Wallace Stevens, a Dutchman among the Americans

May 31, 2010 His stately mansion in the fusty provincial city of Hartford, Connecticut, was home to antique vases from China, liqueur chocolates from Paris, bibliophile editions from England, cigars from Havana and a matchlessly beautiful wife whose profile appeared on an American coin. All those beautiful and delicious things were apparently no obstacle to him becoming one of the most important voices in modern Western poetry. And all the while he pursued his career as a businessman.

Twentieth-century American poetry would have looked completely different without Wallace Stevens. It would have been less philosophical, less abstract, less erudite, less spiritual, but also less witty and sophisticated in its view of the world and the imagination. Stevens is a poet of the utmost precision and one who reconciled the challenges and ideas of America with the traditions of Europe. His work is so rich that virtually every American poet who started out after him has been saddled with an onerous legacy. Above all, he bequeathed us an extremely enjoyable body of work that continues to tell us something about the relation between poetry and the imagination, language and reality. We should be eternally grateful to him for immortal poems such as ‘The Snow Man’, ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ and ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’.

Of course one would be only too happy to grant such a person some Dutch origins. So much time went by, however, between Michiel’s voyage and the birth of Wallace Stevens that in the poet’s case it would be pushing it to speak of a Dutchman in America. At most, one could call him an American with Dutch roots. This is how Michiel’s distant descendant spoke of himself when he wanted to find an ethnic and cultural explanation for his ‘stubbornness and taciturnity’. I’ll overlook the notion that the Dutch may be taciturn and stubborn, but the thought that the most important American poet of the previous century was partly Dutch, or at least felt he was, is a pleasing one. There are just as many reasons to call his ancestor Flemish, however. According to the Ghent professor of literature, Bart Eeckhout, it is not inconceivable that Stevens was the descendant of Flemish refugees who moved to Holland during the Counter-Reformation. He has a point, because the name Stevens is particularly common in Flanders and especially in the region around Ghent, a city well known for its taciturn and stubborn inhabitants.

The genealogical yarns about the Stevens family are less spin, however, than you might think at first sight. The associations between Wallace Stevens’ and the Netherlands are not simply due to the nationality of the grandfather of his grandfather of his grandfather. Rather, they arise because, of all the American poets over the years, or, for that matter, foreign ones too, he is the one who has had the most influence on our poetry. The number of Flemish and Dutch poets over the past decades who in one way or another have had a Wallace Stevens connection is quite astonishing. To name but a few − Jan Baeke, H.H. ter Balkt, Benno Barnard, Bernlef, Huub Beurskens, Rein Bloem, Stefaan Van den Bremt, C. Buddingh’, Remco Campert, Paul Claes, Hugo Claus, Maria van Daalen, Hans Faverey, Peter Ghyssaert, Wouter Godijn, Lloyd Haft, Stefan Hertmans, C.O. Jellema, Frans Kellendonk (a novelist), Hans Kloos, Antoine A.R. de Kom, Onno Kosters, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Jan Kuijper, Thomas Lieske, K. Michel, Peter Nijmeijer, Cees Nooteboom, Willem Jan Otten, Michael van der Plas, Martin Reints, Jan de Roek, Alfred Schaffer, Erik Spinoy, Willem van Toorn, Bert Voeten and the author of this article. Some of them have devoted essays to his poetry, others have written poems about him; others again have attempted to translate his poems or borrowed a line of his as an epigraph for one of their own poems. Poets like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke or Pessoa may often have been translated into Dutch in their entirety, but you’d have your work cut out to draw up a list like that of Stevens to prove their influence on contemporary poetry in our corner of Europe.

But no matter how important Stevens may be among poets, the reception of his work by his Dutch readership can hardly be called a success. The only two Dutch translations of Stevens that ever appeared in book form were mercilessly remaindered. Maybe that has to do with the difficulty of his work, combined with the fact that Dutch-language readers can more easily read English literature in the original, certainly in comparison with French or Portuguese literature. But it is also noticeable that few of our most celebrated translators of poetry have ever seriously taken him on, whereas the poets have done so. This is perhaps because they know full well how untranslatable he is. They would have to make far too much allowance for untranslatable words or phrases and would end up with something dreadfully contrived. The power and challenging character of Stevens’ poetry lies in the seemingly natural tone of his poems, despite all their puns, references and ambiguities. Those Dutch poets who have taken on the challenge may have done so more for their own sake than that of the master. Every translation of a poem by Stevens is, after all, a statement about your own standpoint on poetry and the imagination. If you want to return home in one piece from such a challenge, you’d better not stray too far from your base. Or else you could consult an American with roots in the Low Countries. This article was written on the occasion of the 41st Poetry International Festival Rotterdam. On Thursday 17 June at 20.00 hrs, festival poets Christian Hawkey (USA), Tomas Lieske (Netherlands), Michael Palmer (USA) and Hasso Krull (Estonia) will read their favourite poems by Wallace Stevens and also read their own work. The poets will discuss where and how Steven’s approach to art, music, philosophy and the comic spirit inspired them.

At 22.45 hrs a documentary about Wallace Stevens, produced by Voices and Visions in 1988 for the Centre for Visual History, will be shown.