Jeremias de Decker

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Rembrandt van Rijn : Portrait of Jeremias de Decker, 1660

Jeremias de Decker , rare de Dekker (* 1609 / 1610 in Dordrecht , † November 1666 in Amsterdam ) was a Dutch poet .

life and work

His father Abraham de Decker from Antwerp worked as a soldier, among other things, in the defense of Ostend and then moved to Dordrecht , where he turned to trade. There he married Maria van den Bremden in 1607, and their son Jeremias was born in 1609 or 1610. The Protestant merchant moved to Amsterdam with his family shortly afterwards due to conflicts with the Catholic Church , where he set up a business in spices.

Jeremias de Decker had been doing business in his father's company since his youth and devoted himself to poetry and self-study in Latin, French, Italian and English in his free time. His first major poetic work was De klaagliederen van Jeremias , a paraphrase of the biblical lamentations of Jeremias . Translations and revisions by Roman poets such as Horace and Juvenal followed.

He became publicly known through a collection of morally instructive epigrams ( Puntdichten , 1650) and a collection of his poems, which appeared in 1656. With Goede vrydag ofte Het lijden onses heeren Jesus Christ ( Good Friday or the sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ) he dedicated a cycle of poems to the death of Christ.

During this time he was involved in a theological dispute with Jacob Westerbaan, the friendly course of which was preserved for posterity through the correspondence of the two obviously well-educated opponents.

In 1659 he received an offer for a second, increased edition of his poems, modestly titled Rijm-Oeffeningen (rhyme exercises) by the author , which, however, ultimately appeared as a pirated print. In 1660 he was portrayed by Rembrandt van Rijn , whom he held in high esteem. In 1661 de Decker published a Dutch translation of Pierre Matthieu's History of Spain.

His most famous work today is the extensive paradoxical praise poem Lof der geldzucht (Praise of Greed ), one of his last poems, which was only published posthumously in 1667.

In 1702 a third edition of his collected poems appeared. However, Matthaeus Brouërius van Nidek did not publish a complete collection of his poems until 1726 in Amsterdam. In 1827 a collection of Decker's Oorspronkelijke Dichtstukken appeared in Amsterdam .

literature

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personal data
SURNAME Decker, Jeremias de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dekker, Jeremias de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch poet
DATE OF BIRTH 1609 or 1610
PLACE OF BIRTH Dordrecht
DATE OF DEATH November 1666
Place of death Amsterdam