The Essential Gorter

  Lloyd Haft & M. Kruijff with their respective translations for The Essential Gorter Herman Gorter (1864-1927) is one of the all-time great Dutch poets. Most Netherlanders, even if they seldom or never read poetry, are familiar with Gorter’s often-quoted line Een nieuwe lente en een nieuw geluid , literally ‘A new springtime and a new sound.’ They may or may not know that this is the opening line of May (Mei, 1899), a long story poem with which Gorter instantly became famous when he was only twenty-four. An epic of youth and passion against a background of vibrant nature imagery, May is written in traditional rhymed couplets. Thematically as well as in form, at times it shows influence of Keats’ Endymion or of the drama and diction of Old Norse mythology. In subsequent books, starting with Verses (Verzen, 1890), Gorter wrote in a radically new style which combined experimentally intense lyricism with a freewheeling approach to language. Changing the spelling or even the so...

Hear,  past midnight - the cacaphony of quacks where coquettish carps now flirt their backs. The little lambs are prancing! How the pasture's graced: they gambol gaily through that springtime frame of May. - M. Kruijff Lloyd Haft's foreword to Herman Gorter's May  When I was choosing my angle to write this foreword for M. Kruijff's translation of Gorter’s May , what crossed my mind was the American poet Robert Frost's famous one-liner definition of poetry: ‘Poetry is what gets lost in translation.’ As one who for decades taught Chinese poetry via translations, I can testify to the lamentably widespread truth of it. Yet, I can also affirm that it is but a partial truth. Translations of poetry can themselves be poetry. I was more or less ‘converted to’ Chinese poetry by A. C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang (Penguin, 1965). Somehow the evocative elegance of Graham’s phrasing in English, together with his commentaries which assured me that he really did know what the...

  Herman Gorter: Selected Poems Translated by Lloyd Haft.  Finalist of the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards When times were leaf-still, long gone by, born she was, in autumn hush a bloom in bleak lightweepings standing pale light – the clouds cloak her in rains. Pale she stood her light amidst all drear, keeping light eyes, blonde hair spreading near her, tears at many an hour, white of hands – a poor light girl light-famished. Bring upon her color of bloomglow, your blood-red, o new season that is now. From Herman Gorter: Selected Poems. Translated by Lloyd Haft, 2021. Photo: M. Kruijff   It is not true that this is sunlight. This is you. This is not the wind that blues across the water: that is not so gentle: this is you. This is not the earth and not the heavens – so beautiful they’re not. This is you. From Herman Gorter: Selected Poems. Translated by Lloyd Haft, 2021. Photo: M. Kruijff  Deep goes the radiance of night and of light, translating All into feel...