Review of Even Now in AGENDA (Belgium)
Belgian critic Michael Bellon reviewed Hugo Claus's Even Now, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, for AGENDA: Colmer always opts to render the vitality and the natural power of the language rather than slavishly copying the rhymes, alliterations, and meanings. In the epilogue,
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
Head of Emotional State
It's always a surprise when presidents or kings or prime ministers or otherwise powerful heads of state reveal a poetic side. Sometimes it's laughable, but other times -- considering they were probably busy dealing with things like the defeat of
Libretti & All: Auden the Translator
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. -- W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose: Volume II. 1939-1948 In addition to his own verse, Auden translated a number of works into English, including
Ezra Pound & Canto I
If you're going to engage with English poetry, a mentor once told me, sooner or later, you're going to have to deal with Pound. She was referring, of course, to his controversial--and often, downright bigoted--remarks both on the page and
My hero: Yannis Ritsos by David Harsent
“The poet’s extraordinary productivity was achieved in the face of personal tragedy, persistent ill healthy and systematic persecution” David Harsent, forThe GuardianUK, writes a moving piece on the legacy of Yannis Ritsos. Read it here.