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Document Details : Title: Ook losgezongen van de betekenis? Subtitle: Enkele opmerkingen over betekenisconnotaties in 'De Moeder de Vrouw' van Nijhoff Author(s): ROOKER, Rien Journal: Spiegel der Letteren Volume: 49 Issue: 3 Date: 2007 Pages: 343-358 DOI: 10.2143/SDL.49.3.2025299 Abstract : The poet Martinus Nijhoff is well-known as the author of poems which seem perfectly accessible at first glance, but turn out to be highly complex and ambiguous when read more closely. In 1933 a new bridge across the river Waal was opened in the Netherlands. This bridge inspired Nijhoff to write one of the most famous poems written by his generation, namely ‘De Moeder de Vrouw’. In this poem, an ‘I’ hears a woman singing psalms while she is standing on a passing ship. This makes the ‘I’ think intensely about his dead mother. Despite extensive metaphorical and metaphysical analysis, critics have hardly ever considered that the ship might have been called ‘Moeder de Vrouw’, even though there is a strong grammatical argument in favour of it and the option has been suggested in the specialist literature. I will therefore plead for the founding of a data base containing the known connotations of difficult passages, especially for texts so complex and ambiguous as those of Nijhoff. After all, this might benefit substantially those authors who publish for a general audience. |
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