Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets

“Writing, and certainly the writing of a poem, is the same thing as translating, just in reverse order: a gentle probing into the pulsating heart of one’s own text,” writes Anneke Brassinga (born 1948 in Schaarsbergen), the “language magician” (Rob Schouten) of Dutch poetry. Brassinga came to writing through translating—including works by Beckett, Diderot, Nabokov, and Plath—and an ensuing “surplus of verbal energy,” which culminated in her poetry debut Aurora (De Bezige Bij) in 1987. Since then, numerous volumes of poetry, prose, and essays have been published, and in 2016, Matthes & Seitz published her selected poems under the title entitled Fata Morgana, dürste nach uns! in a German translation by Ira Wilhelm and Oswald Egger. Brassinga’s poems are characterized by a sensitive handing of the living “invisible substance” of the poem and by neologisms, forgotten words, and whimsical compounds.

“It isn’t true / you’re just standing / still before a window / the place is almost complete / as if the image came about / because you came along,” writes Erik Lindner (born 1968 in The Hague), yet another outstanding representative of Dutch poetry. In 1996, he made his debut with Tramontane, which was followed by two novels and numerous volumes of poetry, most recently Zog (Van Oorschot 2018) und Hout (Van Oorschot 2024), as well as Nach Akedia (Matthes & Seitz, 2013), the selected poems in the German translation by Rosemarie Still. Lindner’s poems are often characterized by serial snapshots, seemingly disparate observations of images that are as probable as they are not. Through the perception of things and naming them with words, a potential coherence arises, which Lindner nevertheless simultaneously puts into question, “as if he were placing each word in quotation marks” (Ulf Stolterfoht).