Author | J. Slauerhoff |
---|---|
Country | Netherlands |
Language | Dutch |
Genre | Poetry |
Publisher | C. A. J. van Dishoeck (first ed.) |
Publication date | 1928 |
Preceded by | Oost-Azië (1928) |
Followed by | Fleurs de Marécage (1929) |
Eldorado is a volume of poetry by Dutch poet J. Slauerhoff. First published in 1928, the collection gathers poems that speak mostly of sailors' and pirates' lives and desires. The poems contain familiar themes for Slauerhoff: a sailor's life, the impossibility of life on land or in society, the myth of the pirate and the Flying Dutchman .
Eldorado comprises 27 poems in seven sections. All, except for "Dschengis", rhyme in couplets or, especially if consisting of four-line stanzas, use rhyme schemes ABBA and ABAB (alexandrines).
Three of the poems address the myth of the Flying Dutchman , though literary critic H. T. J. Miedema wrote in an overview article of the myth in the 1950s that Slauerhoff is "less of a poète maudit fighting against God" than some of his contemporaries who used the theme. [2] The theme was familiar to Slauerhoff, who had written a Flying Dutchman poem already before 1922. Whereas other Dutch poets were inspired more by German Romanticism (particularly Richard Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer, based on a short story by Heinrich Heine), Slauerhoff arrived by way of French poets who treated the related themes of the eternal ghost ship and the dead albatross. [3] For instance, his Rimbaud-inspired "Het eeuwige schip" had been published in 1925 already, [4] and before 1922 he had translated Charles Baudelaire's "L'Albatros". Literary critic S. P. Uri considers "Spookschip", which makes no overt reference to the theme, a better poem than "The vliegende Hollander"; like his other poems that treat the theme implicitly, it is a "strong visionary and symbolic poem, filled with typical Romantic feelings of demise, death, and decomposition". By contrast, he treats the theme in the overt "Flying Dutchman" almost satirically, in "forced language and sloppy rhymes". Uri surmises that perhaps Slauerhoff, who was never interested in "typical Dutch fare", chose to focus on the French Romantic aspects of the myth rather than the Dutch, Calvinist ones. [3]
Corbière is cited as one of Slauerhoff's influences and in his early years he had identified with the French poète maudit . [5]
First published in 1928 by C. A. J. van Dishoeck in Bussum, it was printed twice more by the same publisher (1942, 1946). It was published (unchanged) in 1982 by Nijgh & Van Ditmar as part of Slauerhoff's collected poetic works. [6]
J. C. Bloem (in De Gids , 1929) compared the poem "Afrikaansche elegy" ("African elegy"), which opens the second section, with the work of Charles Baudelaire (esp. "Parfum Exotique"); Bloem made his comparison in an overview of new Dutch poets whose "raw, jarring, and purposely unpolished" poetry had its flaws but was a welcome change from over-stylized predecessors. [7] Raymond Herreman (Den Gulden Winckel, 1929) praised Slauerhoff for being a young Dutch poets who reacts strongly against two different tendencies he saw in contemporary poetry—a "verbose and hollow romanticism" that attempted to ingest the entire cosmos and was ready to explode, and a school that childishly inflated the tiniest psychological imbalance to inner drama. Eldorado, according to Herreman, was a breath of fresh air with verses full of violence and warmth, and on the whole expressed a deep desire to grasp life at its fullest. [8] Poet and critic Nico Donkersloot noted that the glory days of Dutch lyric poetry seemed to have passed, and while praising Slauerhoff as the greatest poet of his generation said Eldorado was disappointing, possibly because of high expectations. [9]
Hendrik Marsman, a fellow poet and critic, wrote a highly favorable review; in 1931, he wrote that of all contemporary poets Slauerhoff most closely exhibited the "original life force of the formative beginning, of the poetic force". He admired the apparent struggle between the formal, poetic power, whose desire is to express itself using the highest human faculty (language), a poetic power that is at the same time "thwarted, undermined, misled, and poisoned by nature". [10]
Jan Jacob Slauerhoff, who published as J. Slauerhoff, was a Dutch poet and novelist. He is considered one of the most important Dutch language writers.
The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship, allegedly never able to make port, but doomed to sail the seven seas forever. The myths and ghost stories are likely to have originated from the 17th-century Golden Age of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and of Dutch maritime power. The oldest known extant version of the legend dates from the late 18th century. According to the legend, if hailed by another ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman might try to send messages to land, or to people long dead. Reported sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries claimed that the ship glowed with a ghostly light. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship functions as a portent of doom. It was commonly believed that the Flying Dutchman was a fluyt.
Hendrik Marsman was a Dutch poet and writer. He died while escaping to Great Britain, when the ship he was sailing on, the S.S. Berenice, either suffered a fatal engine-room explosion, or was torpedoed by a German submarine which mistook Berenice for another vessel.
De Vliegende Hollander is a combination of a water coaster and a dark ride in amusement park Efteling in the Netherlands. The ride is based on the legend of Dutch man of war the Flying Dutchman.
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Oost-Azië is a volume of poetry by Dutch poet J. Slauerhoff. First published in 1928 under the pseudonym John Ravenswood, the collection contains poems whose theme is the Far East, a part of the globe Slauerhoff knew from his career as a sailor.
Fleurs de Marécage is a collection of French poems by Dutch poet J. Slauerhoff, first published in 1929. Some are poems originally written in French, others are French translations by the poet of his originally Dutch poems.
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