J. Slauerhoff
J. Slauerhoff
The life of the ship’s doctor and poet Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898-1936) satisfies all the criteria for literary stardom. He was restless, adventurous, and intriguing, a tormented loner who suffered poor health and died young – a poète maudit in every way.
‘My poems are my only home,’ wrote Slauerhoff, and despite the romanticism of these words, his life really was a lonely undertaking. A similar non-conformism characterizes his literary work. Slauerhoff’s prose exhibits the same features as his poetry: it is strongly autobiographical, restless and world-weary, and revealing a yearning for the unreachable and for a more passionate age.
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J. Slauerhoff
The poetry of J. Slauerhoff
J. Slauerhoff is one of the greatest Dutch poets of the twentieth century. He owes the unique place he occupies in Dutch literature to a completely personal theme that he shaped into an equally personal poetry. Longing for a passionate love for a woman, the tragedy of loneliness, the longing for elsewhere and the past, the yearning for the sea, the disillusionment with the present existence, the sense of dissolution, all these themes label him a belated romantic poet.
J. Slauerhoff
Life on Earth
Slauerhoff drew from his experiences as a ship’s doctor in the 1920s when he wrote this spectacular novel set in China. Cameron, an Irish naval radio operator, meets a lieutenant who turns out to be an opium smoker, as well as a mysterious European woman in a Chinese dress, ‘like an overladen fruit tree’. He becomes infatuated by both the woman and opium.
J. Slauerhoff
The Forbidden Realm
In 'The Forbidden Realm', J. Slauerhoff draws on existing stories, mainly from the nineteenth century, about Luis Camões, a sixteenth-century Portuguese poet and seaman who wrote the famous epic 'Os Lusíados' in Macao in the late 1550s. Slauerhoff’s version is set in the twentieth century, with a ship’s radio operator as the main character. After a series of mishaps the radio operator lands at Macao. There he experiences some kind of hallucination that makes him identify with the Portuguese poet who lived three centuries earlier.