Column | Pleuke is also dead

As far as I’m concerned, death in my area can stop cleaning up. It should not be a cleaning rage. This week I was struck by the death report about an old girlfriend, whom I still thought in full life, but had already died for several months.

We corresponded quite intensively for decades, in recent years there had been a draw because of personal problems that claimed too much to us. Our partners became demented, hers earlier than mine, and she had little need to share her concerns about it.

Her name is Pleuke Boyce, in literary circles best known as a translator of the work of Alice Munro, the Canadian writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Pleuke translated seven books from Munro into Dutch. She also translated the poetry of HC ten Berge into English.

Years earlier, thanks to another Canadian writer, Norman Levine, we had been in contact. I had written enthusiastically about his stories translated by pleuke; They first appeared in1988 at a Dutch publishing house (Van Gennep) under the title Because of the war. They were sober, light melancholic stories with little plot and a lot of atmosphere. I was immediately sold, but not the book; Levine remained a marginal writer – apart from Canada, where he is hardly read anymore.

Pleuke (birth name van Dam) turned out to have a special background. She was born in Zwijndrecht in 1942, married in 1961 to a Canadian writer, Ron Boyce, with whom she finally ended up in Errington on Vancouver Island in 1974, in a very rural environment. In Canada she had two children with Ron, one of whom died in a traffic accident at a young age, published a barely noticed collection of stories and devoted herself to a career as a translator.

Occasionally she came to the Netherlands so that I could meet her in person. She also visited Adriaan Morriën with whom she had had a relationship in her younger years. « I’m so happy that I know you! » She once wrote him. « I learned a lot from you, both about love and about literature. I actually think I was allowed to sit at the feet of a master and I was allowed to sleep in bed with him and talk to him about everything. »

Pleuke turned out to be a calm, sympathetic woman, very well read and still interested in the Netherlands; She read daily NRC And a lot of recent Dutch literature. A. Alberts, JJ Voskuil and Frida Vogels loved them, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer suffered too much in her eyes. Politics – she was oriented left – she followed them closely.

The highlight for her as a translator was the Nobel Prize for Munro, which she also knew – just like Levine – personally. « What a great news, I still can’t quite believe it, » Pleuke wrote to me. A month later she visited Munro, but it turned out to be barely sharing her joy. Pleuke: « She is still completely in mourning about her husband’s death. That entire Nobel Prize can actually be stolen, she is not in the mood for it. »

In the meantime, the main characters in this column are all dead: Norman Levine, Ron Boyce, Adriaan Morriën, Alice Munro and now also that nice fiddling. I would like to wait a while myself.

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