In a fascinating portrait, highly respected translator Paul Vincent, known among other things for his translation of Willem Elsschot's ‘Cheese', takes a retrospective look at the work of Hugo Claus (1929-2008). He looks at the many highlights of Claus' oeuvre in a well-organised article that the foreign layman will also find extremely accessible. Vincent's article is accompanied by an English translation of ‘April in Paris', the jazz poem that Clause wrote in the early fifties of the twentieth century. There already are five other English translations of poems by Claus available on Poetry International Web. All of these have been made by John Irons, who in 2005 had an anthology of Claus' poetry published by Harcourt, a prestigious New York publisher.
Alongside Claus, the work of Gaston Burssens (1896-1965) is also in focus. Burssens specialist Matthijs de Ridder has written a portrait of the Flemish modernist and friend of Paul van Ostaijen, and has selected a number of poems from his oeuvre that have been translated into English.
