Poetry
Gedichten
Not translated into English
Johan Alfried de Laet · 1848
Opening lines
Onze oudren waren groot! - en wij? - wat zijn we heden?
Een volk dat moedeloos, van vreemden voet vertreden,
Zijn leeuwennek gedwee en siddrend nederbukt!
Our forefathers were great! And we? What are we today?
A people who, disheartened, trodden down by foreign feet,
Meekly and trembling bow their lion's neck!
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from dbnl.org
Synopsis
Poems: sonnets, pieces addressed to friends and to women he loved, a drinking song, patriotic verses, and a sequence of addresses to the painters of Antwerp, Van Eyck, Massys, Rubens, Seghers, down to his contemporaries. Two poems say what the author expects of poets and of their song. Elsewhere returns the disenchantment of one who has seen the illusions of his youth fall; the author also adapts Schiller and Lamartine there.
Context
The collection appeared in Antwerp in 1848, from P. E. Janssens, in some one hundred and thirty pages. It brings together about twenty pieces written between 1837 and 1847; his first verses, the author had written in French for a Brussels weekly. It was his only collection: journalism, politics and business afterwards took up all his time. He himself brought out a second edition in 1883, enlarged by two pieces.
Who it is for
A slim volume of romantic verse, sonnets and occasional pieces, in Dutch from before the spelling reforms; it exists neither in French nor in English.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by Flemish critics of the following century as one of the best collections of the first Romantic generation.
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