Poet
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Albertina Soepboer 1969-... country: the Netherlands language: Frisian |
writes in Frisian and in Dutch. In the mid-1990s she began to present her own work in both languages, which resulted in her debut collection Gearslach. Ireland, Spain and Morocco, which she loves to visit, and the landscape of her native Friesland feature prominently in her poems. Besides her poetic activities, Albertina Soepboer writes for the newspaper Friesch Dagblad, the poetry review Poëziekrant and the weekly Vrij Nederland. Albertina Soepboer was born in the small town of Holwerd in the Dutch province of Friesland. She now lives in Groningen, where she studies Frisian literature and Romance languages and cultures. She writes poetry in both Frisian and Dutch, and has so far published four collections of poems in Frisian and two in Dutch. Earlier this year, Contact published a book of Dutch translations of her two latest collections, De stobbewylch (The Pollard Willow, 2000) and It nachtlân/Het nachtland (The Night Country, 1998); the book includes the original poems in Dutch from the latter collection. In her early collections, Soepboer showed herself a sensitive researcher of the female identity, displaying her exceptional talent for powerful earthy, sensory images. In her recent work she actually continues her research, while broadening her thematic range. In her collection It nachtlân/Het nachtland she explores, in a close-knit chain of poetic sequences, the meaning of elementary spheres of life, focussing in particular on the language carrying that meaning. She pays special attention to the complexity of a bilingual situation, for instance in a poem like ‘Hermans huis’ (Herman’s House), where she uses alternating Dutch and Frisian stanzas. The triptych ‘Woartels’ (Roots), which Albertina Soepboer reads at this year’s Poetry International Festival, was taken from It nachtlân/Het nachtland. In this triptych a woman returns to her country of origin. She signals the pain of growing up, but also the pain of being alienated from one’s native country and language. In addition, she will read a cycle from her collection De fjoerbidders (The Fire Worshippers) that appears this fall, singing of a lost love in dark, sober images, and finally her poem ‘Moeder Spin’ (Mother Spider), a moving account of how a woman accommodates the adult and the child within herself. Author: Jabik Veenbaas Translated by Ko Kooman Gearslach (1995); De hengstenvrouw (1997); It nachtlân/Het nachtland (1998); De stobbewylch (2000); De dieptering(2001); Het nachtland/De knotwilg (2003). Poets: |
