Even Now

Translator’s Acknowledgments

The selection and translation of these poems was an enjoyable but daunting task and I am very grateful for the generous help provided by a number of people who have built up their knowledge of Claus and his poetry over years, if not decades, of specialization and study. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Georges Wildemeersch and Dirk van de Geest for making space in their busy schedules and would also like to thank Victor Schiferli and Patrick Peeters for their time and advice, Tom van de Voorde for his encouragement and for reading a draft of the translation and comparing it to the original, and P.C. Evans and Rokus Hofstede for help with particular poems.

I selected the poems from the almost 1,500 pages of Claus’s two-volume collected poems and tried to choose representative works from all periods of his extremely diverse poetic oeuvre, not limiting myself to his most famous poems, but also including examples of his latter work, poems from the erotic series Morning, You (first published as loose pink cards in a purple velvet box) and Knittelvers from Almanac.

While researching the work, I read, browsed and consulted quite a lot of secondary literature, most importantly books and essays by Paul Claes, Dirk de Geest and Georges Wildemeersch and articles and essays by J.M. Coetzee, Bart Eeckhout, Frank Lekens, Kristel Markoen and Patrick Peeters. I also referred to many existing translations, specifically French translations by Marnix Vincent and Maddy Buysse, Franco Paris’s Italian translation, Maria Csollány’s German, and English translations by J.M. Coetzee, John Irons, Peter Brown & Peter Nijmeijer, and Paul Claes, Christine D’haen, Theo Hermans & Yann Lovelock. My fellow translators’ interpretations and solutions often helped me to discover new depths in the original poems and find new possibilities for my own translations. Similarities between my translations and the existing English translations are inevitable, not just because the best translation of a word or phrase is sometimes the most obvious one, but also because Claus sometimes refers back to English sources in direct and indirect quotes.

David Colmer

Amsterdam, Septembert 2013