November has come and gone, and it has taken E.M. Beekman from us. Monty Beekman (1939-2008) taught for more than three decades in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (read his obituary here) and wrote more than two dozen books including novels, short stories, scholarly works and poetry. He was a member of the Advisory Committee of the yearbook The Low Countries, for which he wrote an excellent survey piece about colonial literature from the former Dutch East Indies.

Beekman, who kept himself alive with a variety of jobs (oilman on the Rock Island Railroad, bartender, plastics factory worker, janitor, bouncer, lab assistant) before he embarked on his academic career, was a noted scholar and translator of Dutch colonial literature. Born in Amsterdam, he spent part of his youth in the Indies, where he encountered a completely different world, of which he claimed to remember the exotic smells of the tropics and the richness of those tropical surroundings. Though he never returned to the Indies after his adolescence, he put this extravagant splendour to use in his own poetry. His highly acclaimed translation of the seventeen-century Dutch naturalist Rumphius’ Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet published by Yale University Press earned him a Fellowship in support of this continuing translation. Reinier Salverda, who also reviewed Beekman’s Troubled Pleasures. Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies 1600-1950 (Oxford, 1996) in the yearbook The Low Countries, praised his ‘his extraordinary erudition and scholarship’ and the effort of his ‘labour of love’ in other reviews the same publication.

That labour has been cut short by the inevitable law of life called death. But as always what’s written stays behind, or as Beekman himself wrote about his poems: ‘ I had other presumptions once, but after a certain age and the cold logic of bereavements, life does indeed seem a lesson in leaving and poetry a better grade of litter.’ The same holds for his work as a scholar and translator. The Dutch poet Lucebert once wrote that everything valuable is defenceless, but with a bit of luck some of the valuable stuff isn't as biodegradable as we sometimes fear it is.