to support the status quo, criticizing European colonial culture, and ultimately moving towards the other, non-European culture--the forbidden realm.

Time Travel in the Forbidden Realm: J. J. Slauerhoff's "Het verboden rijk" Viewed as a Modernist Novel

The article analyses Het verboden rijk(1931) by the Dutch poet and novelist J.J. Slauerhoff (1898-1936) as modernist fiction which is experimental, narrated from multiple viewpoints with a complex handling of time. It focuses in particular on the narrative's movement between the twentieth and sixteenth centuries, and between a radio operator and the Portuguese poet Camoens. The text is read as thematizing cultural identity, rejecting history, which is used to support the status quo, criticizing European colonial culture, and ultimately moving towards the other, non-European culture-the forbidden realm.

Metapoësie as digterlike leesstrategie

Summary Linguistic strategies in a poem intrigue competent readers as well as poets. In this article the analysis of the poem “Leopold” by the Afrikaans poet T.T. Cloete investigates the possibility of metapoetics. The poem appears in a volume entitled Idiolek (1986: 63). From this title it can be inferred that attention will be focused on distinctive individual linguistic expression. In Cloete's poem it becomes evident that the poetic style of the Dutch poet J.H. Leopold (1865–1925) is under scrutiny. It will become evident that the celebration of poetry as a maximum exploitation of language can be identified as a distinctive poetic style. The aim of the article is to draw attention to the functioning of poetic metalinguistics as an interpretive and creative process of reading.

Die interfererende kontoere van Nijhoff en Cloete se poëtika

The interferential contours of Nijhoff and Cloete’s poeticsIn the poetry of T.T. Cloete the recycling or idiolectical transformation of texts from the Dutch literary tradition can clearly be demonstrated. The aim of this article is to explore the manner in which Cloete’s poetics manifests itself verse-extemally and verseinternally, and to indicate the interactional views of the poetry of Cloete and the Dutch poet Nijhoff. In the article it is demonstrated that those views which Cloete shares with Nijhoff manifest themselves in his poetry. The contours of these theories are views of the origins of poetry, a world view and a theory of objectivity. The nub of the shared views centres in the concept of the wilfulness of language which is linked synchronically to the so-called autonomistic poetics of the Utrecht model.