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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.

 

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Hugo Claus in Photographs

Claus Hugo.2

 

In the office, we’re getting excited about the upcoming November publication of Even Now, selected poems of Hugo Claus, defly translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. In anticipation, here are some photos, courtesy of De Wolken: Uit de geheime laden van Hugo Claus (De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam: 2011).

 

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For more, visit the Even Now & Wonder pages.