“M. Vasalis is the pen name of Margaretha Droogleever Fortuyn-Leenmans, a poet who studied medicine, married a neurologist and had four children, one of whom died very young during the Second World War. She worked as a child psychiatrist until her seventieth birthday. Between 1940 and 1954, three collections of poetry were published that gained her the highest literary awards and that were immensely popular with a large reading public. She is dubbed the Dutch Anna Akhmatova by some, because right up to the present day, many Dutch people know Vasalis poems by heart. After her death in 1998, a fourth, posthumous collection was published. A volume of her collected poems was first published in 2006, and has been reprinted several times since.

Many of Vasalis’s poems are located in nature. This positioning in nature, however, always leads to an inner experience that is the actual subject of the poem. This is the case in, for example, the poem ‘The IJsselmeer Dam’, where the contrasts between internal and external, people and water disappear and where time finally stands still in a wonderfully illuminated now-moment. Nature grants access to a forgotten or repressed dimension in one’s own existence. In many poems such an experience of mental transcendence is central, something that also fascinated Vasalis as a psychiatrist. The experience may have to do with inebriation, but also with passionate love, melancholy, the dream or vision. The unknown dynamics of the life within is her theme. The way in which she wrote about deep distress, melancholy and the loss of a child has touched many people deeply.

Already early on, Vasalis was compared with the medieval mystic Hadewijch. And a part of her work certainly fits into the mystical tradition. Space, time and gravity can disappear in the course of a poem, as can the awareness of the ego and the difference between subject and object. These experiences are blissful or terrifying, enlightening or full of mere emptiness. The ego is thereby passively affected, and the oxymoron is the most frequently used stylistic means, since the experience is virtually incommunicable. Vasalis explores that other dimension which lies outside every religious framework. Her concern is pure immanence. Her fellow-poet Clara Eggink has called this the "transcendence of the earthly". That makes Vasalis a very modern poet.”

“David McKay was born and educated in the United States, holds degrees in philosophy (B.A., Swarthmore), linguistics (M.Sc., MIT), and international relations (M.A., Webster), and has lived in The Hague since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he translated speeches, diplomatic correspondence, and other texts for the Dutch foreign ministry.

From 2006 onward, he translated publications and exhibitions for many prominent Dutch publishers, scholars, and museums, including the Van Gogh Museum, the National Museum of Antiquities, and the Jewish Historical Museum. Over time, he has moved into the field of literary translation.

David now translates a wide range of books and shorter writings: fiction, literary and popular non-fiction, short stories, poetry, art and design books, and scholarly works. His interests include theater, poetic prose, narrative non-fiction, classics, historical novels, poetry in traditional forms, science writing and science fiction, psychology and philosophy, and Surinamese, Flemish, and Frisian literature. His work has been described as “dazzlingly lyrical” (Neel Mukherjee, The Guardian).

His other professional activities include teaching translation workshops, evaluating and judging translation quality, and mentoring. He is a firm believer in artistic collaboration and enjoys working closely with authors, editors, theatre makers, granting agencies, and other translators.

David was awarded the Vondel Prize for his translation of the historical novel War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize International, shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, and featured on top ten lists by major American and British newspapers. His translations of Hertmans’s The Convert and The Ascent have also met with widespread acclaim from readers and critics.

He co-translated, with Ina Rilke, the new English edition (NYRB Classics, 2019) of Multatuli’s anti-colonialist classic Max Havelaar, the most influential work in the history of Dutch literature. This translation was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize 2020. Klick here for a fascinating deep dive into his translation of The remembered Soldier (De herinnerde soldaat) by Anjet Daanje?

His recent work includes the long-awaited English translation of Anton de Kom’s anti-colonial manifesto We Slaves of Suriname (Polity Books), for which he received an ICM Global South Translation Fellowship 2021 from Cornell University. A room in the renovated Translator’s House in Amsterdam has been named after Anton de Kom. See also David’s blog about the book.”