Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2021

On three occasions in his literary career the poet and painter Lucebert (1924-1994) has engaged in writing poetry on the sculptor, painter and poet Hans Arp (1886-1966). One particular poem, ‘arp’, dates from 1950 and was designed to be a part of a series of poems, ‘de getekende naam’, on contemporary artists. The authorship of this poem has been questioned in the 1980s as a result of a publication on the poetry of Arp. This article demonstrates that the translation of the poem of Lucebert into German by Ludwig Kunz, published in the catalog of an art exhibition in Cologne in 1960, has been mistaken for a poem of Arp. The mistaken identity of the authors, this contribution proposes, is more than the result of an editorial mishap: the confusion points to a deep-seated kinship between the authors. By comparing Lucebert’s and Arp’s poems, as well as the extant scholarship on the work of the two authors, it is argued that Lucebert’s close affinity with Arp offers valuable insights into the Dutch poet’s own work and poetics.

This article offers an in-depth reading of the poetic cycle Het graf van Pernath (1977; Pernath’s Tomb) by the Flemish author and novelist Hugo Claus (1929-2008). The cycle is only one of the many tributes to the prominent post-experimental Flemish poet Hugues C. Pernath, who died in 1975. First, the present article shows how Het graf van Pernath displays a complex attitude towards the genre tradition of the tombeau littéraire in particular and funerary poetry in general. Claus’s poems intricately respect, oppose and transform both traditional formal conventions of the genre and dominant conceptions of death and grief. Second, this article demonstrates how Claus’s exploration of the funerary tradition goes hand in hand with an exploration of the genre of confessional poetry, which has become the dominant paradigm in the post-Romantic lyric. Indeed, Claus’s critical poetic homage to a befriended poet can also be interpreted as a critical unmasking of both authors’ very own poetic practice as a form of semantic deceit.

The novels Gimmick! (1989) by Joost Zwagerman (1963-2015) and Trainspotting (1993) by Irvine Welsh (1958-) depict two generations that dominated the societal scene during the 1980s, respectively the snobbish yuppies and the desperate ‘no future kids’. This article examines the literary representation of these generations on the basis of two questions: how does the concept of generation take shape within these novels? The descriptive questions in Hans Becker’s sociological ‘generation model’ serve as a means to analyze the representation of generations on three levels: the level of the system, the individual and the historical context. Analysis of the statements by the characters reveals that generation and identity play important roles in these novels. Furthermore, the article demonstrates how societal developments influence the generational cohorts in the novels.