Doing the Fosbury Flop. Gerrit Krol's Literary High-Jump (with two Poems and an Extract by Gerrit Krol)

The graphic artist M.C. Escher became famous for ‘impossible' objects such as his ‘impossible cube', a three-dimensional image that only ‘works' because it is projected onto a two-dimensional plane surface. Krol is Escher's literary counterpart; he uses language to portray human relationships and human endeavour, and he does so mainly by projecting one situation onto another: murder onto mathematics, daily life onto science, sex onto eternity, etc. In doing so he allows us to believe in the impossible. He is a great writer. And not yet lost in translation.