Poetry
Occupied City
Bezette stad
Paul Van Ostaijen · 1921
Opening lines
U zal veel worden vergeven
want
gij hebt veel films gezien
Much will be forgiven you
for
you have seen many films
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Antwerp under German occupation, from the troops' entry in 1914 to their retreat in 1918, told by the page as much as by the words: the characters change size and direction, the blanks count, a poem takes the shape of a zeppelin. A shell falls on the city, the forts are abandoned, the port is empty, Sunday is dead; people amuse themselves in dance halls, cinemas, brothels and music halls, where the famous “Boem paukeslag” bursts out. These are not chronicles but images of a city where people wait.
Context
The poems were written in Berlin, for the most part in 1920. On his instructions, his Antwerp friends Oscar Jespers and René Victor oversaw the layout; Jespers designed many of the letters and cut the woodblocks. The volume appeared in Antwerp in 1921: of 530 copies, about two hundred were sold. Its author saw in it a poison taken as an antidote, a settling of accounts with his idealism of 1918. The manuscript was acquired by Flanders in 2021.
Who it is for
A book whose typography is part of the text: it needs an edition that respects it, such as the 2014 facsimile or the French and English translations.
Prizes and reception
One of the author's two best-known books, although it sold poorly when it came out; translated into French in 1993 and into English in 2016.