Martinus Nijhoff

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Martinus Nijhoff

Martinus Nijhoff (born April 20, 1894 in The Hague ; † January 26, 1953 there ) was a Dutch poet , translator , essayist and literary critic .

Nijhoff is considered one of the Dutch modern classics. A translator's prize, which has been awarded annually since 1953, bears his name. He first studied law in Amsterdam , later, as a well-known poet, also literature (Dutch studies) in Utrecht . As editor of De Gids magazine , he had a major impact on literary life in the Netherlands . He was married twice, first with the novelist AH Wind until his divorce in 1950 , then with the Diseuse Georgette Hagedoorn until his unexpected death from heart failure . In the vote on the greatest Dutchman of all time, which was carried out by the television station KRO in 2004, he landed in 176th place. The Martinus-Nijhoff Bridge over the Waal near Zaltbommel, built between 1993 and 1996, is named after him. The previous and now demolished bridge appeared in the first line of his poem The Mother the Woman ("I went to Bommel to see the bridge [...]").

Are the focus of his work the two interrelated long poems Awater and the X hour . Both are often placed on a par with other equally extensive poems of the 20th century such as TS Eliot's The Waste Land , Ezra Pounds The Cantos , William Carlos Williams poems about the city of Paterson or Allen Ginsberg's Howl . Other famous poems by Nijhoff are: The Children's Crusade , The New Stars , The Song of the Foolish Bees and The Ferry . His unique style is characterized by the fact that he is not explicitly experimental, although thematically modern and embeds a simple everyday language in traditional forms. Nijhoff's poems were translated into German by Ard Posthuma . They appeared for the first time in a bilingual collective edition of the library Suhrkamp series (859).

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Works (selection)

Nijhoff was of the opinion that in the age of modernity (the century of collectivity as opposed to the previous one of individuality) there is no greater difficulty for a poet than the form of his language. The traditional objective forms have become just as deceptive as the spontaneous, subjective effusion. He saw only two ways to get out of this dilemma. Either the recourse to a tradition that goes so far back in time that it has almost disappeared from modern consciousness. Or you have to speak today's colloquial language and "make it vibrate". In his poem Awater he tried the former, and in his poem The Hour X the latter.

Awater was written in Utrecht in 1934 and completes the volume of New Poems dedicated to Brother and Mother . The work is partly autobiographical .

Nijhoff gave an account of the genesis of the poem in his 1935 lecture Writing verses in times of crisis about the tasks of poetry. As role models he named the youthful verses Jean Cocteau , TS Eliot and the paintings of surrealism . With a certain skepticism of language, he acknowledged that the old, emotional verse forms were no longer suitable for his purposes, but unlike Eliot, he did not want to “smash any form like window panes” either. He was looking for "the origin rather than the extreme" and therefore chose the old European form of the Roland song .

The poem, which has six almost equally long sections and a prologue and epilogue, begins with the motto “I'm looking for a companion (ik zoek een reisgenoot)”, which comes from a personal ad. In the first lines the nameless speaker calls upon the spirit of God from Genesis 1, 2, hovering over the water, as he did several times in the course of the poem , to look at the emerging work, which is compared with the desert and empty earth: “It doesn't want to be carefree like Formerly / fair weather singing where there are ruins all around. / Singing is an ulcer that rebels ... ".

Then an anonymous, average man appears who works as an authorized signatory in an office and whom the spokesman names Awater. He is compared with John the Baptist , a prophet in the desert of the big city, with a monk or a soldier. Awater is supposed to be someone, a modern everyone. Although it has a specific name, it is pure “mass and abstraction”, an “outline” or “clear, transparent surface”. According to his own account, Nijhoff came up with the name Awater ("a name is a person") when he heard a doctor asking for a patient of the same name on the phone. Due to the merely incidental, fleeting mention, he had no memory associated with the name, which he liked very much given Awater's desired vagueness. But he jokingly mentioned that Awater could also mean water twice ( Aa is an old Dutch word for water), that it is a Sanskrit word and also the monogram of his parents' two first names. Awater is therefore an arbitrarily chosen individual, but also a neighbor who represents the crowd.

His mother recently died and he is brooding towards the end of the day. Biblical allusions mix with symbols of modernity such as typewriter, teacup and telephone.

The spokesman has the idea of ​​picking up Awater from the office because his brother has died himself and he lacks a friend and companion (Nijhoff's brother had died shortly before in the Dutch East Indies , which caused a jointly planned trip to fail). He decides to secretly follow Awater, who doesn't know him.

