Remco Campert

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Remco Campert (1963)

Remco Wouter Campert (born July 28, 1929 in The Hague ) is a Dutch writer. His extensive work includes poems , short stories and novels . He was editor of various magazines, worked as a translator and is a columnist .

Life

Remco Campert is the only child of the writer Jan Campert and the actress Wilhelmina (Joekie) Brodelet, who divorced two years after his birth. Remco officially lived with his mother, but since she was often on tour, he grew up with his grandparents, and from 1942 with friends in the country. Remco's father, who worked as an escape helper for Dutch Jews during the German occupation until he was arrested in 1942, died on January 12, 1943 in Neuengamme concentration camp . Campert wrote the poem Januari 1943 in 1983 about the moment he learned of his father's death .

Campert finished high school in 1948 without a degree. He wrote for several magazines, published poems and short stories and founded the literary magazine Braak with Rudy Kousbroek in 1950 , in which Lucebert , whom Campert admired as a role model, also contributed. Was Campert part of the so-called Vijftigers (fifties), according to Michael Kruger "the influential artistic avant-garde of the Dutch post-war period." 1951 appeared Camperts first poetry bird vliegen toch , who with his poetic credo is initiated:

Remco Campert (1976)

"I believe in a river
that flows from the sea to the mountains,
I ask nothing more from poetry
than to describe this river
[...]"

- Remco Campert : Credo

As a result, there was a publication of Campert in prose or poetry almost every year . His oeuvre includes around 100 titles. Campert's first novel, published in 1961 under the title Het leven is vurrukkulluk , became a bestseller in the Netherlands . For the 50th Dutch Book Week in 1985 he wrote the novella Somberman's actie as a free Boekenweek present . He has also written screenplays and radio plays and translated works by Eugène Ionesco , Marguerite Duras , Françoise Sagan and George Bernard Shaw, among others , into Dutch. Campert worked from 1969 to 1979 as an editor at De Bezige Bij publishing house , he was editor of various magazines and is a columnist . Since 1996 he has been writing a column in De Volkskrant with the former soccer player Jan Mulder under the common pseudonym CaMu .

Between 1950 and 1966 Campert lived alternately in Paris , Blaricum , Amsterdam and Antwerp , after which he settled in Amsterdam. Campert married four times. The third marriage to Lucia van den Berg had two daughters. Since 1996 Campert has been married to the gallery owner Deborah Wolf-Spelman, with whom he had lived 30 years earlier.

plant

Remco Campert (1984)

Among the experimental literature written by the Dutch group of artists, the Vijftigers , Remco Campert's poems are among the most accessible works. His poetry and prose are equally shaped by playing with language and ironic humor. Michael Krüger judged: "Campert has created an extensive, beautiful work that often deals with silence and melancholy ". Koos Hageraats emphasized the “ease [...] with which he succeeds in conjuring up a melancholy mood. He uses means such as understatement , self-criticism and irony above all to protect himself against an overly direct formulation of this melancholy. "In Campert's work," the theme of love plays a predominant role. "

In his Dutch homeland, Campert is highly valued, especially as a poet. An anthology published in 1995 simply bears the title Remco Campert - Dichter . His poems - mostly in free metrics - are characterized by a parlando style and have only developed slightly in their style, from a moderate experimentalism to a closer approximation to prose. Campert's best-known and most frequently printed poem is entitled Poesie is een daad :

Remco Campert (2015)

“Poetry is an act
of affirmation. I affirm
that I live, that I do not live alone.
[...] "

- Remco Campert : poetry

The publisher Elisabeth Raabe saw the cultural landscape of the Netherlands shaped by Campert's works up to the present day. For Kristina Maidt-Zinke, Campert is “an intellectual authority in his country”; Michael Augustin called him “known as a sore thumb” in the Netherlands, where his works are part of the school canon. At the same time, Campert's work also follows a social claim, and he addresses people who have no access to literature as well as the youth. Despite Campert's importance in his Dutch homeland, he remained little known in the German-speaking area for a long time, only a few poems appeared in German translation. Only since 2005 have the Arche Verlag published parts of the newer prose work in German on a regular basis in translation by Marianne Holberg.

Remco Campert himself described his life as a writer in an interview in 1996: “I write exclusively for the love of writing. Sometimes you have several love affairs in your life, while writing is a lasting love for me. [...] A vital need. I cannot imagine that this need will ever wane. [...] If I want to live, and I would like to, then I have to write. "

Awards

Remco Campert at the awarding of the PC Hooft-prijs by Til Gardeniers-Berendsen (1976)
  • 1953: Reina Prinsen Geerlig Prize for Berchtesgaden
  • 1955: Poetry award from the Amsterdam municipality for the poem met een moraal
  • 1956: Jan Campert Prize for Met man en muis and Het huis waarin ik woonde
  • 1958: Anne Frank Prize for Vogels viegen toch
  • 1959: Prose award from the Amsterdam community for De jongen met het mes
  • 1960: Award of the Amsterdam Art Council for De jongen met het mes
  • 1976: PC Hooft-prijs for the lyric work
  • 1987: Cestoda Prize
  • 2015: Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren

Works translated into German

  • 2005: A love in Paris ( Een rande in Parijs , 2004)
  • 2006: As in a Dream ( As in een droom , 2000)
  • 2007: The heart of silk ( Het satijnen har , 2006)
  • 2008: A cat's diary ( Dagboek van een poes , 2007)
  • 2009: soft landing. stories
  • 2011: Hunt, Live, Remember. Poems 1951–2011 , Arche Literaturverlag, Zurich, ISBN 978-3-7160-2665-6 .
  • 2016: Hôtel du Nord ( Hôtel du Nord , 2013. Translated by Marianne Holberg), Edition Rugerup, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-942955-59-1 .

literature

  • Elisabeth Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures . In: Remco Campert: Like in a dream . Arche, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-7160-2350-7 , pp. 89–118.

Web links

Commons : Remco Campert  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , p. 90.
  2. ^ Remco Campert: January 1943 . Translated by Gregor Laschen . In: die horen , 38th year, volume 3/1993, pp. 116–117.
  3. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , pp. 91–92.
  4. ↑ Michael Krüger : Still the birds fly - About Cees Nooteboom and Remco Campert . In: Literature as Food . Sanssouci, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-8363-0120-6 , p. 119.
  5. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , p. 93, translation by Marianne Holberg.
  6. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , p. 94.
  7. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , pp. 96–97.
  8. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , p. 110.
  9. ↑ a b Remco Campert on NetherlandsNet of the University of Münster .
  10. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , p. 97.
  11. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , p. 100.
  12. ↑ Krüger: Still the birds fly - About Cees Nooteboom and Remco Campert , p. 120.
  13. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , p. 112.
  14. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , p. 95.
  15. ↑ a b c Remco Campert at the Berlin International Literature Festival .
  16. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , pp. 102, 115.
  17. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , p. 105, translation by Maria Csollány .
  18. ↑ a b Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , p. 118.
  19. ↑ Kristina Maidt-Zinke: In the caves of forgetting . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 28, 2005.
  20. ^ Raabe: Remco Campert, poet. An approximation in words and pictures , pp. 116–117.
personal data
SURNAME Campert, Remco
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Campert, Remco Wouter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH The hague