Jan Elburg (1919-1992)

Jan G. ELBURG (Wemeldinge 1919 - Amsterdam 1992)

Jan Gommert Elburg grew up in Amsterdam North. Already in his youth he was fascinated by comics, because of the combination of text and image. This also attracted him to children's books. half century friendship

He experienced an intensive confrontation with the possibilities of language, unconsciously, in Amsterdam Noord. During the remediation of various Amsterdam neighbourhoods, different population groups repeatedly sought refuge north of the IJ. In this way he absorbed many dialects of old Amsterdam. Moreover, his mother had retained the lilting Zeeland accent and when Jan was in Zeeland, he heard the Zeeland dialect. Early on he had a good ear for all those different nuances in language.

The Elburg family often traveled to Zeeland and the salty smell of the Oosterschelde and Westerschelde always stayed with Jan. In Maatstaf (September 1970) he wrote, thinking back to this: ten to one that, when I close my eyes for this moment, an early film image is showing of a dike sheeting, with waves and growths and all. art images. water images.

The songs he wrote for the secret society De Zwarte Dolk, which he had founded when he was about ten or eleven years old, were a kind of beginning of his writing. Here too, poetry and visual art went hand in hand. It wasn't until he was in high school that he realized what poetry really was, when his English teacher read Edgar Allen Poe's surrealistic The Raven.

In the Amsterdam of Elburg's youth, the feeling of belonging to the working-class population emerged that would emerge in many later poems. His rebellious nature and social feeling made him a communist out of conviction. In 1937, in the middle of the crisis, Jan Elburg obtained his high school diploma and got his first job.

War He became a laboratory technician, and in May 1940 he fought against the SS near Zutphen. He spent a month in captivity on the border near Poland. From this short time he remembered the most penetrating image of the entire war; the bare fact that when you shoot someone at close range, they get a hole and a little red spot on their chest that gets bigger and bigger.

After the capitulation he returned to Amsterdam and continued his work as a laboratory technician, as well as his struggle against the occupying forces, joining the armed resistance. The one above and the other underground. As a laboratory technician he supplied raw materials for explosives to the resistance, which he kept hidden in his own house.

Experimental janelburg biography It was during this period that Elburg's first collection of poems, Serenade for Lena (1941) was published and he was incorporated into Amsterdam's literary life. From the opening of the Amsterdam artists' café Café Eylders, Elburg belonged to the circle of poets, writers and painters who were at home there until well after the war. Gerard den Brabander became one of his great friends there, twenty years his senior.

In 1946 Elburg became editor of Het Woord. Elburg made his entrance into Dutch literature with traditional poetry. Indoors, however, he was engaged in very different, wanton experiments with language. In 1948 Jan Elburg came into contact with the Dutch Experimental Group and shortly afterwards with the International Cobra Movement. He started writing experimental poems during this period. He also experimented in the visual field. He made surrealistic collages, among other things. cobra

Here he found in other Dutch poets and painters the same conviction that he had already defended in Het Woord: that the creative game, the total experiment with language and image, or whatever medium, has to do with being socially progressive, with the change of all life.

During the Cobra exhibition in Amsterdam in 1949, Elburg, together with Kouwenaar, Lucebert and Schierbeek, pointed out the text “there is a lyricism that we abolish”.

elburg art

Visual work Elburg started making visual art around 1948. He only made a small appearance with this. In recent years, however, there has been increasing appreciation for Elburg's surrealistic collages in particular. His paintings, drawings, collages and objects have regularly been shown at exhibitions in the Netherlands and are still being exhibited. In 2012 there was an exhibition of his work in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.

“La putain de classe” (“the expensive whore”, so called by Cobra artist Corneille), a collage by Jan Elburg in which he replaced the head of Titian Venus of Urbino with the head of an old woman and also added peeping peasants, caused so much swell that the sale of the magazine in which it was featured, Cobra-schrift 4, had to be discontinued.

The spatial work that Elburg made during this period led to a teaching position at the Rietveld Academy, which lasted from 1952 to 1982.

