Fewer foreign students in the Netherlands? The universities presented a plan for this on Thursday. Our columnist Jean Pierre Rawie has been advocating for less English at university for years.
I received an invitation from the Groningen Alma Mater to give a lecture about my poetry and its creation. Travel and accommodation expenses would be reimbursed, but because I live about 200 meters from the Academy Building, this did not play a significant role. However, the meager university compensation that is usual in these types of cases was not the reason why I declined this invitation.
Indeed, where it concerned a meeting in the context of international relations, the presentation should be given in English. It seems quite crazy to me to speak about Dutch poetry in English at a Dutch university, especially when illustrative quotations also have to be translated.
Disease
The whole of the Netherlands, especially the university, suffers from the English disease. Virtually no other foreign language is available in academic bookstores these days, and more and more lectures are taught in English. This is also the main language during the introduction week. Compared to other countries, we are unique in this respect (‘We are at the forefront in this’, the Poppemas and Sterkens will say); it is inconceivable that the French or Italians would similarly deny their own language. If you want to study in those countries, you will have to learn French or Italian.
Until recently, this also applied to us. In the last century, for one reason or another, many Norwegians practiced medicine here. They mastered Dutch in no time, albeit with a Groningen accent, and, I am told, quickly cracked the filthiest jokes, as you know, an unmistakable sign of language proficiency.
devotion
When Queen Wilhelmina received an honorary doctorate in Dutch Letters in Groningen (!) in 1914, she testified to her ‘attachment to our wonderful language, the inspiring power that emanates from her and the significance that she has for both my life and that of our entire people’. It is good that the Queen does not have to experience the current development.
The Nijmegen professor of Dutch Studies Lotte Jensen recently complained about it the Volkskrant about the fact that she could no longer teach her subject at master’s level, because even papers about Vondel had to be written in English, including quoted lines of verse, which ad hoc had to be translated.
Melancholy
It is melancholy to think that the situation in the Golden Age was completely different. Famous foreign writers such as the German Andreas Gryphius and the British John Milton took Vondel as an example. Milton seems to have learned Dutch, especially in order to read his tragedies, and modeled it Paradise lost to Vondels Match . Something sometimes went wrong: for example, Martin Opitz Germanized Hooft’s sonnet Guiding stars of my hope as Leitsternen meines Haupts , but that’s not the point. Our language and literature were known and admired across borders, especially in the Protestant part of Europe.
Past
That was due to the fact that the Republic was an economic and military power at the time that was duly taken into account, and that is – oh! – long gone. The decline, I suspect, started when we thought we had made a big move in 1674 and exchanged New York for Suriname.
This column previously appeared on January 6, 2018.