Dutch Literature

[Stiffelio]

Eric, your story is insane, kafkian even. Maybe there is some corruption involved and they hand pick their translators/grant recipients according to some shady method. I also wonder how they choose their target language 'assesors'. You don't sound to me to write wooden English. On the contrary, at least in these pages, your style is very lively.

[Eric]

I don't know whether it's insane or Kafka?sque. But it just happens to be true.

Before the Productiefonds was started, there was another chap whose promotional agency was run by, or at least funded by, the Dutch state. But he was found out to have been doing creative bookkeeping, as I remember. So when the Dutch Ministry of Culture, or whoever, decided to clean things up I was very happy. But it was simply the same old story with new people. Not that they were corrupt, but simply that they had their own agenda and regarded translators as servile lackeys who do the work that they choose. A polite chat, several free books, and you're on your way. They never contacted you again unless they needed you for an emergency translation. That is indeed where I first ran into trouble. I won't bore you with details, but I feel that I am morally in the right.

I don't feel my English is wooden either. But for some reason, every bloody time I sent in a test translation to the Productiefonds, there was something wrong with it. The first couple of times I believed that I could have just made a hash of it and rushed the translation test. OK. But when I went on to translating Estonian, then actually got things published, and won a prize a couple of times, I thought hello, there's something fishy going on. My translations can't all be that crappy.

But let me say this: a literary translator is always vulnerable to criticism. If you're a writer in your own right, you have 100% control over what is, after all, your own text. But a translator can get criticism from the author (if they know English, however superficially), from the editor at the publishing house (this is legitimate if it occurs pre-publication) and from the critics who pick out one word on a 100,000-word novel and go on and on about how you mistranslated it.

In the mood I'm in now, I must relate one classic instance in my case. I used to sit around on Thursday evenings in Amsterdam with a pleasant little gathering of literary translators, mostly into Dutch. Earlier this decade, I was feeling rather proud of myself as I had managed to translate an Estonian novel and publish it in America. I can't find my translation right now, but it was the novel "Things in the Night" by Mati Unt, which had just appeared with the Dalkey Archive, a respectable American university press.

Obviously, Dutch people know zilch, as the Americans say, about Estonia. But I handed it to a well-received and generally nice, and erudite, Dutch translator from several languages to leaf through. On page, let's say 47, he looked at one of the extremely rare phrases deliberately left untranslated, a French quote.

I can't remember the word in question but it was like "garage". Now, as everyone who speaks French knows, all words ending in an "e" are feminine - with a number of exceptions. "Garage", like the original word that I can't remember, is one. So this Dutch chap pointed at the page of this 300-page novel and said: "That should be 'le garage', not 'la garage'". This is purely one anecdotally funny incident. But that sort of thing was perhaps going through the minds of the Productiefonds every time they rejected me, i.e. a few small mistakes, but what devastating ones.

[Stiffelio]

Eric, I forgot to mention, in reference to the quality of your English end in an hypothetical translation from the Dutch, that I was put off by the awful translation of an otherwise marvellous novel I read recently, namely Harry Mulisch's The Assault. The perpetrator of the hatchet job goes by the name of Claire Nicolas White. Have you heard of her? The English prose reminded me of the kind of English spoken in the colonies or even in the Anglo-Argentine community of my grand parents' generation. I thought you could have done a much better job. Oh well, maybe that's the kind of writing they like at Productiefonds!

[Liam]

in reference to the quality of your English

I often disagree with Eric's views, but I never disagree with his English! Frankly, I've only met a handful of people with such a firm and unshakeable command of the language.

[Amoxcalli]

Can't agree more! Amoxcalli is a good example. He is being very Dutch in his approach to the Netherlands and to Dutch literature. Out of I don't know what motivation (maybe embarrasment or a feeling of inferiority) he is very quick to talk or write negatively about it:



Come on, Amoxcalli, let's look at the bright side. I agree there's a lot of crab, but there is also really good stuff among it.

