Rutger Kopland

The poet Kopland made his debut in 1966 and has published over fifteen volumes of poetry, three essay collections and a collection of travel and translation notes. He has won numerous prizes for his poetry, including the prestigious VSB Poetry Prize 1998 and the P.C. Hooft Prize 1988, one of the Dutch-speaking world’s most important literary awards. Kopland ranks high as one of the Netherlands’ best-loved poets. He speaks to his readers in a quiet, conversational style, using ostensibly simple phrases. His poems seem to evoke a wistful, almost nostalgic atmosphere of a lost paradise, happiness beneath an apple tree or in the grass, Among the Cattle, to quote the title of his 1966 debut volume. Kopland addressed the issue in a series of notes from his diaries that were added as an appendix to one of his volumes: “Everyone finds a lost paradise in my poetry, a longing for it. I don’t long for the past, I long for experience (...) and experience is new, now.” These diaries also reveal that Kopland has long wrestled with the problem that the obvious words for the proverbial ‘major emotions’ have a steamroller effect, flattening everything before them. Those words might have been worth something in a world that was still whole, but that world no longer exists for Kopland, neither does he long for its return.

Kopland’s poetry is constantly balancing on the borderline between language and what it evokes. Irony is a common device in his early work and he is a master at using subtle exaggeration to steer a path between cliches. He once elegantly described the clash between his nostalgic tone and the far-from-nostalgic meaning of his poems as “memories of the unknown”. Through creation, through writing and slashing, something completely new emerges and turns out to be a memory: the memory of what and who you always were, irrespective of all the ideas you’ve always had about yourself: a stranger, someone else, an emptiness, “a hole in the form of / a man in the landscape.”

In his later volumes, from the eighties onwards, Kopland’s poetry seems to have become more philosophical. He wrote a series entitled ‘Die Kunst der Fuge’ in which a non-specified ‘it’ wanders, merges, dissolves, disappears, “and it went on, as if there was always something else / that has to be sought, found, lost, sought, / as if there was always something, something that has to be / before it disappears and after.” The poems seem to provide the basic pattern for the kind of movement Kopland makes in all his poetry. They demonstrate the ‘mechanics of emotion’. The continuing presence of these mechanics in his latest volumes guarantees that Kopland is still a poet whose work evokes the response: yes, that’s it exactly! – and that feeling is immediately reassuring, almost comforting. But what it exactly is is rather disturbing: the ‘now’ in which you are who you are is already over, a memory, the essential unknown, intangible.

“One wonders how long it will take the Nobel Prize committee to consider Rutger Kopland, clearly an exceptionally gifted poet, and a very proper focus for their liberations.”
Poetry Nation Review

“The quality of his lyrics and elegies, alpha and omega of the poet’s trade, indicate a warm and intelligent man who tackles the big subjects with economy and tact.”
The Independent

Bibliography

Poetry
Onder het vee, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1966
Het orgeltje van Yesterday, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1968
Alles op de fiets, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1969
Wie wat vindt heeft slecht gezocht, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1972
Een lege plek om te blijven, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1975
Al die mooie beloften, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1978
Dit uitzicht, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1982
Voor het verdwijnt en daarna, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1985
Herinneringen aan het onbekende (Anthology), Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1988
Dankzij de dingen, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1989
Geduldig gereedschap, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1993
Tot het ons loslaat, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1997
Verzamelde gedichten (1966-1999 Collected Poems), Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1999
Geluk is gevaarlijk (Anthology, Maarten Muntinga), Rainbow Pocket, Amsterdam, 1999
Over het verlangen naar een sigaret, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 2001)
Wat water achterliet (Gedichtendagbundel, Poetry International), Van Oorschot, Rotterdam-Amsterdam, 2004
Een man in de tuin, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 2004
Verzamelde gedichten (Collected Poems), Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 2007
Toen ik dit zag, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 2008
Hoe zou het zijn om thuis te zijn, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 2015

Essay collections on poetry
Het mechaniek van de ontroering,Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1995
Mooi, maar dat is het woord niet, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1998
Twee ambachten, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 2003

Collection of travel and translation notes
Jonge sla in het oosten, Van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1997

Translated collections (selection)
An Empty Place to Stay (Twin Peaks Press, San Francisco 1977. English translations by Ria Leigh-Loohuizen)
Songer à partir (Gallimard, Paris 1986. French translations by Paul Gellings)
The Prospect and the River (Jackson’s Arm, London 1987. English translations by James Brockway)
A World Beyond Myself (Enitharmon Press, London 1991. English translations by James Brockway)
Wybór poezji (Leopoldinum, Wroclaw 1992. Polish translations by Andrzej Dabrówka)
Ha-lo yadua she-nizkarti bo (Carmel, Jerusalem 1997. Hebrew translations by Shlomo Gnor and Assi Degani)
Souvenirs de l’inconnu: poèmes (Gallimard, Paris 1998. French translations by Paul Gellings)
Memories of the Unknown (The Harvill Press, London 2001. English translations by James Brockway)
Ei verd utanfor meg sjølv (Det Norske Samlaget, Oslo 2005. Norwegian translations by Finn Øglænd)
Prima della scomparsa e dopo (Edizioni del Leone, Spinea 2005. Italian translations by Giorgio Faggin and Giovanni Nadiani)
What Water Left behind (Waxwing Poems, Dublin 2005. English translations by Willem Groenewegen)
Dank sei den Dingen. Augewählte Gedichte 1966-2006 (Hanser, München 2008. German translations by Mirko Bonné and Hendrik Rost)

A choice of Kopland’s poetry was published in The Vintage Book Of Contemporary World Poetry (Vintage Books, New York 1996). Noble Prize Winner J.M. Coetzee translated Kopland’s poetry for his anthology Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands (Princeton University Press, Oxford 2004). Poems by Kopland have also been translated and published in Spanish, Russian, Czech, Slovakian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Servo-Croatian, Macedonian, Greek, Arabic, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese and Chinese.

Articles on Rutger Kopland
Introduction to Memories of the Unknown by translator James Brockway

Websites

In English:
Kopland on Dutch Foundation for Literature
Kopland on J.M. Coetzee’s Landscape with Rowers Princeton University Press

In French:
'Souvenirs de l'Inconnu' at Gallimard

In Swedish:
Swedish translation By Lasse Söderberg

In Dutch:
Interview with Kopland by Tjitte Faber, January 2004