Appendix to Daan Rutten, The Modernist Affair with Terrorism: The Curious Case of Willem Frederik Hermans

Abstract

For scholarly reasons of reproducibility and verifiability, the reader can find here three English translations of texts written by Hermans that I used for the article ‘The Modernist Affair with Terrorism: The Curious Case of Willem Frederik Hermans’. The translations were made for scholarly usage within the NWO project ‘The Power of Autonomous Literature: Willem Frederik Hermans’ (2010-2015) and/or as course material within the curriculum of Modern Dutch Literature at Utrecht University. Although one of these texts (‘Preamble’) is a fictional text with a dramatized author and one of them is a very short column originally published in a newspaper (‘Behind the Signposts’), I consider them all very important poetical essays on the greater purpose of Hermans’s literature.

'Preamble' (pp. 38-42) is the translation by Ina Rilke of ‘Preambule’, the introduction of the short story collection Paranoia, first published in Dutch in 1953. It was recently republished as part of the seventh volume of Volledige Werken.

'Behind the Signposts No Admittance' (pp. 43-44) is the translation by Sven Vitse of ‘Achter borden Verboden Toegang’, first published in Het Vrije Volk, 25 January 1956. It was republished in Het sadistische universum (1964), now part of the eleventh volume of Volledige Werken.

'Unsympathetic Fictional Characters' (pp. 45-55) is the translation by Michele Hutchison of ‘Antipathieke romanpersonages’, originally published first in De Vlaamse Gids 44 (1960) and republished in the fifth and extended edition of Het sadistische universum (1967), also part of the eleventh volume of Volledige Werken.