It's not bad per se, but I've yet to read a "great" Dutch novel. The Dutch language seems to produce a lot of mediocre writers, a fair few good writers and a handful of "world-class" writers (Nooteboom, perhaps Mulisch. I'm also of the unshared opinion that Gerrit Komrij is one of the best Dutch authors ever). Contemporary or Classic. I'm not all that enthusiastic about Vondel and his friends either. Max Havelaar has been published as a Penguin Classic, but is it really?

The Discovery of Heaven and Max Havelaar are supposed to be the two peaks of Dutch literature, but I found Multatuli's style rather amateur-ish and although I haven't read The Discovery of Heaven, I'm not that excited about Mulisch' work either.

Should I start looking at other languages, I find that I can easily name a handful of great writers in the Czech language (with only 12 million speakers, as opposed to 27 million speakers of Dutch), among them being Kundera, Hrabal, in the Swedish language (10 million, Lagerlof, Lagerkvist). Even tiny languages (forgive me), such as Icelandic and Norwegian (0.3 and 5 million respectively; Hamsun, Ibsen, Laxness) seem to be produce great writers at least as consistently as the Dutch language.

I think even professors of literature abroad will have difficulty naming five Dutch authors. That's not just because it's barely promoted.

[Bernadette]

If you are interested in hearing a Dutch author read his work in Dutch and English you should come to the Poetry Cafe, 22 Betterton Street WC2H 9BX, on Wednesday the 20th October at 7.30 pm.

Arnold Jansen op de Haar will not only read from Yugoslav Requiem and Joegoslavisch requiem but he will also talk about his involvement in the translation process and how he changed careers from being a professional soldier to a full time writer and poet.

The attached flyer provides more details as does this page.

[mesnalty]

I'm reading Anne Frank's diary, and she mentions in passing reading a book called The Assault. Now, unless there is some sort of time travel going on, it obviously can't be Harry Mulisch's novel The Assault (which, eerily enough, is also about the occupation of the Netherlands during World War II). Does anybody know of what book Anne Frank might be referring to?

[Eric]

I agree that the time travel theory is a little unlikely. The problem is that in a translation you won't immediately be able to find out what the title of the original book is in the Dutch version. I tried Googling under the Mulisch title "De aanslag" but removed Mulisch from the search (i.e. " -Mulisch") but that did not reveal anything.

So it depends of what the original Dutch (or German? - Anne Frank was, after all, German-born) title of the book is. Also, how recently it was translated, as a recent translator would surely be more circumspect.

Could you give more context to her remark?

[mesnalty]

There isn't too much context, unfortunately. Here's the relevant excerpt, from the entry for October 16, 1942:

"Yesterday I finished The Assault. It's quite amusing, but doesn't touch Joop ter Heul. As a matter of fact, I think Cissy van Marxveldt is a first-rate writer."

Unless I missed something, that's the first (and last) time she mentions it. It might even be a French book, since she could read French, and mentions reading some French books.

[Eric]

Well, Mesnalty, we're moving forward a little. Cissy van Marxveldt (pseudonym of Setske de Haan) is a Wikipediaised name, so there is a list of books she wrote. Joop ter Heul (usually a boy's name, but seemingly that of a girl here) is a fictional character in her novels.

Given the fact that before her terrible end Anne Frank was just an ordinary teenage immigrant living in Holland, she will have been reading books for teenage girls at the time.

You see how handy it is to know languages and just to be able to access information in them. I happen to know Dutch well, so the book title list in the Wikipedia article presents no challenge.

But alas, the answer to the question has not yet emerged. Because the long list of van Marxveldt's titles does not reveal anything that could be translated as "assault" or "attack", except maybe the 1925 title "De Stormers", which does sound as if someone is storming something, even in Dutch.

The cover:

The title of this book was changed after WWII to "Burgermeesters tweeling" (The Twins of the Mayor), presumably because "De Stormers" had nasty associations with storm-troopers.

[Mirabell]

There isn't too much context, unfortunately. Here's the relevant excerpt, from the entry for October 16, 1942:

"Yesterday I finished The Assault. It's quite amusing, but doesn't touch Joop ter Heul. As a matter of fact, I think Cissy van Marxveldt is a first-rate writer."

Unless I missed something, that's the first (and last) time she mentions it. It might even be a French book, since she could read French, and mentions reading some French books.