He has no eyes for the flow of passers-by and the city in the evening. Always followed by the speaker, he walks off as if following a vision, looking at shop windows and seems to want to travel. One only finds out one's thoughts indirectly through the speaker, who tries to put himself in the shoes of Awater because he feels like himself. Awater suddenly seems to disappear, but shows up again at a hairdresser's where he has his hair cut. "Awater has never been so close and tangible to me / as now, when the reflection shows him; / he was never more unreachable at the same time".

The speaker remains on his heels and they both end up in the pub of him and his dead brother. The speaker continues to watch Awater from his seat and remembers his brother. He asks the waiter about Awater, but only learns that this is his first time there. Awater opens a small game of chess, smokes and drinks. "He sits alone, in absolute peace, / He looks like a planet, like a flower ..." Both pay without Awater's notice of the speaker, and continue through the streets.

You enter a restaurant where Awater seems to be well known and the speaker learns a lot about him, e.g. B. he reads in Greek or Irish in the evening . Then Awater gets up and sings an enigmatic, sad song in front of the curious crowd in the central scene, presumably relating to the loss of his mother. It is a free translation of Francesco Petrarca's sonnet CCL (250) Solea lontana in sonno consolarme from the Canzoniere . Awater falls silent and stands rigid in front of the applauding audience, then he stumbles out.

He still has not noticed the presence of his cautious pursuer. He vacillates between the spontaneous desire to travel and his domestic duties when both arrive at the train station at midnight. A young Salvation Army woman points out the omnipotence of love. (Nijhoff's mother, whom he admired all his life, had leaned towards Catholicism and had joined the Salvation Army as a “soldier”, which the liberal-enlightened family had found shocking, but had shaped the poet with regard to religious borrowings). Awater looks around, seems to know the speaker from somewhere. But this flees from his questioning look.

In the last stanza he looks at the tracks from the window of a steam locomotive, dreams of distant places and adventures and, in a mysterious way, comforted and happy, into the unknown, continues on his stalled journey through life. "The persecution of Awaters, the affection I had developed for him, made the desert habitable again for me."


The hour X was first published in a magazine in 1936 and appeared in a streamlined and revised form in 1942 in the volume of poetry of the same name. The work consists of twelve sections of different lengths. It is an allegory that cannot be fully interpreted and , despite its superficial realism, appears magically charged. The scenery is reminiscent of some paintings by Giorgio de Chirico . It comes from a dream of Nijhoff's son, to whom the poem is also dedicated. Characteristic is the objective, extremely concise language that works with numerous repetitions. It looks unadorned, as if purged. The short staccato-like pairs of rhymes are bracketed together to form long sentence periods . The narrative tone is distant, sometimes almost ironic. But even the most inconspicuous object appears to have been enriched with an almost incidental symbolism that surpasses it. The first verse evokes a hot, silent summer day ("It was summer day / In the scorching sun / the road. No bird sang".). A couple of children are playing on the deserted street when suddenly a faceless and nameless stranger appears on the corner. It seems as if there is an impending danger like the calm before the storm. The moment of extreme tension that gives the poem its name is described. The term Het Uur U comes from the military vocabulary, as Nijhoff reports in one of his rare self-interpretations. It denotes the hour of the attack, which is announced by a light signal (here a small cloud). The street is a symbol of the well-to-do society, whose residents have ceased to feel like living beings out of comfort and conformity and are now unwantedly reminded by the stranger in his almost messianic appearance of what they have lost and what they have given up. They accompany his quiet passage with hatred, but whether they like it or not, they have to expose themselves to life. They watch him out of the windows with suspicion and fear. In brief visions, everything that has been repressed in her life and the past suddenly bursts out. A doctor, a judge and a lady become aware of unadmitted guilt and self-alienation. Nevertheless, everyone seems to experience this dream-like moment ambiguously as a moment of highest happiness or at least the memory of this. The whole thing only takes one breath, however, in which time seems to have stopped. After a brief moment of realizing their own failure, the residents of the street wake up to their familiar, dreary existence. They are happy and relieved to find themselves in their daily grind and continue to live as before. But the stranger goes on until he gets to the children. Surprisingly, they begin to follow him in single file like the Pied Piper of Hameln , until they are indignantly called to order from their homes by their panicked parents. The man looks for a long time at the crowd of children looking up at him and then disappears around the corner. The beginning song of the birds breaks the heavy silence and after some hesitation the children go to dinner.

literature

  • Martinus Nijhoff: The Hour X - Poems (translation and afterword by Ard Posthuma) . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-518-01859-0

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The poem was included in the volume of poems Neue Gedichte ( Nieuwe Gedichten ) in 1934 .
personal data
SURNAME Nijhoff, Martinus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch poet, translator, essayist and literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH The hague
DATE OF DEATH January 26, 1953
Place of death The hague