Nederlander Poets

A sample of close generation

- Translations wanted -

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Sieger M. Geertsma
(The Netherlands, 1979)

Sieger M. Geertsma performs something between poetry and rap. His poetry is marked by speed and strongly expressive form.

Many of his dynamic performances are ‘free-style’. In 1999 he published a collection of his poems, De Tonen van Replica, at his own expense. Some of his poems were included in the anthology Vanuit de lucht (‘From the air’, 2001).

[Sieger M. Geertsma took part in the Poetry International Festival Slam Rotterdam 2002. This text was written on that occasion.]

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Mustafa Stitou
(The Netherlands, 1974)

When Mustafa Stitou made his debut with Mijn vormen (My forms) in 1994, he was the first Dutch poet of Moroccan origin to publish a collection with a major publishing house. This may have helped bring extra attention to his work, as did the fact that he was only nineteen years old at the time, but the most important reason for the sensation that Mijn Vormen caused must be attributed to a combination of the unusual tone of the poems and their highly original images and points of view.

Stitou’s debut collection was nominated for the C. Buddingh’ Prize, the most important Dutch prize for first collections of poetry. In 1998 Mijn gedichten (My poems) followed and two years later both collections were republished in one volume. His most recent collection, Varkensroze ansichten (Pig-pink picture postcards), was published in 2003. It was immediately recognized as his best work to date and marked his position as one of Holland’s most promising young poets of today. Soon after its publication, Varkensroze ansichten was selected as the “best collection of Autumn 2003” by the Dutch Poetry Club. A few months later, in May 2004, it was awarded the prestigious VSB Poetry Prize 2004.

The poet himself also regards this third collection as his best until now: “My debut was uninhibited, but it contained poems that were not really rounded off. In the second collection, the poems were more flawless and light-hearted, but I overtaxed the experiment. I’ve eased back with this collection: I’ve combined the candour of the first book with the precision of the second.”*

In general, Stitou distinguishes himself in his phenomenal application of language, language in which emotion and intellect share a rare bond. He tacks easily between reality and imagination, irony and commitment, humour and seriousness – with all their ambiguities invariably wrapped in dazzling forms. He is also an excellent live reader and performs at literary events and festivals throughout the country and abroad. His poems have been translated into German, English, French, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Swedish and Macedonian.


THOMAS MÖHLMANN


Last updated: Aug 31, 2006
© Image: Roeland Fossen


*Stitou is quoted from an interview by Bas Belleman, in Awater, Autumn 2003.
You can find his poetry < here >

‘Everything that catches his eye can be used as a theme. He ties it up, pulls it tight, and displays his product to the reader as a jewel.’

Maria Barnas in De Groene Amsterdammer

‘The conceivable and the inconceivable are equalized. “The underlying is what shows itself,” writes Stitou. It is the rich breeding ground of these luxuriantly thriving poems.’

Paul Demets in Belgian magazine Knack

‘Stitou is being called the most important poet of his generation.’

Nico de Boer in Noordhollands Dagblad

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Maria Barnas
(The Netherlands, 1973)


Before she published her first collection of poetry, Twee zonnen (Two Suns, 2003), Maria Barnas had already written two novels and established herself as a visual artist. She studied at the Rietveld Academy and the Rijks Academy, both in Amsterdam, and her artwork has been exhibited in Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin.

A year after it was published, Twee zonnen received the C. Buddingh’ Prize, one of Holland’s most important debut prizes. The jury of that prize considered her work, “contemplative, musical poetry, desperate and humorous, powerful and brittle, with a transparency that gets more complex on re-reading”. Although similar words could be used to generally describe her second collection, Er staat een stad op (A City Rises, 2007), the poet’s style has clearly evolved: Barnas loosens her grip on syntax and widens her focus. Meanwhile, sharp observations seem to overrule contemplation, and a light, slightly frightening sense of violence enters her poems now and again. Her craftsmanship, which critics praised in Twee zonnen, is still there, but it’s put to use in a more nonchalant manner.

Barnas still combines her various artistic trades, and added writing poetry reviews, a libretto and plays for theatre and radio to the list, but writing poetry is at the centre of her activities. As she once told a reporter of the Dutch daily Trouw, she always needs to find a solution for something in a poem first, before she can start thinking about it in any other form.


