Poetry. Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent and John Irons. 100 DUTCH-LANGUAGE POEMS is a lovely selection of poems written in the Dutch language from the 11th century to the present day. For the poetry lover it is a comprehensive introduction to poetry from the Low Countries and provides a wonderful insight into the themes and issues that influenced generations of poets. The Dutch language and English translations are presented side by side making it a great resource for literature and language students and scholars. A detailed foreword by Paul Vincent and John Irons who selected and translated the poems, as well as an intriguing afterword by Gaston Franssen, assistant professor of Literary Culture at the University of Amsterdam, add additional value to this necessary anthology. PAUL VINCENT Paul received a BA (Hons) Modern Languages (German, Dutch, French) from University of Cambridge, UK in 1964. He undertook Postgraduate study at the University of Amsterdam during 1965-1966. He was awarded an MA from University of Cambridge in 1968. From 1967 to 1989 he was a full time Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Dutch Language and Literature at Bedford College, University of London, and afterwards at University College London. He left his academic career in 1989 to become a freelance translator of Dutch and German into English. He has translated many of the leading authors and poets from the Low Countries including Louis Couperus, Harry Mulisch, Willem Elsschot, Louis Paul Boon and Hugo Claus. He was the recipient of the first David Reid Poetry Translation Prize for the translation of Hendrik Marsman's famous poem 'Herinnering aan Holland' (Memory of Holland) in 2006, awarded by the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature. In 2012 Paul Vincent received the Vondel Prize for My Little War, his translation of Mijn kleine oorlog by Louis Paul Boon, published by Dalkey Archive. Paul Vincent is based in London. JOHN IRONS John Irons studied Modern & Medieval Languages (German, French, & Dutch) at Cambridge University and completed his PhD, The Development of Imagery in the Poetry of PC Boutens, at the same university. He worked as a senior lecturer at Odense University in Denmark. He has been a professional translator, from Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, German and French to English, since 1987. He was awarded the NORLA translation prize for non-fiction in 2007. John Irons has worked on a long and distinguished list of publications and he has been a translator for Poetry International Rotterdam since 1996. He has translated several of the leading authors and poets from the Low Countries including anthologies of Dutch-language poets Hugo Claus and Gerrit Komrij. John Irons lives in Odense, Denmark. http://johnirons.blogspot.co.uk/

This volume--featuring Coetzee's finely wrought English translations side-by-side with the originals--brings the work of six of the most important modern and contemporary Dutch poets to light.

OF GREAT IMPORTANCE is Nachoem Wijnberg's 16th volume of poetry. One of the most prominent living Dutch writers, Wijnberg's poetry is known for its deceptively plain language and his poems, according to the poet himself, can be read well by anyone who can read a newspaper. The poems in OF GREAT IMPORTANCE engage with statecraft, economics, and world history, lyricizing taxes and debts, stocks and flows, citizenship and labor contracts, notaries and accountants, factories and strikes, freedoms and fundamental rights, banks and railroads, property rights and codes of honor, sieges and treaties, gods and generals, how to make money and how to win elections, when to declare war and when to found a new state. Wijnberg's engagement with these and other related topics is based on his belief that economics, politics, and history - and all of the tangled relations therein, no matter how asymmetrical - concern how people live together, and his poetry is a creative form of historiography that attends to tracing the theater of an affective commonwealth, in which he builds upon the best work of those thinkers and poets who came before - including Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Heinrich Heine, Czeslaw Milosz, and especially C.P. Cavafy. Ultimately, Wijnberg understands that "Something important that changes the world only happens if there is a lever with a fulcrum you cannot know enough about," and yet his poetry gorgeously illuminates this fulcrum. VAN GROOT BELANG, a substantial part of which has been translated in OF GREAT IMPORTANCE, was shortlisted for the Dutch VSB Poetry Prize. According to the jury report, the book "constitutes the pinnacle of [Wijnberg's] individualistic oeuvre to date, [and] is a painfully consistent and uncomfortably accurate analysis of power, economic and social structures, and mechanisms that are at the root of the corrupted world in which we wake up each morning. In a highly individual poetic jargon, so bright that it causes a daze, he demonstrates the logic of the illogical and pares the illogical away from the logical." For his entire body of work, Wijnberg has also received the most prestigious Dutch literary award, the P.C. Hooftprijs, in 2018.

