Dutch theologian and poet Huub Oosterhuis passed away

On Easter Day, theologian and poet Huub Oosterhuis passed away at the age of 89.

I had the pleasure of arranging the rights for a selection of his prayers and poems for the English anthology Times of Life for the Paulist Press in New York. The selection is from the Dutch language collections Hoe ver is de nacht and Dan zal ik leven. The translation is by N.D. Smith (Norfolk UK).

Publisher: Paulist Press 

Year of publication: 1979

Editions: 3

Paperback: 114 pages

ISBN-10 : 0809122456

ISBN-13 : 978-0809122455

 

 

Other translations (translations by N.D. Smith and rights managed by Frank Fehmers): 

- Your Word is Near (1968);

-  Fifty Psalms (1973)

-  At Times I See (1974);

-  Prayers, Poems and Songs (1975)

 

Tears from heaven...

When the Dutch radio news service interrupted regular programmes on the last day of 2022 for the obituary of the retired pope, Benedict XVI, it rained in the Netherlands.

Benedict XVI was averse to tradition. The only tradition he broke with as pope was his retirement. Otherwise, as pope, he was a fanatical guardian of tradition and the doctrine of faith.

Before taking office as pope, he was, among other things, the head of the Department of the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican. Originally from Bavaria, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger had risen through the archdiocese of Munich to become prefect of the department of religious doctrine in the Vatican from 1981. He had become a kind of minister in charge of guarding the purity of religious doctrine. And he did so with great vehemence.

And Catholics in the Netherlands noticed that. In the 1960s, Dutch theology became known at home and abroad. Theologians from Nijmegen Catholic University became well-known Dutchmen, despite the Flemish origin of some. Schillebeeckx and Schoonenberg, in particular, trained a whole group of new theologians in the Netherlands and in Europe and regularly appeared on television programmes. 

The thinking of Dutch theologians was not only confined to the Netherlands. The second half of the 1960s saw a whole wave of translations of their works. For instance, Frank Fehmers, the later producer of the international television series Barbapappa, was an adviser to a religious book publisher in New York, the Paulist Press. He put books from Dutch publishers out for reading reports among theologians and theology students and, if the report was favourable, for translations. However, when Ratzinger started agitating against the new-lighters like Kung, Schillebeeckx and Schoonenberg and others as a scholar from 1972 and became prefect of religious doctrine at the Vatican from 1981, the wave slowly rolled to its death and churches in the Netherlands emptied.

Tears will be shed in heaven, but in the Netherlands it rained and people prepared to say farewell tot the year 2022.

Jak Boumans (aka James M. Boumans) M.Div. (Master of Divinity) translated Dutch theology books ( The Sacrament of the Eucharist) during his studies from 1966 to 1970 at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, La.  In 1979, he handled the translation rights for Time of Life by Huub Oosterhuis.

BPN 1726: Farewell to my pre-computing era

This month it is 50 years ago that I flew for the first time, with a second primer  I flew to the USA. I was going to study theology at Notre dame Seminary in New Orleans, Louisiana. The flight was a long one, from the old Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam, to London, Washington DC and Atlanta for a transfer to New Orleans. Some 13 hours. The first leg to London was with BEA, British European Airways, the precursor of British Airways, the rest of the flight was made with Delta Airlines. In  Washington the passengers were picked up by a bus which looked like it was made for the moon surface, before being unloaded to pass passport control and immigration authorities.

I studied four years in New Orleans and picked a Bachelor and Master. The study was rather traditional. The lectures were listened to. Only the homiletics (preaching and public speech) were done with new media by recording with a video camera.For the rest, you used notebooks, read books and typed your papers. Books could be borrowed from the extensive library, these days called the Rev. Robert J. Stahl S.M. Memorial Library, named after the librarian during my stay.

During my study, I noticed that my scholarship was paying for my tuition and campus facilities. Yet there were other costs to be covered, So I looked around what I could do to create an income. I came up with a solution. As Dutch theology was hot at that time I got in touch with a publisher of religious books, the Paulist Press in New York, and offered my services. And I was accepted as a lector delivering reading reports about new Dutch books and after a while as translator from Dutch into English. These functions had an additional advantage; by passing on the lector’s reports and eventually the translated books to the staff, I picked up extra merits.

Above the translations: left: The sacrament of the Eucharist by G.T.H. Liesting S.S.S.; above right: The Prophet in the Nearness of God by H. Renckens S.J. (note that on the cover there is a misspelling: Renkens without a -c-); below not a translation of my hand, but I acted as the foreign rights consultant. In the USA I used as my name James M. Boumans.

During the translation work, I became acquainted with the newest piece of office appliance at that time: the IBM Selectric, a typewriter with the golf ball. Jesse R. Ortego, a fellow student, typed the manuscripts on this device. The Selectric mechanism was notable for using internal mechanical binary coding and two mechanical digital-to-analog converters to select the character to be typed. The Selectric was faster, the correction mechanism was efficient and a range of letter fonts could be used by changing the golfballs.

The Selectric was the closest device to the beaconing era of computing. For the rest life still was analogue. Television and radio were still analogue. Contact with my parents and friends was done by handwritten airmail letters. Stamps had to be bough at the post office and be licked before applying them to the envelop. Sometimes I sent an audio-cassette as a spoken letter and seldom a photograph, as development was critical of a full roll of film. Tickets for flights had to be ordered from a travel bureau. You had to dial a fixed line telephone number and for speedy messages you sent a telegram. If you wanted to know something, you had to look it up in an outdated printed encyclopaedia and for telephone numbers you had to consult a printed telephone directory.

Having completed my studies in 1970, I decided to return to the Netherlands and after some months picked up a job as editor Humanities in a reference department of a publishing company, which just had started a publishing project of 25 volumes of a general encyclopaedia. Not the regular way with library cards with references and the clippings of the last edition.This encyclopaedia project did not have a precursor and became the first European encyclopaedia project using a (mini-)computer to assist the editorial staff. For me this became my entrance into the digital world and, without being really aware of it, the farewell to the analogue world.