Joop Ter Heul is a series of ya novels by Van Marxveldt, which are thought to have influenced Anne Frank strongly. Some suggest that the way she makes use of letters, and names like "Kitty" are borrowed directly from van Marxveldt.

Here's a brief review of Joop Ter Heul http://prettybooks.livejournal.com/78344.html

Eric is right abozut "The Assault". The passage is, in Dutch, "Gisteren heb ik De Stormers uitgelezen. Het is wel leuk, maar het haalt het lang niet bij Joop ter Heul."

[mesnalty]

Thanks! The three sentences I quoted seemed to me to imply that The Assault was by someone other than Cissy van Marxveldt, but I guess not.

[Eric]

I thought about Mesnalty's point about "written by someone else". But I thought I'd look through the Marxveldt titles first. And "De Stormers" does appear to fit the bill.

Reading the sentence in Dutch, as Mirabell quotes it, it does appear to be the contrast between two books by the same author. She says it's alright, but not a patch on the Joop ter Heul books.

[John]

Anne Frank is good and of course Vincent Van Gogh, http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/...446746,00.html

[John]

I plan to read he Dutch writers Thomas Bernhard and Robert Musil --> http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/...,66265,00.html

[Daniel del Real]

I plan to read he Dutch writers Thomas Bernhard and Robert Musil --> http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/...,66265,00.html

Oh my, it seems a real penguin did that Dutch selection

[Eric]

Yes, we have an expression in Britspeak: a double-Dutch dumbo. Austria has, of course, been part of the United Netherlands since 1791 (or maybe 1792?) when the famous Slaughter of Vienna took place and such famous revolutionaries as Thomas Musil and Robert Saint Bernard had their throats slit by an Esperanto-chanting mob of Wends, drunk on pastiche and Baranduin wine.

Gerra life and gerra language. Surely the penguins can't be that daft. They survive Antarctic winters.

[Eric]

Does anyone here at the WLF, apart from the mysterious Bernadette, actually read any Dutch literature on a regular basis?

[Liam]

I didn't even know they HAD a literature. Isn't Dutchland a province of Germany or something?

[Eric]

The Dutch are hopeless at promoting their genuine classics and modern classics. They appear to want to plug people who have relatively little literary value, but are somehow part of their arcane system of mutual back-scratching. The authors must be alive, so that they can be wheeled out to book fairs to boast about their achievements, or just look pretty. So anyone who has died, will be exploited for a bit, then quietly dropped. This may all seem cynical, but yours truly did live for two decades in the Netherlands.

If Dutchland were made a province of Germany, the rather efficient Germans would promote Dutch literature for them.

So next week, the first novel by Moekje van het Poepje will be launched, and Moekje, a dumb blonde with a very big mouth about her fantastic achiefments, vill be telling de veurld about her luffly book.

Moekje van het Poepje was born in 1990, has big tits and likes to fleurt viss yeurnalists by showing a lot of leg and crossing them at key moments, showing what we Brits call her knickers. She has written one novel, four poems, half a play and the first three words of an essay, and is being tipped for the Nobel by all the top journalists of all the top Dutch dailies, as well as by a couple of papers in Flanders (aka northern Belgium).

"Van het Poepje is the most brilliant author Holland has effer known". Arie Bumscratcher, De Volkskrant.

"Moekje is the most talented author to publish a noffel since May 2012". Loekje van Vleeskut, Trouw.

"The author has got nice knockers". Frans Vriemel, author of "The Groper", "The Rapist", "The Dirty Old Man", and twenty-seven other similar books.

"My friend Moekie likes to suck my... Sorry, my dear friend Moekie is the most accomplished author ever to have written a book anywhere on this Earth. She is the greatest author Holland has effer produced and makes Jorge Luís Márquez look like a dog turd by comparison. Ivan Tolstoy wouldn't reach up to her fanny, I mean shoulders, and all the rest are yust feukking shit. Moekie has been writing since she was ten, when in fact she started writing this noffel, which is one of the best that..." [continues] Joop Stront aan de Knikker, NRC Handelsblad.

"Fabulous." Literary agent Kalkulatius Munnymaker, of Bookwinner Productions.

"Out off my way. I heff written a book." Moekje van het Poepje.



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