Fifties Jan Elburg developed after his Cobra time into one of the most important Vijftigers, he is also called the greatest surrealist of the Vijftigers. The poets from this movement (including Remco Campert, Gerrit Kouwenaar and Simon Vinkenoog) resisted the old norms and values that were once again cherished after the war, also in art. The poetry of the poets of Fifty deviated so much from what was then the norm that many readers at first did not see why this kind of work could still be called poetry or literature. fifties

A few typical Vijftigers characteristics: letting go of punctuation, grammar and a fixed verse form (such as the sonnet) and the pursuit of spontaneity. It is not the product that is most important, but what one experiences while making it. Elburg called this 'Thinking with tongue and hands'. His great verbal talent, nurtured by everyday colloquial speech, comes into its own in Praatjeskijk (1960), a collection of aphorisms, comments and stories about visual data.

After a long relationship with visual artist Lotte Ruting, Elburg married Freddie Rutgers in 1960. She was previously the partner of fellow fifty-somethings Remco Campert and Gerrit Kouwenaar. The marriage broke up in 1962. In early 1963 Elburg met Michelle Gaarkeuken, they married in 1964. Their son Rengert was born in 1965 and their daughter Marlina Augusta in 1966.

From 1969, Elburg, like other poets from the Fifty movement, performed regularly during the Poetry International festival in Rotterdam.

Zeeland The fact that Zeeland always continued to play an important role for Jan Elburg is apparent from an article in a Zeeland issue of the literary magazine Maatstaf in September 1970: in the piece If we are honest he gives memories of his Zeeland background. Among other things, he tells how he could enjoy Hugo Claus's poems, because they are written in a language that 'has passed through Flemish', and because the Ostend dialect still bears a resemblance to Zeelandic.

Elburg corresponded, among others, with the Zeeland author Johanna Kruit. Contact with Johanna Kruit arose because the Zeeland Cultural Council invited Elburg on 16 February 1976 to join the jury, which had to award two incentive prizes, poetry and prose, to young talent from Zeeland. For the award ceremony, Elburg traveled to Middelburg and met Johanna Kruit, who was allowed to interview him for the Zeeland magazine Slib. There was an exchange of letters and a friendship that lasted until Elburg's death. They told each other about their daily lives and Elburg encouraged Kruit to write poetry, although her verses had nothing modernistic about them.

The collection Poems 1950-1975 was published in 1975. The publication led to an interview with Ischa Meijer in the Haagse Post and to a special issue about Jan G. Elburg in the magazine Bzzletin (no. 33). At the end of his Poems 1950-1975, a few new series show a austerity of language, which also manifests itself in later, unbundled poetry (Domestic life). This greater control (the title Kaalslag is typical) greatly benefits his work.

In 1976 he received the Constatijn Huygens Prize for his poetic oeuvre.

Jan G. Elburg was also a weapons collector and he worked as a copywriter. The well-known slogan 'real butter!' was invented by him, for example. He died in Amsterdam in 1992 from the effects of leukemia.

Prices

• 1948 Jan Campert Prize for Small t(er)reurspel
• 1959 Poetry Prize of the Municipality of Amsterdam for Having and Being
• 1970 Phoenix Prize for his entire oeuvre
• 1976 Constantijn Huygens Prize for his entire oeuvre

Publications

Poetry Serenade for Lena (1941), Klein t(er)reurspel (1947), Through the night (1948), The flag of reality (1956), Having and being (1958) Trident (1960), Stripe through the bill ( 1966), Contraforms (1971) and Chatting (1975), It seems like Winter (1988) Water, earth, fire, air (1992)

Prose

• If we are honest; Zeeland stories
• No Lettermen: from the prehistory of the fifties. Memoirs of Jan Elburg about the period 1945-1950
• The Parable of the Manatee and Other Poetic Prose

letters

• Half a century of friendship: two fifties in letters, 1943-1992. Correspondence between the Dutch poets Koos Schuur (1915-1995) and Jan Elburg (1919-1992). Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 2012