Grand Larcenies

Grand Larcenies features generous selections from the work of ten classic modern Dutch poets. The translator, a notable Welsh poet now living in Holland, takes his bearings from Robert Minhinnick's seminal Welsh anthology The Adulterer's Tongue, which attempts by means of experiment rather than rigid linguistic fidelity to approach the imaginative core of the original. 'These versions take risks,' Evans declares; 'they are no black-and-white photocopy, but they honour the originals' forms and intentions, making audible a wide array of individual styles and voices, and a Dutch sensibility that is both familiar and alien to us. We go from the unstable genius Hans R. Vlek, who completed his stunning oeuvre in a mental asylum, to Esther Jansma, the professor of dendrochronology, who writes with excoriating lyricism on the death of her first child, and is an archaeologist of the private life, to Gerrit Kouwenaar, whose Eliotesque impersonality and advocacy of language an sich, stands like a tent staked out in a hurricane in his homage to his late wife in Total White Room...' Evans' ten poets are Hans R. Vlek Eva Gerlach Hester Knibbe Rob Schouten Willem van Toorn J. Eijkelboom H.H ter Balkt K. Michel Gerrit Kouwenaar Esther Jansma It transpires that contemporary Dutch poetry is less familiar to us in its themes and poetics than we might have expected. To give the English language reader greater freedom, the book is 'self-triangulating', with the Dutch originals, Evans's translations and imitations, and an afterword on the possible non-existence of translation, where readers can consider their own creative practice.