[Eric]

Do start a thread somewhere else about Ady; it would be interesting. I first heard his name mentioned in the mid-1980s when I studied a couple of terms of Hungarian, and the literary canon was introduced to us. Regrettably, I never learnt enough Hungarian to read even a newspaper article in the original, let alone poetry. (Jokingly, I wonder whether Bill Oddie's got Hungarian forebears, as his surname is pronounced more or less the same as that of the poet, as the Hungarian "a" is almost an "o" sound.)

But to return to the promotion of Dutch literature and its translation into English, people such as Ina Rilke, Paul Vincent and Susan Massoty have translated quite a bit, but I never get the feeling that, in Britain, Dutch literature as a whole has a profile. It's all one-off books, or sometimes a couple by the same author. There are movements and individuals who could be brought to the fore, such as Simon Vestdijk as mentioned earlier, but also contemporary authors, such as Leon de Winter, Margriet de Moor and Maarten 't Hart. And F.B. Hotz and L.H. Wiener are good short-story writers.

From an older generation, people have told me that Arthur van Schendel is good, though the Wikipedia article is quite uninformative, the DBNL article is just another bloody list of publications, and from the various things on the net, even in Dutch (!) you get rather a limited picture.

There is also Frederik van Eeden whose work looks very interesting, but whose books I've never got round to reading. At least one of his books is available in English.