Against the Forgetting: Selected Poems

A stunning selection of poems from the great twentieth-century Dutch poet.

Against the Forgetting presents the work of an important twentieth-century Dutch poet, Hans Faverey. The first extensive selection of his poetry in English, this collection brings together poems from his eight published volumes of poetry spanning the years 1968 to 1990―the last volume, Default, he received only two days before his death. In addition, a selection of poems from a posthumous collection, Spring Foxes, first published in Holland in 2000, is also included. The translator Francis Jones writes, "Hans Faverey left behind a poetic structure of uniquely subtle richness and beauty, made from so little―a few words, surrounded by silence." Filled with a precision and arresting musicality comparable to the hermetic poems of Celan and Bronk, and as mysterious as the writings of Heraclitus and the German mystic Meister Eckhart, Faverey's poems, like Lichtenberg's lightning frozen in time, lash out, splintering systems and syntax―enlightening.

Hans Faverey (1933-1990) was born in Paramaribo, Surinam and moved to Amsterdam when he was a child. He worked as a clinical psychologist at the University of Leiden and received many literary awards, including the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his work as a whole.

Francis R. Jones lectures in English and applied linguistics at the University of Newcastle. Among his other translations are Ivan V. Lalic's The Works of Love, The Passionate Measure (for which he was awarded the 1991 European Poetry Translation Prize), and The Rusty Needle; Vyacheslav Kupriyanov's In Anyone's Tongue; and Vosko Popa's Complete Poems (with the late Anne Pennington).

Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz’s In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgiafor Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.