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Nachoem M. Wijnberg
A new translation of work by one of the Netherland's most innovative, exhilarating poets, a poet who draws on everything from economics to parables to world history.
The Dutch poet Nachoem M. Wijnberg is one of the most inventive, surprising, entertaining, and thought-provoking poets writing today. He is also remarkably productive, so that up to now only a small portion of his extensive body of work has appeared in English translation.
This new selection of poems draws on all twenty volumes Wijnberg has published to date, constituting an indispensable introduction to this wry, off-kilter, spellbinding modern master. Wijnberg, not only a poet but a professor of business studies—hence his persistent concern with questions of value, real and false—writes only in the plainest language while displaying a formidable erudition. His poems engage economics, philosophy, and history; he writes Chinese poems and Jewish poems and classic songs; he tells stories that may or may not be parables; he writes from where the mind meets the heart. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson enjoins. Wijnberg for his part has said, “Alienation is the last thing I am trying to achieve. The world is strange enough as it is and my poems help in dealing with that strangeness by bringing it close and as far as possible trying to understand it.”
The Dutch poet Nachoem M. Wijnberg is one of the most inventive, surprising, entertaining, and thought-provoking poets writing today. He is also remarkably productive, so that up to now only a small portion of his extensive body of work has appeared in English translation.
This new selection of poems draws on all twenty volumes Wijnberg has published to date, constituting an indispensable introduction to this wry, off-kilter, spellbinding modern master. Wijnberg, not only a poet but a professor of business studies—hence his persistent concern with questions of value, real and false—writes only in the plainest language while displaying a formidable erudition. His poems engage economics, philosophy, and history; he writes Chinese poems and Jewish poems and classic songs; he tells stories that may or may not be parables; he writes from where the mind meets the heart. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson enjoins. Wijnberg for his part has said, “Alienation is the last thing I am trying to achieve. The world is strange enough as it is and my poems help in dealing with that strangeness by bringing it close and as far as possible trying to understand it.”
- GenresPoetry
232 pages, Paperback
Published September 20, 2022
About the author
Nachoem M. Wijnberg
35 books3 followersNachoem M. Wijnberg is one of the Netherlands' preeminent living poets. His debut De simulatie van de schepping (The Simulation of Creation, 1989) was nominated for the Buddingh' Prize, the most important prize for Dutch-language debut collections. He has won several other awards and was nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize, the greatest honour a Dutch-language poetry collection can receive. His most recent collection is Divan van Ghalib (Divan of Ghalib). In 2012 a book of English translations (by David Colmer) will be published by Anvil Press Poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 2, 2024
19 Sept 2022
B.A. Van Sise for the New York Journal of Books
To start, let us thank Nachoem Wijnberg for doing something rare in poetry. He admits openly what all poets know of themselves: that they are talentless, and their success unearned. Many of them are wrong. Mr. Wijnberg can take pride, as so many men like to do, in being right.
It is oddly refreshing to see an author admit this; it is, perhaps, an unconsidered reward of the famous Dutch propensity toward speaking directly. A middle-aged business professor in Amsterdam, he tilts into it in the poems and in their titles alike: large fonts let you know one poem is titled My father says that it is sensible to get into something in which mediocrity is no disaster, like the field in which I am a professor.
Still, in this anthology (offered in translation by the New York Review of Books) a 30-year span of selected poems manages to do what poetry must always do: raise an emotion. In this case, that emotion is shock. Page after page, shock: that an editor went through 30 years of poems that managed to put their blot onto otherwise unblemished paper and that, somehow, these were the best of them.
Nevertheless, there is an issue to be discussed: If poetry is supposed to be, first and foremost, an expression of the experience of the poet, why should it be unacceptable for a boring life to produce boring poetry? In this book there’s a lot on offer—30 years produces a lot of work—but the biggest takeaway is that it offers nothing but boredom. Boredom on tap, boredom in an unstoppable faucet. It’s got everything for you if you’re into that sort of thing: jokes that aren’t funny, history lessons that are ahistorical, and poems that aren’t poetic.
Professor Wijnberg teaches a boring topic and writes boring poems about boring life. That’s fine; after all, life is boring. And it feels fitting that Wijnberg makes his life in Amsterdam which, in spite of being full of prostitutes and drugs and urinating tourists, manages to be the most boring city in Europe.
Amsterdam is a city full of large meals. Imagine sitting in a cafe there at 2 a.m., sober as a judge, and watching the two most stoned people you’ve ever seen eat three racks of ribs and eight pancakes while giggling. In the end, it did for them what it needed to: They ended up full and forgetting all of it. Mundanity can make a meal, and on exactly such mundanity large meals are easily made but, still, are elevated to anecdote. Made over 20 years and clocking it at hundreds of pages, this is such a meal.
There is, however, something to be praised here: a true universality that spreads and folds its wings around the sum of the work: elements and influences drawn from thousands of years of other poets, whose work Wijnberg has seen and, if not absorbed, at least reflected as a mirror. There is a true catholic voice in the poems whose sounds come from instruments of every nation and mix to make music: we—the great we, the biggest we possible—are Chinese and we are Jewish and we are English and we are Dutch and we live on Earth and one day we could live on the moon or beyond. All the world is one. But Wijnberg reminds us, even if unintentionally, that nothing magical ever happens because nothing magical has ever happened.
The poems are not good. But they try to be. Sincerely: they try to be, and that is to be praised. It is not so much poetry as an encyclopedia of extractions that, taken independently, feint toward art:
“I rub my face raw on beauty. I do not waste my time.”
“A righteous man arrived on horseback / he slept with all the women of the village / without paying attention to hands or faces”
“Soldiers die for him / differently than they would die for the state.”