The instant #1 New York Times bestseller and #1 USA Today bestseller Amanda Gorman’s electrifying and historic poem “The Hill We Climb,” read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition. “Stunning.” —CNN “Dynamic.” —NPR “Deeply rousing and uplifting.” —Vogue On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe with her call for unity and healing. Her poem “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” can now be cherished in this special gift edition, perfect for any reader looking for some inspiration. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this remarkable keepsake celebrates the promise of America and affirms the power of poetry.

Beautifully translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, the IMPAC Award-winning translator of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, 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. Perhaps Belgium’s leading figure of postwar Dutch literature, Claus has long been associated with the avant-garde: these poems challenge conventional bourgeois mores, religious bigotry, and authoritarianism with visceral passion.

... This odd but compelling collection transforms Dutch poems into English written with a heavy brogue ... The book offers much work that is startling, though readers may find themselves partial to the marvelous touch of Michael O'Loughlin and Eamon Grennan.--Publishers Weekly.

Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs offers fifteen essays on the triptych of poetry + translation + Chinese. The collection has three parts: "The Translator's Take," "Theoretics," and "Impact." The conversation stretches from queer-feminist engagement with China's newest poetry to philosophical and philological reflections on its oldest, and from Tang- and Song-dynasty classical poetry in Western languages to Baudelaire and Celan in Chinese. Translation is taken as an interlingual and intercultural act, and the essays foreground theoretical expositions and the practice of translation in equal but not opposite measure. Poetry has a transforming yet ever-acute relevance in Chinese culture, and this makes it a good entry point for studying Chinese-foreign encounters. Pushing past oppositions that still too often restrict discussions of translation-form versus content, elegance versus accuracy, and "the original" versus "the translated"-this volume brings a wealth of new thinking to the interrelationships between poetry, translation, and China.

'What makes me saddest, is the double silence of her being. Language has packed its bags and jumped over the railing of the capsizing ship, but there is also another silence in her or around her. I can no longer hear the music of her soul.' One day, the author's mother no longer remembers the word for 'book'. This seemingly innocuous moment of distraction is the first sign of the slow disintegration of her mind. As Alzheimer's disease sets in and language increasingly escapes her, her son attempts to gather the fragments of what she has become, writing a moving, loving chronicle of the gradual descent into dementia of someone who 'no longer knows who she is, where she is or what will happen'.

The Bruges-born poet-priest Guido Gezelle(1830–1899) is generally considered one of the masters of nineteenth-century European lyric poetry. At the end of his life and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Gezellewas hailed by the avant-garde as the founder of modern Flemish poetry. His unique voice was belatedly recognised in the Netherlands and often compared with his English contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). In this bilingual anthology, award-winning translator Paul Vincent selects a representative picture of Gezelle’soutput, from devotional through narrative, to celebratory and expressionistic. Gezelle’sfavourite themes are childhood, the Flemish landscape, friendship, nature, religion and the Flemish vernacular, and his apparently simple poems conceal a sophisticated prosody and a dialogue with spiritual and literary tradition.However, an important barrier to wider international recognition of his lyric genius up to now has been the absence of translations that do justice to the vigour and musicality of Gezelle’sWest Flemish idiom. Two of the translations included go some way to redressing the balance: ‘TheWatter-Scriever’ by Scotland’s national poet Edwin Morgan and ‘A Little Leaf . . .’ by Francis Jones. Both translators make brilliant use of their own vernaculars (Glaswegian and North Yorkshire respectively) to bring Gezelleto life for the non-Dutch-speaking reader.