A Brill Calendar: August 15

Few civilizations have been more closely intertwined with one another than England and the Low Countries.

Or for longer: the contact precedes the age of Charlemagne, with English missionaries taking the initiative.

During this vast expanse of historical time it is seldom that an individual emerges who may be said to be equally at home at both sides of the Channel. Of course, Desiderius Erasmus is one of them; as well as his contemporary Hans Holbein, and later Anthonie van Dyck (1599 – 1641), the painter, and later again William of Orange (1650 – 1702), Stadholder of the Republic and King of England. However, it is also seldom that such individuals reach a true trans-national balance and that both nations acknowledge indebtedness to these extraordinary individuals. Since few mortals end up as timeless celebrities, most of them have been largely forgotten.

A fine example of cultural exclusion is the eccentric figure of Jozua Marius Willem Schwartz van de Poorten (Amsterdam, August 15 1858 – Doorn, August 3 1915). Under the pseudonym ‘Maarten Maartens’ he publishes during two decades some dozen well-written novels in English, widely read in the Anglophone world around the turn of his century; and best-selling. A stylish polyglot and a wealthy gentleman of leisure: famous Anglo-Saxon authors like James Barrie, Edmund Gosse, William Robertson Nicoll, Thomas Hardy and the fashionable painter Lawrence Alma Tadema belong to his in-crowd.

There can be no doubt why Maarten Maartens isn’t mentioned in canonical surveys of Dutch authors: his passion for English as medium of expression cost him in a fiercely patriotic age and culture a dedicated group of followers in the country of his birth. A few sloppy translations into Dutch didn’t help either. Yet, for his best work, a rediscovery and translation may be overdue; contemporaries compared it with De Maupassant and Chekhov.