Speaking in Tongues should come as a welcome surprise to English-language readers, as it not only opens new doors, but also presents exciting technical challenges. H.C. ten Berge is a master of many genres, but poetry informs all of his writing. In this generous new selection of poems and poem-sequences translated into English—his first publication in book form in North America—we follow the exciting trajectory of the poet from his initial collection, Poolsneeuw (Polar Snow) in 1964, to his most recent, In tongen spreken (Speaking in Tongues), which came out in 2020. His poetry is nourished and influenced not only by the contemporary world, but also by the European Middle Ages and earlier civilizations. A major voice in The Netherlands, Ten Berge has won many prizes and distinctions, including the prestigious P.C. Hooft Award (2006), the jury celebrating that he “has opened Dutch poetry to worlds that until then had gone unnoticed.”

H.C. ten Berge's profile page

Pleuke Boyce's profile page

H.C. ten Berge was born in 1938 in Alkmaar, the Netherlands. One of Holland’s most important poets, he is the author of a large body of work that includes not only poetry but also novels, novellas, essays and translations. Apart from translating from modern languages, he collected and translated poetry and myths of the Aztecs, Inuit, Eastern Siberian Peoples and First Nations of the Pacific Northwest. He has received many awards for his work, including the most important and prestigious oeuvre prize in the Netherlands, the P.C. Hooft Award.

Pleuke Boyce was born and grew up in the Netherlands and now lives on Vancouver Island. She received the James S. Holmes Award from the Translation Center at Columbia University for her translations of work by Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg: But this Land has no End - Selected Poems. Her translations into Dutch include seven books by Alice Munro.