Thomas Möhlmann

Last updated: Jun 2, 2008
© Image: Marijke Aerden



Bibliography:

Poetry
Twee zonnen (Two Suns), De Arbeiderspers, Amserdam 2004.
Er staat een stad op (A City Rises), De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam 2007.

Prose
Engelen van ijs (novel), De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam 1997.
De baadster (novel), De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam 2000.

Published translations
In: Vamos a Ibiza (Spanish, catalogue), translated by Diego Puls, Groninger Museum, 2007.
In: By heart - Uit het hoofd (English, anthology), translated by Sarah Corbett, Antony Dunn, Daljit Nagra, Five Leaves, Nottingham 2006.
In: Dias Abertos (Portuguese, anthology), translated by Fernando Venâncio, Culturgest, Lisboa 2006.
Dutch edition of Carapace Magazine (English, South Africa), translated by Willem Groenewegen and John Irons, in: Carapace, no. 53, 2005.
Mlada nizozemska poezija (Slovenian, anthology), translated by Katjusa Ruciga, in: Mentor, XXVII, nr.1-2, 2006.
Uit Nederland (German, anthology), translated by Ulrike Draesner, Norbert Hummelt, Marlene Müller-Haas, Marinus Pütz and Jan Wagner, in: Drehpunkt: Die Schweizer Literaturzeitschrift, nr.122, 2005.

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Alfred Schaffer
(The Netherlands, 1973)

“Unrest. Anxiety. Suspicion. Curiosity.” This was the young Dutch poet Alfred Schaffer’s response to the question as to what motivated him as a poet. Schaffer is rightly regarded as one of the most interesting young poets in the Dutch-language region.

Schaffer’s poems are characterized by the cool, business-like tone with which he records unsettling observations. It is seldom that one idea or one observation is elaborated on right till the end. “It is not my aim to work out a line of coherent thought in a poem,” he says in the same interview. “Life itself is not coherent, my poetry is oriented toward articulating something of this diffusion.”

He achieves this by describing several fragments and details of scenes and situations. “You could refer to my poems as ‘collages’. I’m concerned with the experiment with language and significance, with the way in which words influence one another when they are placed in a certain context.” Schaffer provides a snapshot but never an entire panorama. As a consequence, his poems have a strongly alienating effect. They offer the reader little to hold on to in an attempt to formulate a sound interpretation (in the traditional meaning of the word) and thus often evoke a feeling of unease.

Nevertheless, the rapid switch between apparently incoherent fragments does not lead to a kind of non-committal poetry. The procedure applied by the poet does result in a coherent whole; this is not narrative poetry but rather expressive poetry. Although the things described have a positive correlation with our own everyday lives (many lines have even been adopted from everyday language use, including sayings and jargon), Schaffer creates a completely strange and alienating language in his poetry. It is a world in which people are frequently watched or monitored, and one in which it is impossible to clarify the surroundings. It is a world that most resembles a claustrophobic nightmare.

In Schaffer’s first two collections, this world is primarily described via various characters who are helpless playthings of events and circumstances. These, in turn, have absolutely no purpose. The yearnings and requirements of the characters are of no avail. In his oppressive last collection Geen hand voor ogen, where the poems have become more austere in their form, the focus is shifted from the characters to the reader (and perhaps the poet himself), so that this confusion and despair are given shape in a very direct manner.

Edwin Fagel
Translated by George Hall
Schaffer made his debut in 2000 with the collection of poems Zijn opkomst in de voorstad (His Rise in the Suburb), for which he received the Jo Peters Poetry Award and a nomination for the C. Buddingh’ Award, both of which are prizes for young poets. His second book of poems Dwaalgasten (Vagrants; 2002) met favourable reviews and was nominated for the VSB Poetry Award. After the bibliophilic publication Definities en hallucinaties (Definitions and hallucinations; 2003), his most recent collection Geen hand voor ogen (No hand before your eyes) was published in May 2004 and once again nominated for the VSB Poetry Award.

Schaffer’s poems have been translated into Afrikaans, English, French, German, Macedonian and Swedish. After years of living in South Africa, where he taught Modern Dutch Literature at the University of Cape Town, he returned to the Netherlands in 2005 to work for the Amsterdam publishing house Cossee. Together with South African poet and writer Antjie Krog he compiled Nuwe Stemme 3, an anthology for yet unpublished Afrikaans talent.


