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Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands
Antioch Review, The, Fall, 2004 by John Taylor
Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands, ed. and trans. J. M. Coetzee. Princeton University Press, 105 pp., $19.95 (cloth). At a time when most Americans know next to nothing about contemporary foreign literature, this attractive bilingual volume is particularly welcome, despite its limitations. The 2003 Nobel prizewinner provides engaging, yet small, samples of the work of six key Dutch--langauge poets: Gerrit Achterberg (1905-62), Sybren Polet (b. 1924), Hugo Claus (b. 1929), Cees Nooteboom (b. 1933), Hans Faverey (1933-90), and Rutger Kopland (b. 1934).
Despite the brevity of the work presented, Coetzee has astutely rendered poetic sequences, rather than individual poems. His choice highlights what unites, not separates, distinct literary sensibilities. Achterberg's fourteen-part sonnet sequence "Ballad of the Gasfitter," Polet's at once playful and grim "Self-Repeating Poem," Claus's witty "Ten Ways of Looking at P. B. Shelley," Nooteboom's four-part homage to "Basho," Faverey's five-part suite "Chrysanthemums, rowers," and Kopland's at once touching and philosophically inquisitive "Descent in Broad Daylight" (a five-part series accompanied by Co Westerik's haunting illustrations) often permute words, phrases, or themes and employ formal schemes sometimes broaching upon the mathematical. In such ways, these poets represent the experimental branch of contemporary European poetry.
Besides Kopland's limpid, profound verse, the contributions by Claus and Nooteboom also call for attentive rereading. Interestingly, the latter are better known as novelists. Claus's The Sorrow of Belgium (1983) is one of the most deep-probing European novels devoted to the Second World War. Because Claus is Belgian, the subtitle of this anthology is erroneous; and Coetzee should have penned a much more detailed introduction--not just a frustratingly succinct summary of Dutch-language literary history, followed by brief bios of each poet. The reader of this volume will want more--which is perhaps the point.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Antioch Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
