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Celebrate the release of EVEN NOW at Passa Porta in Brussels!

Please join David Colmer, Jan Decleir, and Mark Schaevers at Passa Porta

to celebrate the release of EVEN NOW

Selected Poems of HUGO CLAUS
translated from the Dutch by David Colmer
with an afterword by Cees Nooteboom
—The event will feature a reading of Claus’s poems by translator DAVID COLMER 
and Jan Decleir followed by a conversation led by Mark Schaevers 

WHERE: 
Passa Porta, International House of Literature
Rue A. Dansaertstraat 46
Brussels
WHEN: Tuesday November 26th // 8 pm
Special thanks the Flemish Literature Fund for their generous support! 
Beautifully translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, Hugo Claus’s poems are remarkable for their dexterity, intensity of feeling, and acute intelligence. From the richly associative and referential “Oostakker Poems” to the emotional and erotic outpouring of the “mad dog stanzas” in “Morning, You,” from his interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a modern adaptation of a Sanskrit masterpiece, this volume reveals the breadth and depth of Claus’s stunning output.  These poems challenge all forms of authority with visceral passion and candor.

 

David Colmer translates Dutch literature in a wide range of genres including literary fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and poetry. He is a four-time winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize, and received the prestigious 2013 Vondel Translation Prize, the 2009 Biennial NSW Premier and the PEN Translation Prize. His translation of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (Archipelago) was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and he received–along with Gerbrand Bakker–the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Bakker’s novel The Detour. 
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Jan Decleir is a prolific Belgian film and stage actor born in Niel, Antwerp. He has started in Academy Award winning movies as Karakter and Antonia. For his role in The Barons, he received the Margritte Award for Best Supporting Actor.
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Mark Schaevers is a Belgian journalist, author, and editor.
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David Colmer Interviewed in The American Reader

Jan Steyn interviews David Colmer in The American Reader:

JS: Can you say a word or two about the place of Claus in Dutch letters and in translation before this volume?

DC: If you talk about post-war Dutch-language literature, writers who emerged after the war and dominated the new literary scene for the decades that followed, Claus was clearly the leading Belgian and on a comparable level to the “Big Three” in the Netherlands: Hermans, Reve and Mulisch (Hermans has been picked up recently but Reve still remains virtually unknown in English). The difference between them is Claus’s enormous range and productivity; he produced so much in so many genres that, in Flanders at least, it’s hard to overestimate his cultural importance. A number of his novels have been translated into English and been critically well received, but his poetry has had a much more marginal existence. There was one book-length collection, but that stayed pretty much under the radar, and otherwise the poems have mostly appeared in fairly minor journals and magazines. Coetzee did include a series of Claus’s poems in Landscape with Rowers, his anthology of Dutch poetry, and I think that was the one notable exception in terms of getting Claus’s poetry into the public eye in English.

 

Read the full interview here.