Nachoem Wijnberg: Selected Poems

Translated by David Colmer (New York Review Books, paperback)

Publication Date: September 20, 2022

Publisher Marketing: 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 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 and none of it in America. This new selection of poems draws on all of the nineteen volumes Wijnberg has published to date and also includes uncollected work and constitutes an indispensable introduction to this wry, off-kilter, but 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.”