Thomas Möhlmann

Last updated: May 5, 2007
© Image: Mark Kohn

“Schaffer is susceptible to the absurd reality in which we live, but does not allow himself to be overawed. Sober and resolute, he pursues his own route, eradicating the humbug, discarding the disorder: he knows where he’s going. Alfred Schaffer is already one of the poets who will lead the way in the years to come.”

Adriaan Jaeggi in Het Parool

“At first sight, Schaffer is a poet who quasi-nonchalantly observes the world around him from a surprising perspective. A closer look shows that he is more than that. The merit of his poetry lies in the suggestion he evokes, rather than in the observation.”

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer in NRC Handelsblad

“The result is intriguing, entertaining, and draws Schaffer’s challenging poetic horizon right in front of the readers’ face. With Vagrants, Schaffer has proven that he is steadfastly situated between promise and a challenging future.”

The jury of the VSB Poetry Award on Dwaalgasten (Vagrants)

More about him < here >

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Ramsey Nasr
(The Netherlands, 1974)

Ramsey Nasr (1974, of mixed Palestinian-Dutch parentage), voted the Netherlands’ national poet in 2009, is an actor as well as a poet, and it shows in his work. Take the first poem from his first collection, 27 gedichten & geen lied (27poems & no song): “The heavens I move. I remove / The mountains I loathe to somewhere else.” A man who opens up like that does not shun the grand gesture. No wonder his poems carry reminders of the way those ancient Dutch gods of sound, the Tachtigers (poets of the 1880s), practised their art: no quiet psychology or modest intimacy, but the language of visionaries pouring out their innermost feelings. The long epic poem ‘Geen lied’ (No song) is nothing less than a stage monologue in which a young man wanders through the underworld in search of his beloved, finding and losing her repeatedly. Nasr obviously likes to latch on to ancient traditions.

In his second collection, Onhandig bloesemend (Awkwardly blossoming) Ramsey Nasr continues to pour forth his lyrical impulses. “I really want to make the soul-dive”, he exclaims, full of zest. And he gives free rein to his love for imitation and word-play in poems based on Heine’s famous Dichterliebe. Nevertheless, there seem to be two souls living in Nasr’s body (no doubt on account of his mixed ancestry). For all his romantic exuberance he is no stranger to embarrassment, as “in polder fashion in loden coat between drop and wind”.

His remarkable bitonality ensues from his great theme: love. “the true lover admits no difference / between lily and hydrogen bomb,” he writes. Nasr as a poet is such a pure lover. And a man who does not feel embarrassed by clumsiness or spontaneity. It is not without reason that he turns his back on academies and science in ‘my brother was a level-headed boy’. Frustrated enthusiasm and passion are theme of his long poem ‘winter sonate (zonder piano en altviool)’ (winter sonata (without piano and viola)) about the composer Shostakovich. A characteristic subject, although Nasr appears to be not likely to follow any dictates concerning his art.


Rob Schouten (Translated by Ko Kooman)
Last updated: Mar 30, 2009
© Image: Tineke de Lange

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Albertina Soepboer
(The Netherlands, 1969)

Albertina Soepboer was born in the small town of Holwerd in the Dutch province of Friesland. She now lives in Groningen, where she first studied Romance languages and cultures and then Frisian literature. She writes poetry in both Frisian and Dutch, and has so far published five collections of poems in Frisian and two in Dutch. A book of Dutch translations of her two Frisian collections De stobbewylch (The Pollard Willow, 2000) and It nachtlân/Het nachtland (The Night Country, 1998) was published in 2003; the book includes the original poems in Dutch from the latter collection.

In her early collections, Soepboer showed herself a sensitive researcher of the female identity, displaying her exceptional talent for powerful earthy, sensory images. In her recent work she actually continues her research, while broadening her thematic range. In her collection It nachtlân/Het nachtland she explores, in a close-knit chain of poetic sequences, the meaning of elementary spheres of life, focussing in particular on the language carrying that meaning. She pays special attention to the complexity of a bilingual situation, for instance in a poem like ‘Hermans huis’ (Herman’s House), where she uses alternating Dutch and Frisian stanzas.

