Hans C. ten Berge
Year of birth: 1938
1993 Materia Prima, Poems 1963-1993
1993 A Garden in Winte
2001 Oysters & Pot Roast
2004 The Trampled Mystery
Novels, Novellas & Field-Notes
1969 Canaletto and Other Stories
1970 A Case of Delusion
1978 The Bears of Churchill
1981 Frosted Glass
1985 Self-Portrait with White Hat
1986 The Secret of a Cheerful Mood
1987 Written in A Convent arden, autobiographical essay
1991 An Italian in Zutphen
1995 The Home-Loving Traveller, Field-Notes 1
1996 Women, Jealousy and Other Discomforts, F-N 2
1998 The Sea-Town Years
2003 Blue-Beard’s Awakening
2006 The Deloused Past, five novellas
Translations
1969 Yūgāo, A Tale and Five Nō-Plays
1970 Ezra Pound, 15 Canto’s
1975 Gunnar Ekelöf, Late on Earth, poems
1979 Kenneth White, Travels in the Drifting Dawn
1982 Yasunari Kawabata, The Izu Dancer
1983 Mark Strand, A Slack Breeze,poem
1983 Christopher Middleton, In the Secret House & Other Poems
1985 Gunnar Ekelöf, The Byzantine Trilogy. Ekelöfs last masterpiece
2000 Murasaki Shikibu, Evening Faces, Episodes from The Life of Prince Genji. With an essay on ancient Japanese culture
2009 Christopher Middleton, Intimate Chronicles, poems; Robert Hass, A Story about the Body, poems
Although he is known primarily as a poet, H.C. ten Berge has also published prose fiction, essays, and translations. His early poetry was marked by a bare, concise diction, a language full of discontinuities and pared down to essentials, so as to evoke powerful sentiments while avoiding sentimentality. The later work is more fluent and melodious, more overtly personal, intent on combining innovative and traditional elements, lyrical and intellectual impulses. The poems, usually grouped into cycles in which different voices and viewpoints combine to form multi-layered narrative sequences, range widely in scope and theme, and incorporate a variety of historical and literary references. Materia Prima contains Ten Berge’s collected poems up to 1993. Oesters & gestoofde pot (Oysters & Pot Roast) was published in 2001, Het vertrapte mysterie (The Trampled Mystery) in 2004, Hollandse Sermoenen (Dutch Sermons) in 2008.
The openness to the outside world which marks Ten Berge’s poetry is apparent also in his numerous translations. Apart from renderings into Dutch of a selection of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and of contemporary fellow poets - Kenneth White, Christopher Middleton, Mark Strand, Gary Snyder, Nathaniel Tarn, Robert Hass, Xavier Villaurrutia and Gunnar Ekelöf among them - they include texts well outside the Western tradition, from Japanese Nō-plays and episodes from The Tale of Genji to Aztec sacral and secular hymns. His work in the ethnological field culminated in a three-volume annotated collection of Myths and Fables of Northern Peoples (NW Coast Indians, Inuit/Eskimo and Siberian peoples).
Ten Berge’s prose fiction shows the hand of the poet in its meticulous wording, visual imagery and imaginitive power. His protagonists are typically emigrés, travellers with an uncertain destination, rootless individuals who have at best a tenuous grip on reality and on themselves. Among his major works in prose are the travelogue The Bears of Churchill (1978), the novellas Frosted Glass (1982), Self-Portrait with White Hat (1984), An Italian in Zutphen (1991) and the novels The Secret of a Cheerful Mood (1986), The Sea-Town Years (1998) and Bluebeard’s Awakening (2003). Recently he published The Deloused Past (or: Empty Chairs), five novellas, followed by Exemplary Tales and their Veiled Meanings (2009).
Hans C. ten Berge, born Christmas 1938, spent longer periods in Eastern Europe as well as in North and Central America (Greenland, Canada, Texas, Mexico). He was attached to the National Museum of Man (Ottawa, Ontario 1974-5), the Art Academy at Arnhem (NL) and the University of Texas at Austin (US). He also was founder and sole editor of the literary quarterly Raster (Grid) from 1967-1973. The Secret of a Cheerful Mood brought him the Multatuli-Prize. In 1996 he was awarded the prestigious Huygens-Prize for his entire oeuvre. In 2006 he received the P.C. Hooft-Prize, the highest award for literature in The Netherlands.
The HALMA scholarship for H. C. ten Berge is made possible by the dutch foundation for literature.
