Sonja Prins

Sonja Prins (1912-2009) was successively a communist, a camp prisoner and a hermit. In addition to a novel about forced labor in Ravensbrück (The Green Jacket, 1949), she wrote hundreds of poems, many of which were first published in her collected works only after her death. Emancipation, solidarity and community are what her activist poetry is all about, whether for workers, women, colonized people or animals. This is already the core of her poetics as an 18-year-old, when she founded the trilingual literary journal Front on her own to "arm the worker against the bourgeoisie. And it remained so until her death - she spent the last 40 years of her life secluded in a bungalow in Baarle-Nassau that she called the Boshut. There she wrote poetry from her micro-ecosystem about the plants and animals that surrounded her, and with whom she formed a "living community.

Her committed poetics have been fixed throughout her life, but in form she continues to reinvent herself. From experimental poetry initially associated with the Fifties, after a failed attempt to write an epic, she develops a looser, serial form of poetry - short lines, short stanzas, with a direct, wholly unique, crisp voice.

Prins's poetry is above all an invitation to look, feel and think from a relational worldview with care for the environment. 

This introduction was provided to Poetry International by Loranne Davelaar, the translations of Sonja Prins’s poems were made by marwin vos and edited by Nadia de Vries. These translations were made possible by the Thérèse Cornips fund.
The collected works of Sonja Prins, 'Weegschaal de Aarde' ('Scales, the Earth') were published in Dutch by publishing house Papieren Tijger in Breda (The Netherlands) in six parts.