Poet
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Jellema 1936-... - 2003-... country: the Netherlands language: Dutch |
is one of the most impressive poets of the Dutch language area. His collected poems were published under the title Gedichten, oden, sonnetten (Poems, Odes, Sonnets) in 1992. Most prominent in his verse are ideas, reflections and images, yet there is plenty for the ear to enjoy as well. Jellema died last March. His final collection is Stemtest (Voice Test). C.O. Jellema (Netherlands, 1936 – 2003) was among the poets invited for this year’s festival, but he died, after a short illness, last March. In him, the Netherlands loses the author of an intense, profound poetic oeuvre. To honour him, others will read from his work at the festival. C.O. Jellema was a theologian, a Germanist and a philosopher as well as a poet. He translated poetry of Mörike, Von Andrian, Rilke and Von Platen, and a generous selection from the treatises and sermons written in Middle High German by the early fourteenth-century mystic and philosopher Meister Eckhart. Jellema’s childhood as a parson’s son in rural Groningen, and the spacious splendour of the landscape itself, are recurring themes in his poetry, as are his loves, his friendships and his passion for West European visual arts and music from medieval times to the present. Jellema wrote his poems in a Dutch of a beautifully intimate and, at the same time, stately quality, which lends to his work an inalienably individual tone and power. Apart from writing free verse, he liked to compose poems in strictly prescribed forms such as ode and sonnet. In many of his poems, Jellema deals with what Meister Eckhart would have called ‘suffering from the separateness of all things’: being painfully aware of a lost unity that can be recovered only in dreams. This loss may involve friends or loved ones, or the passing of youth, but also the realization that we humans are subject to time, that we are the prisoners of our bodies, of our brains. We cannot transcend our brain, to become a part of everything around us. C.O. Jellema once said in an interview: ‘With a poem I try to reach an awareness of original unity, an awareness we somehow return to.’ Jellema’s large oeuvre, which won him many awards, was collected in a single volume, Gedichten, oden, sonnetten (Poems, Odes, Sonnets) in 1992. He published three more collections, Spolia (1996), Droomtijd (Dream Time, 1999) and Stemtest (Voice Test), which appeared shortly before his death. Author: Erik Menkveld Translated by Ko Kooman Kleine gloria en andere gedichten (1961); Tijdverblijf (1971); Een eng cocon (1975); De schaar van het vergeten (1981); In de koude voorjaarsnacht (1986); Ongeroepen (1991); Gedichten, oden, sonnetten (1992); Spolia (1996); Droomtijd (1999); Stemtest (2003). Poets: |
