‘Turf is nu eenmaal een vruchtbaar terrein voor de fantasie’

‘After all peat is a fertile soil for the imagination’. The literary representation of bog and peat cutting in Dutch literature, 1909-1940 Novels about peat lands and turf-cutting were immensely popular in the Netherlands during the first decades of the twentieth century. This article traces recurring narratives and tropes in four such novels written by H.H.J.Maas, Antoon Coolen, Anne de Vries, and Theun de Vries, illustrating the ambivalent role that peat lands play in these texts. They function as sites of communality, future opportunity, and disorder on the one hand, and as places of exploitation and alienation on the other. These four novels do not downright reject the introduction of industrial innovations, but some among them are critical of the class divisions that may result. Others seem to acknowledge the hard labour that turf production involves, but do not criticize the social status of the peat-cutters.

Op de raaklijn tussen het historische en literaire. Het Vlaamse koloniale proza tot 1960 toegelicht door Luc Renders

Publications on Dutch literature about the Belgian Congo that have appeared to date are fragmentary and scattered across scholarly as well as cultural journals, collected volumes, and conference proceedings. There are practically no comprehensive studies on the history of Flemish colonial literature. Koloniseren om te beschaven. Het Nederlandstalige Congoproza van 1596 tot 1960, a recently released book by Luc Renders, aspires to redress this gap in research. Renders’ book can be considered the first as wide-ranging and detailed literary-historical exploration of pre-1960 colonial literature, which is presented against an extensive historical background. Crucially, Renders not only compiles the existing research on colonial writings in Dutch, but also contributes to it in an important way.

The devil in the human form and related matters: A handful of remarks

The aim of the article is to present the book by Małgorzata Dowlaszewicz Diabeł w legendzie. Wyobrażenie diabła antropomorficznego w średniowiecznej literaturze niderlandzkiej, published in 2020. The researcher analyzed the anthropomorphic devil figure on the basis of two collections of exemplars and legends Gulden legende and Der Byen Boeck, translated into Middle Dutch from Latin. The research results were presented in the broad context of medieval Dutch literature.

Branding Books Across the Ages

As marketing specialists know all too well, our experience of products is prefigured by brands: trademarks that identify a product and differentiate it from its competitors. This process of branding has hitherto gained little academic discussion in the field of literary studies. Literary authors and the texts they produce, though, are constantly 'branded': from the early modern period onwards, they have been both the object and the initiator of a complex marketing process. This book analyzes this branding process throughout the centuries, focusing on the case of the Netherlands. To what extent is our experience of Dutch literature prefigured by brands, and what role does branding play when introducing European authors in the Dutch literary field (or vice versa)? By answering these questions, the volume seeks to show how literary scholars can account for the phenomenon of branding.

Max Havelaar by Multatuli in Russia: The origins of translations

This article is dedicated to the Russian translations of the Dutch novel Max Havelaar or the coffee auctions of the Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappy (1860) by Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820–1887), who published his work under the pseudonym Multatuli. Max Havelaar is one of the best known and most translated works of Dutch literature. There are six complete Russian translations published between 1916 and 1959, which have not yet been analyzed. The authors hypothesize that German is the intermediate language in the Dutch-Russian literary transfer as research has shown that German often served as an intermediate language for translations into Scandinavian and Slavic languages during this period. In the specific case of Max Havelaar, the German translation by Wilhelm Spohr, who moved in circles of anarchists, served as an intermediate text. The authors also investigated whether the Russian translators used the English translation of 1868, but this was not the case. In the first part of this article, the biographies of the Russian translators, authors of forewords and editors who worked on the Russian translations are examined. In the second part, excerpts from the novel are compared with the translations to analyze the relationship between the texts. The results of the research confirm that the first Russian translations were based on Karl Mischke’s German translation, which had appeared almost simultaneously with Spohr’s. Traces of this translation can also be found in later texts. To the authors’ knowledge, it has not been shown before that Mischke’s translation and not Spohr’s was used as an intermediate text.

Nederlandse fantastische literatuur in het Pools vertaald

Dutch fantastic literature is showing clear development in the formalisation and strengthening of its position in Dutch literature and culture. This can also be seen in the growing interest being paid to Dutch writers in foreign literature markets. This article shows the history and trends in the translation of Dutch fantastic literature into Polish. I discuss the different literary organisations, the subgenres, and the forms of the publication of Dutch fantastic literature in Polish in order to illustrate the tendencies of the Polish literary sphere.