“the foreigner says: you were foreigners yourselves once too, / and they say: no, not us, we’ve always been here”
“in women there are/ smaller women, / sometimes larger women / and even larger women in these women”
I am the egg man. I am the walrus. Koo-koo-ka-joo.
So far from context, a great deal of it ends up sounding like another Amsterdam icon: the Dutch crime boss depicted in Ocean’s Twelve who speaks in intended abstractions that are, of course, just tortured codes.
Again, the poet tries. A more generous and dishonest appraiser would remind you, here, that Icarus also flew. But instead, we’ll let the author himself review the work, with the very title of a poem he’s included in it as a centerpiece:
Question: So Are Poets Not Allowed to Be Bad at Their Trade?
Answer: If They’re Poets, They Can Be as Bad as They Like.
B.A. Van Sise for the New York Journal of Books
To start, let us thank Nachoem Wijnberg for doing something rare in poetry. He admits openly what all poets know of themselves: that they are talentless, and their success unearned. Many of them are wrong. Mr. Wijnberg can take pride, as so many men like to do, in being right.
It is oddly refreshing to see an author admit this; it is, perhaps, an unconsidered reward of the famous Dutch propensity toward speaking directly. A middle-aged business professor in Amsterdam, he tilts into it in the poems and in their titles alike: large fonts let you know one poem is titled My father says that it is sensible to get into something in which mediocrity is no disaster, like the field in which I am a professor.
Still, in this anthology (offered in translation by the New York Review of Books) a 30-year span of selected poems manages to do what poetry must always do: raise an emotion. In this case, that emotion is shock. Page after page, shock: that an editor went through 30 years of poems that managed to put their blot onto otherwise unblemished paper and that, somehow, these were the best of them.
Nevertheless, there is an issue to be discussed: If poetry is supposed to be, first and foremost, an expression of the experience of the poet, why should it be unacceptable for a boring life to produce boring poetry? In this book there’s a lot on offer—30 years produces a lot of work—but the biggest takeaway is that it offers nothing but boredom. Boredom on tap, boredom in an unstoppable faucet. It’s got everything for you if you’re into that sort of thing: jokes that aren’t funny, history lessons that are ahistorical, and poems that aren’t poetic.
Professor Wijnberg teaches a boring topic and writes boring poems about boring life. That’s fine; after all, life is boring. And it feels fitting that Wijnberg makes his life in Amsterdam which, in spite of being full of prostitutes and drugs and urinating tourists, manages to be the most boring city in Europe.
Amsterdam is a city full of large meals. Imagine sitting in a cafe there at 2 a.m., sober as a judge, and watching the two most stoned people you’ve ever seen eat three racks of ribs and eight pancakes while giggling. In the end, it did for them what it needed to: They ended up full and forgetting all of it. Mundanity can make a meal, and on exactly such mundanity large meals are easily made but, still, are elevated to anecdote. Made over 20 years and clocking it at hundreds of pages, this is such a meal.
There is, however, something to be praised here: a true universality that spreads and folds its wings around the sum of the work: elements and influences drawn from thousands of years of other poets, whose work Wijnberg has seen and, if not absorbed, at least reflected as a mirror. There is a true catholic voice in the poems whose sounds come from instruments of every nation and mix to make music: we—the great we, the biggest we possible—are Chinese and we are Jewish and we are English and we are Dutch and we live on Earth and one day we could live on the moon or beyond. All the world is one. But Wijnberg reminds us, even if unintentionally, that nothing magical ever happens because nothing magical has ever happened.
The poems are not good. But they try to be. Sincerely: they try to be, and that is to be praised. It is not so much poetry as an encyclopedia of extractions that, taken independently, feint toward art:
“I rub my face raw on beauty. I do not waste my time.”
“A righteous man arrived on horseback / he slept with all the women of the village / without paying attention to hands or faces”
“Soldiers die for him / differently than they would die for the state.”
“the foreigner says: you were foreigners yourselves once too, / and they say: no, not us, we’ve always been here”
“in women there are/ smaller women, / sometimes larger women / and even larger women in these women”
I am the egg man. I am the walrus. Koo-koo-ka-joo.
So far from context, a great deal of it ends up sounding like another Amsterdam icon: the Dutch crime boss depicted in Ocean’s Twelve who speaks in intended abstractions that are, of course, just tortured codes.
Again, the poet tries. A more generous and dishonest appraiser would remind you, here, that Icarus also flew. But instead, we’ll let the author himself review the work, with the very title of a poem he’s included in it as a centerpiece:
Question: So Are Poets Not Allowed to Be Bad at Their Trade?
Answer: If They’re Poets, They Can Be as Bad as They Like.
February 21, 2025
it's odd that the simplicity of the style is lauded & marked--for me, there is an opacity without the feeling of fullness. the clauses join elliptically and circle one subject matter in their own riddle-like logic (sounds like "there is an x and a y. if there were no x but y then it would be z"). i am not sure the answers are always that interesting. weird sense of competition in some of the poems. very discursive in a way, as if following the uneven rhythms of speech but with little levity. but then there are stuff i really liked too such as "remembering the start of seeing: / that wasn't me, that was someone else / who began to see" or "two things I worry about: the list that does not include sleep, / and that which I, if I leave now," / / cannot do, / and I don't know if I still want to learn how." or "what the sun had brought, / when it stretched that day out for as long as possible."
but anyways all i say PALES in comparison to the other review on this book--so loaded like what did amsterdam do to you my bro!!
but anyways all i say PALES in comparison to the other review on this book--so loaded like what did amsterdam do to you my bro!!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews