literature

Astrid Alben’s Choice: Toon Tellegen and Dominique De Groen

Every month, a translator of Dutch into English gives literary tips by answering two questions: which translated book by a Flemish or Dutch author should everyone read? And, which book deserves an English translation? To get publishers excited, an excerpt has already been translated. Astrid Alben makes a case for poetry: by a retired doctor-writer who gives animals a voice, and by a young poet whose verses twist and coil like snakes.

Must-read: ‘Raptors’ by Toon Tellegen

Toon Tellegen (b. 1941) is a retired doctor who, as a poet (more than twenty collections to date), prose writer and playwright, is practically a household name in his native Netherlands. To the wider public, he is best known for his numerous volumes of children’s stories inhabited by anthropomorphised squirrels, long-horned beetles, crickets, elephants and an ant struggling with an identity crisis.

The poems in Raafvogels had their beginning in a novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who invented a family and an imaginary self on the brink of a psychotic breakdown. Tellegen abandoned the novel but kept the poems that the main character wrote about his father. These were published in 2006 and vividly translated by Judith Wilkinson in Raptors (2011).

Tellegen’s gaze at the world is curious, diagnostic. He describes his process of literary composition as similar to jazz — a seemingly limitless variation on a single theme. Sure enough, the poems in Raptors resemble short, intricate ostinati, each poem a synoptic riff on how the plot of the aborted novel might have advanced had Tellegen completed it:

“My father moved heaven and earth”,

“My father bit the dust”,

“My father fished for answers.”

The base motif of “My father” with which every poem opens has a spellbinding effect:

“My father
tied himself into a thousand knots
and every knot became tighter and more inextricable,
and my mother kept unravelling him
and straightening him out.”

Every opening line is followed by an eventfully recycled idiom or an abstraction in personified form. Wilkinson found equivalent idioms and phrases without once turning the absurd into the bizarre.

One third of the way in, however, this repetition starts to feel as oppressive and inescapable as the dysfunctional family the collection depicts — a true “reign of terror, reign of terror…” And yet. Yes, it makes for an excruciating, but also for a very funny reign of terror. The absurdist drift of the imagery, combined with the incantatory dynamics, is sustained by a playful lightness and deep resounding warmth that make this collection relentlessly compelling. Tellegen’s Raptors, it turns out, is addictive. Quite brilliantly so.

Toon Tellegen, Raptors. translated by Judith Wilkinson, Carcanet, 2011, 122 pages

To be translated: ‘Slangen’ by Dominique De Groen

At the time of writing (June 2025), I am over halfway through my residency at the Translators’ House in Amsterdam, where I am translating Big Data/Pig Data by Anne Vegter, due out with Prototype in 2026. Anne and I met in Rotterdam during Poetry International to go over the remaining minutiae of the translation: ‘Would you say the anger in that line is a furious anger, or a desperate anger?’ When we’re done, Vegter asks, “What next?”

“Dunno,” I say.

So she says, “What about Dominique De Groen? Have you read Slangen / Snakes (or should it be the more mythical or meta-textual Serpents)?” She hands me her copy to read on the train back up to Amsterdam.

I never really saw the landscape through the train window. Instead, I was sucked into a self-propulsive, convulsive language, in the way a skin-shedding snake writhes and uncoils in beauty and in pain. Its matter bottomless, cavernous, knotty, slimy, strangling, brimming and wallowing in its own froth and sludge. Even the light that glistened at moments underneath the surface of the poems was a dark light.

The profusion of stylistic elements only seemed to deepen the work’s intricate layering.

Dominique De Groen, Slangen, het balanseer, 2022, 40 pages

 

Here’s a taster:

 

[…]

Where were we? I lay down in the dry storm drain
and I was forever empty

sand and dust blew in my mouth, hot concrete burned
mysterious symbols into my flesh I still can’t decipher

my pores clogged with expired deadlines

my eyes sewn shut with the red thread running between plough,
tank and MacBook Air

my cunt sealed shut with corpse secretions of a dead future

I worked hard for this, will relish every second of it

here comes the water, a liquid yet bone-hard wall of
foam, sludge, silt, dead fish in sickly green & toxic yellow,
actresses presumed missing from the silent movies, their darkly
lipsticked lips grotesque open shut open shut, incantations to
transmute blood into capital, sunbeams into coal…
and then just the usual waste matter, the swollen carcass of the
last tasmanian tiger no the last white rhinoceros no the last
Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat no

I’m lying naked on my back, wedged between a clear blue sky and
white hot concrete, can’t move, close my eyes, tense my
muscles & wait for the inevitable flash flood

crush my bones with the debris of this future
use them for fertiliser 

(page 13)

…
…
…

Snakes in the hollow eye sockets of the shopping centre
snakes in the mummy of Nature
snakes in the Billboard Hot 100
snakes in the sarcophagus of the present
snakes in the digital shopping basket
snakes in the water coolers, snakes in the cocktails
snakes in the highest echelons
snakes in the Deep State
snakes in the periphery, snakes in the extreme centre
snakes in the mines, the reservoirs, the plantations, the eroding soil
snakes under the permafrost
snakes of liquid crystal
snakes under transparent surfaces
snakes in the data
snakes in the snake emojis
snakes in your brain, snakes in your heart, your gut, a writhing snake pit
CEO in midnight blue suit woven from millions of minuscule snakes
the earth a tangle of snakes, blue adders green mambas
wriggling in a inhospitable universe
the stars covered in the scales of trillions of black
rat snakes

 

yes here come the lonely nights, the darm times of the
winter solstice when evil forces come into play,
sinister copies of ourselves infiltrate our lives,
malevolent doppelgängers hollow out our celebrity-saints
from the inside out and, slowly, come to replace

the long sinister nights of fear-sweat, cold liquid
snakes seeping from the pores of the universe, hissing, writhing

King snakes, desert snakes, water snakes,
wool-worm snakes, squirm snakes, coral reef snakes,
pipe snakes, vipers, giant snakes, shield-tailed snakes,
rainbow snakes that are subterranean, stiletto snakes,
slippery snakes by far the largest family of snakes,
wart snakes, venomous snakes, dead snakes, constrictor snakes,
ringed snakes, extinct snakes, rotting or ossified
snakes, rattlesnakes, sea snakes, a 13 metre-long
prehistoric snake in the El Cerrejón coal mine, wrath snakes,
shedding snakes, grass snakes, tentacle snakes,
sweet snakes, cuddly snakes, angry snakes, the snake from
Megaconda, the snake from Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, the snake from
Curse II: The Bite, lone scared snakes longing for
love, snakes immune to time, a snake an icon
ruined by fame, a snake decorated with gemstones,
the curve of the NASDAQ-100 comes alive is a snake,
the linear arrow of progress zigzags is a snake,
look her words wrap themselves around your organs, squeeze them dry
are snakes, a treacherous and rapacious serpent, a snake that
doesn’t swallow its own tail but vomits it out, this mol snek will
give u the courage to keep going

(page 19)

(translated by Astrid Alben)

 

• Dominique De Groen
• poetry
• Toon Tellegen