Postcolonizing Europe? An International Workshop // May 10-12, 2010

Reshma Jagernath (Leeds) - “Of All Nations the Dutch are the Dullest, the Most Antipoetic”: Reading the Netherlands through the Eyes of “Coetzee”
After winning the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature J. M. Coetzee’s first publication Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands (2004) is a slim volume of translated poems from the Netherlands and Belgium. The translations into English and the preface are of Coetzee’s hand and mean to present ‘a who’s who of contemporary Dutch poetry’ (Coetzee 2004). Landscape with Rowers is in many ways surprising. It is not South Africa, not even his new home country Australia, that Coetzee privileges in his newly-gained pinnacle of success, but the Netherlands, which in the anthology is presented as an obscure dot on the map. In the wake of the publicity that follows the announcement of winning the Nobel Prize, the anthology’s experimental nature offers a platform for new forms of writing in the laureate’s career – poetry over prose, translation over original work. The anthology can in that respect be read as an appraisal of Coetzee’s literary forebear the Netherlands, while concurrently exposing its problematic relationship with South Africa. In my paper I map out this relationship. I argue that Landscape with Rowers first constructs a - dismissive - Dutch cultural and literary identity, one in which Coetzee’s novels are invested, only then to subvert that identity as a gesture to invite the reader to deconstruct the aforementioned relationship.

READ MORE ABOUT THE EVENT