The triptych ‘Woartels’ (Roots), which Albertina Soepboer read at the Poetry International Festival in 2003, was taken from It nachtlân/Het nachtland. In this triptych a woman returns to her country of origin. She signals the pain of growing up, but also the pain of being alienated from one’s native country and language. In addition, she read a cycle from her collection De fjoerbidders (The Fire Worshippers) that appeared in 2003, singing of a lost love in dark, sober images, and finally her poem ‘Moeder Spin’ (Mother Spider), a moving account of how a woman accommodates the adult and the child within herself.


Jabik Veenbaas (Translated by Ko Kooman)
Last updated: Nov 3, 2008
© Image: Ronald Hoeben


[The original version of this text was written for the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2003; minor changes were made by Thomas Möhlmann.]

Bibliography
Poetry
Gearslach (Frysk & Frij, 1995)
De twirre yn ’e tiid (Frysk & Frij, 1997)
De hengstenvrouw (Prometheus, 1997)
It nachtlân/Het nachtland (De Oare útjouwerij, 1998)
De stobbewylch (Bornmeer, 2000)
De dieptering (Passage, 2001)
Het nachtland/De knotwilg (Contact, 2003; Dutch translation by Jabik Veenbaas)
De Fjoerbidders (Bornmeer, 2003)

Prose
Krystman (Bornmeer, 2003)

Translations
Mari-Marietta (a children’s book by Maite Gonzalez Esnal, translated in to Frisian; Koperative Utjowerij, 1998)
Soepboer also writes plays for Theater De Citadel in Groningen

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Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer
(The Netherlands, 1968)

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer made his début in 1998 with a collection entitled of the square man, a literary multi-course dinner which made a splash in Holland’s quiet poetic pond. Fifty-odd highly individualistic poems: a sturdy volume which at once won him the 1999 C. Buddingh’ poetry prize.

Pfeijffer is exuberant, energetic, brimming with life. His banquet serves the reader no white lines of silence, no regular rhyming stanzas. Pfeijffer likes to break bones, throws in a ‘ha ha kiddo humour joke’, jabbers extravaganza and toasts ‘to a dangerous glass’. His free verse, without capital letters, throbs and sings with alliteration, internal rhyme and associative sequences like ‘dram dromende druilknol knoestig knort’. Its overwhelming dynamism, its lavish exploitation of sounds and words, take the reader as by storm. ‘Words must give you something to chew on,’ says Pfeijffer in an interview. ‘There is plenty of ordinary speech around.’

Apart from a poet, Pfeijffer is a Greek scholar on the staff of Leiden University. He wrote a dissertation on the poetry of Pindar, but also published a history of classical literature for the ‘general reader’. Regarding his own poetry he has outspoken views, not just in his often quoted programmatic opening poem ‘Farewell Dinner’, in which he dismisses the hermetic Hans Faverey and calls for ‘butter-baked images / and bulimic verse’. Pfeijffer’s poetic polemics leave no room for doubt as to what kind of poetry he prefers. He feels akin to Lucebert, and abhors the paper verse of introverted hermetics and meek-hearted dreamers (‘stumble, stiff romantic, mumble on’). Poetry should have life, and preferably, in Lucebert’s words, ‘life in full’.

Thus Pfeijffer, the ‘gleaner of contrivances’, quotes not only Pindar and Pound, Horace and Lucebert, Sophocles, Walcott, Gorter, Faverey, Nijhoff and Reve, but also comic book characters. He not only writes about the political martyr Ken Saro Wiwa, but about C&A sweaters and Fiat Croma, barcodes, canned beer, butt-tight and garamond ten point italic. The poet neither lacks humour or self-mockery, nor seriousness for that matter, witness his hotly tender love poems: 'and though I sang and gave over my loins / and you failed to scorch my senses / I should be useless white on white.'


Mirjam van Hengel (Translated by Ko Kooman)

Last updated: Nov 10, 2008
© Image: Pieter Vandermeer



[Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer took part in the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2000. This text was written on that occasion.]
Publications (selection)
van de vierkante man (1998).


LinksIlja Pfeijffer.nl
Pfeijffer's personal website