With Other Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Dutch Poetry by Women

Carolyn Hlus was a lecturer in English literature at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

In the introduction to With Other Words, Maria Jacobs explains the difficulties facing ethnic writers who live away from the countries of their births: “It is a bit of a nuisance, this ardent desire to distribute the literary wealth of two different cultures evenly over the territories concerned.” Although this desire obviously motivated the five Canadian-Dutch women to translate and collect the poetry by eight Dutch women included in the anthology, the book is not dominated by the themes of either the immigrant experience or the conflict between native and adopted languages. Indeed, the poets are Dutch or Belgian; one of them, Elly de Waard, has been involved herself in translation. Her book, Westers (1980), is a collection of 18 side-by-side translations of poems by Emily Dickinson.

The themes in this collection vary from poet to poet. Ellen Warmond’s poems are basically love poems. Elly de Waard’s are concerned with love, too, but with memory as well. Ankie Peypers’ four poems about passing through time and space use casual, almost market square, language. The poems by Patricia Lasoen, Anreas Burnier, Hanny Michaelis, and Fritzi Harmsen van Beek cover topics as varied as Amsterdam’s pollution, Gertrude Stein, and nuclear war. The themes of the best represented author, Judith Herzberg, are exemplified in the two companion poems, “Late Couple I” and “Late Couple II,” which consider two couples’ relationships with absurd wit.

Canadians at least initiated to some French-Canadian/English side-by-side translations will appreciate these Dutch/English poems. Second generation Dutch-Canadians will touch base with their Dutch consciousness.