According to Christina Rossetti, Spring is ‘when life's alive in everything’, but as far as Dutch literature goes, Spring 2008 seems to have been a particularly good season for the Grim Reaper. The Man with The Scythe had these men of letters on his shortlist and they all got the ultimate award:
- Hugo Claus: ‘one of Belgium’s most renowned authors despite his often caustic portrayals of his nation’, according to the New York Times and described in the very first issue of the yearbook The Low Countries as an artistic chameleon ‘whose art is one long ode to freedom’.
- Ed Leeflang: the poet of nature lost and the damaged child, whose lines ‘Here over the tide in sovereignty / go moon, wind and we’ adorns the great East Scheldt Dam in Zeeland.
- Henk Romijn Meijer, a former lecturer in English and American Literature and a prose writer who perfected the Anglo-Saxon genre of the short story in Dutch literature
- Jan Eijkelboom: city poet of Dordrecht, a man who, according to Kees Snoek in The Low Countries, lifted reality to another level and created a poetical universe all his own.
- Willem Brakman, prolific author of novels and short stories, often also labelled ‘a difficult writer’, though he countered that criticism by saying he wrote books for ‘good readers’
- J.J. Voskuil, a writer at his own expense with a small circle of readers, who grew to become a bestselling author and even a public phenomenon, as described in The Low Countries.
That’s quite a body count, yet it doesn’t mean that Dutch-language literature isn’t alive and kicking. On the contrary: the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature is even more active than ever before. The explosive growth of foreign interest for literature and writers from the Low Countries seems to justify a budget raise for the Fund for the future, and the Dutch Council for Culture tends to agree, calling the cultural mission of the Fund indispensible and of lasting long-term importance.
In the meantime the Fund is preparing a ‘Dutch Book Tour’, due to hit the UK in 2009. Dutch authors will tour the scepter’d isle to give readings and sign their works. Which also means that new English translations of Dutch books are to be expected, from long dead Louis Couperus (Ina Rilke's new translation of his Eline Vere (1889) is due to hit the shelves after the summer, over the still going strong 90-year-old Hella S. Haasse (whose Heren van de thee will be published in English in 2010 by Portobello Books, to growing ever stronger talent such as Tommy Wieringa (Sam Garrett's translation of Joe Speedboat, scheduled to appear in 2009, also by Portobello Books). And let’s face facts, unlike Woody Allen who once quipped that ‘I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying’: Death may take writers, but their books are here to stay..with a bit of talent, lots of luck and plenty of hard work from those who stay behind.
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