Category Dutch
Unbudgeable Feelings: Toon Tellegen’s “The Cricket’s Healing,” Translated from Dutch by David Colmer
Toon Tellegen’s “The Cricket’s Healing,” translated by David Colmer, explores themes of loneliness and depression through animal fables. Behind his surreal metaphors and silly yet strange encounters between animals, we can find very real social commentary and a deep analysis of the landscape of the human mind.
“Children are Born Persons”: Toon Tellegen’s “I Wish,” translated from Dutch by David Colmer
By Kelsi Vanada Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is, for me, a prime example of a book with a child narrator that’s often included in literature curricula for middle schoolers, but which in many ways speaks to an adult audience. I taught at a small K-8 school for a few years right out of […]
THINGS UNSAID: GERARD REVE’S “CHILDHOOD: TWO NOVELLAS,” TRANSLATED FROM DUTCH BY SAM GARRETT
By Alex Andriesse I was slow to come around to Gerard Reve’s writing—slow at least by twenty-first-century standards. A year ago, when I first tried reading his novel The Evenings, I found it so dull I couldn’t concentrate and gave up after the second chapter. I knew that in the Netherlands The Evenings was a […]
Michele Hutchison on Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s La Superba, expat writers and translators
Celebrated Dutch author Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s autobiographical novel La Superba, titled after the nickname for Genoa, where he has lived for the past six years, is the story of a writer named Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and the group of expats—legal and illegal—he befriends, as they try to assimilate into the labyrinthine city. I met up […]