Nachoem M. Wijnberg

“Nachoem M. Wijnberg’s poetry possesses the disconcerting quality of being at once extraordinarily strange and very close to the feeling of life as it is actually lived. Wijnberg brings the world close to us by being exact about the indecisiveness of the human will and by favoring the processes of our understanding of experience over the particulars of experience itself….Wijnberg’s approach doesn’t require new forms to astonish; his singular voice makes existing forms seem new.” —Thomas Moody, Rain Taxi Review

“Wijnberg is a thrilling phenomenon in contemporary European poetry—his huge stylistic and intellectual range is matched by an exquisite sense of play and the kind of deep strangeness that, like Pessoa’s, is open to all comers. David Colmer performs an enormous service in making available to English-language readers the full scope of this Dutch poet’s philosophical investigations in translations of great lucidity and lyrical power.” —Alissa Valles

“In a remarkably lucid and refined translation by David Colmer, this collection brings together a generous selection of poems from Wijnberg’s twenty volumes of poetry published to date… . Nachoem Wijnberg is a free-standing mountain in the sloping hills of Dutch poetry; a relentless innovator who has created a gorgeous oeuvre. Am I making him bigger than defensible? You can find out for yourself. David Colmer has translated more than one hundred and seventy poems. It is an irresistibly enticing collection to read, read again and cherish.” —Neerlandistiek: An Online Journal for Language and Literature

Nachoem M. Wijnberg is a poet and fiction writer. He is the author of a handful of novels and several poetry collections, including Divan van Ghalib, Het leven van, and Liedjes. He is the recipient of both the Ida Gerhart Poetry Prize and the P.C. Hooft Award. He is also an accomplished economist and lectures on business administration at the University of Amsterdam.

David Colmer is a translator of Dutch literature based in Amsterdam. He has translated more than sixty book-length works, including work by Gerbrand Bakker, Dimitri Verhulst, Anna Enquist, Annie M. G. Schmidt, and many others. He is the recipient of several prizes, among them the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Bakker’s The Detour and the Vondel Translation Prize for Verhulst’s The Misfortunates.

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