A message to Struga Poetry Evenings - Anneke Brassinga

It is a huge honour and a great surprise for me, to be awarded the Golden Wreath 2026, by the Management of the Struga Poetry Evenings, and I am deeply moved by this distinction. The more so, as I am the first Dutch poet to receive this great honour. It gives me a feeling as if the whole of Dutch poetry, in past and present, is honoured hereby with this Golden Wreath. 

Within Europe, the Dutch language is naturally a very restricted area. As a result, through the ages many great poets have always been translated into Dutch, from other cultures: Dante, Vergil, Homer, Shakespeare, Tsjechov. As a small language, we have always been feeding on what the greater world contributed.

Such lingual intercourse is always a source of liberty, so to say. We find this cosmopolitan liberty in writers like Erasmus and Spinoza, and in poets like Herman Gorter and Lucebert.

As a poet, and as a translator, it is as if I have been raised in a beehive with the bees busy all day, collecting honey from faraway places and times, a polyglot buzzing within my own language, from the minds of writers in ‘other voices, other rooms’ (Truman Capote). As if poetry festivals like the Struga Poetry Evenings, or Poetry International, in Rotterdam, are ever going on, before and after their actual days.   

For me, poetry is a place where all the different languages, like Walter Benjamin said, are involved in the symbolical (metaphorical) re-creation or rediscovery of the one, lost language. That is a metaphor, and poetry is in itself a metaphor, of the mutual and inner understanding that reaches beyond immediate rationality and verbal transaction or coercion – reaching towards compassion and respect, as regards the inner and outward struggles of us all. 

In this season of mankind’s history, every evidence and expression of our conscience as humane beings, in the universal language of poetry, is a wonderful thing. I am most thankful to be participating in the famous international Struga Festival, and I hope to wear the Golden Wreath with dignity.

Moreover, the thought that part of my poetry is being translated and will be published in Macedonian, fills me with joy and gratitude.

Last but not least, it will a pleasure to see in Ohrid the monument and museum devoted to the memory of the writer A. den Doolaard, who lived in a village nearby to my place of birth, in the woods of the Veluwe, in the eastern Netherlands. He introduced the wonderful world of Macedonia to his Dutch readers, and in my childhood I was one of them.

 

                   Anneke Brassinga