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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Sorrow of Belgium by Hugo Claus Hugo Claus. Belgium's leading writer, Hugo Claus, who has died aged 78 in hospital after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was a major poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist and film-maker, who wrote hundreds of works and was best known for his semi-autobiographical novel The Sorrow of Belgium. Born in Bruges, he dropped out of school at 15 and, unhappy at home, left soon after for the second world war, working in a sugar factory for a while. He soon began writing poetry, joining the group of mostly Dutch poets often referred to as "the Fiftiers". As a visual artist - Claus was the son of a painter - he was also involved with the international art movement Cobra (which took its name from the first letters of the major cities of its proponents COpenhagen-BRussels-Amsterdam). In English, his Selected Poems 1953-1973 was published in Scotland in 1986 and a more recent collection, Greetings, in 2005. A large selection of his poetry also appeared in the volume Living Space: Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers in 2005. It is as a novelist, however, that Claus is best known to the English-speaking audience. His first novel, The Duck Hunt - a work inspired by William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying - was published in the US in 1955, and other works, The Swordfish (1996) and Desire (1997) followed. He is perhaps best known, however, for his 1983 masterwork, The Sorrow of Belgium, published by Penguin in 1991 and recently reprinted by the Overlook Press. In the tradition of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, the novel recounts the story of Louis Steynaeve from his time in a Catholic boarding school through the second world war. Claus's clearly autobiographical narrative explores the natures of the Dutch and French-speaking Belgians, and their various collaborations. His intricate insights into the interrelationships of social and governmental corruptions, black-market profiteering, revenge, antisemitism and simple stupidity reveal the reasons for complacency and outright acceptance of the Nazis by thousands of his countrymen, including his own early romanticising of the Germans. As he later admitted: "The Germans were disciplined, sang marching songs - they were very exotic enemies. Like Louis, I liked them very much." In all his works, Claus tackles difficult subjects, including incest, homosexuality, and what he determined were the detrimental effects of religion. Desire depicts a world of small-time drunkards and gamblers, in particular Michel and Jake, who travel together to Las Vegas in search of excitement; what the two discover in the American desert are the entangled tragedies they have left behind; Michel, we gradually perceive, has abandoned the woman he was to marry, Jake's daughter Didi, for a homosexual affair with another of the bar denizens, leaving her in mental collapse. Jake, a seemingly jovial and peaceful man, suddenly lashes out in anger, killing a young gay dancer. Claus's novel The Swordfish recounts the story of a wealthy woman and her son left by her husband in a small, provincial town. Martin, an intense child, who has been converted to religion by a local teacher, sees himself as Jesus bearing the cross to Golgotha, while their drunken hired hand, Richard - a former veterinarian who has been imprisoned for performing unlawful abortions - looks on. Accusations of child abuse and the sexual coupling of the woman, Sibyelle, with a nebbish-like schoolteacher, ends in the brutal murder of Richard's wife. In his 1969 play Friday, Claus explores an incestuous relationship. When George Vermeersch returns from prison, he discovers his wife is having an affair with another man. Partially in revenge, but also in an attempt at reconciliation, he admits that he has had a sexual relationship with their daughter; the wife, in turn, admits that she had known of the situation without demanding it come to an end, and, as the lover leaves her, the two are left to reconstruct their empty marriage. For all his seemingly dark and despairing portrayals of Flemish life, however, Claus was a great believer in the human race, recognising everyone as interconnected and linked; accordingly, any evil or mean act of his figures affects the entire society. The betrayal of anyone is the betrayal of all. As Claus noted in a magazine interview: "We cannot accept the world as it is. Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things." He was often nominated for the Nobel prize and it is on record that he had given up hope of winning. He did, however, receive numerous Belgian and European prizes for his writing. Claus was also a film-maker, and from 1953 until 1955 he lived in Italy, where his lover and, later first wife, Elly Overzier, acted in films. Overzier bore Claus his first son, Thomas, in 1963. In the early 1970s, he had an affair with Sylvia Kristel, the star of the Emmanuelle films; their son Arthur was born in 1975. Claus married his second wife, Veerle de Wit, in 1993. Often described as a "contrarian," Claus was a writer who might be described as both traditional and experimental, often blending the two to produce powerful messages that, for sympathetic readers, could not be ignored. And in that sense Claus's canvas was, as he describes it in his poem A Woman: 14, a "landscape of anger": Don't run from me (lame humans) Meet me, feel me, Crease and break, break, According to his wife, he had chosen euthanasia, which is legal in Belgium, as his agent of death. As the head of the Flemish Literature Fund, Greet Ramael, responded: "He chose the moment of his death himself. He left life as the proud man he was." · Hugo Maurice Julien Claus, novelist, poet, painter, playwright and film-maker, born April 5 1929; died March 19 2008. Hugo Claus. Politics pervades the story. There are conflicts between speakers of Flemish and French and between Anglophiles, Francophiles and Germanophiles. Even those categories are complicated: Much interest comes from Louis's sexual stumblings — his early naivety, guilt over masturbation, homoerotic feelings, and experiences both with girls his own age and older women — and his observation of the infidelities and amours of his family. Important information is often incidentally conveyed. We discover that Louis masturbates, for example, when his mother comes into his bedroom abruptly and he is worried about semen being visible on his towel. And when one of the neighbouring children goes into a hut with Dirty Dick for a few francs, Louis doesn't understand what is happening. Collectively all these episodes effect an indictment of the hypocrisies of society about sex, but again they are not fitted into any overriding argument. And so with everything else in The Sorrow of Belgium . Religion is never directly engaged with, let alone questioned — Catholicism is an intrinsic part of the framework of society — but it is touched on continually: Louis's early earnestness, his fervent monastic teacher "the Rock", the influence of the bishop, and so forth. The large cast of characters is also developed in pointillist fashion, without introduction. And other episodes come from Louis' fantasies and dreams, stories he invents for others, or rumours he overhears. Hugo Claus makes adroit use of language and dialogue. Many of the linguistic nuances must have been lost in translation, but Pomerans captures something of the significance of language and dialect switching (and a brief translator's note outlines the ethnolinguistic background). Absent metanarratives notwithstanding, the component pieces of The Sorrow of Belgium are held together by finely woven strands, worked into a flowing narrative which never gets bogged down or loses our attention. The result is a genuinely compelling story, understandably considered one of the great Dutch novels. The Sorrow of Belgium by Hugo Claus. From and To can't be the same language. That page is already in . Something went wrong. Check the webpage URL and try again. Sorry, that page did not respond in a timely manner. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Something went wrong, please try again. Try using the Translator for the Microsoft Edge extension instead. The Sorrow of Belgium (Hugo Claus): Construction and Deconstruction of Images in German Literary Translation. Fingerprint Dive into the research topics of 'The Sorrow of Belgium (Hugo Claus): Construction and Deconstruction of Images in German Literary Translation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint. Hugo Claus Arts & Humanities. Cite this. APA Author BIBTEX Harvard Standard RIS Vancouver. Research output : Contribution to journal › Article. T1 - Der Kummer von Belgien (Hugo Claus) T2 - Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion von Images in deutscher Literaturübersetzung. AU - van de Pol-Tegge, Anja Monika. N1 - van de Pol-Tegge, Anja, "Der Kummer von Belgien (Hugo Claus)", inTRAlinea Vol. 22., 2020. N2 - Literary translations often seem to be reinterpreted due to certain cultural images of the translator, editor or other relevant decision makers. This case study therefore goes beyond the level of the text and illustrates the influence of the target culture on translation products. In two different German translations of the masterpiece by Belgian author Hugo Claus, underlying stereotypes are traced back through context and intertext. AB - Literary translations often seem to be reinterpreted due to certain cultural images of the translator, editor or other relevant decision makers. This case study therefore goes beyond the level of the text and illustrates the influence of the target culture on translation products.

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