Een Beytie Hollansche: James Boswell's Dutch Compositions

"Een Beytie Hollansche": James Boswell's Dutch Compositions

(Edited by C.C. Barfoot and K.J. Bostoen)

‘Men zegt dat de hollandsche taal is een taal voor den Paarden’. (People say that Dutch is a language for horses).

Dit boek verscheen in een genummerde oplage van 500 exemplaren. Dit is nummer 412.

James Boswell thought the man who said this might haven been thrown into an canal. Boswell, in fact, was so charmed by the Dutch language that he went to great pains to master it. His enthusiasm in this matter is reflected in the liveliness of the forst time in this book.

During the stay in Holland in 1764 Boswell wrote a number of short compositions in Dutch as a daily exercise. These include an account of a visit to Belle van Zuylen and her family, wellknown and influental Utrecht residents.

Although Boswell’s Dutch so journ turned out to a brief, these compositions exhibit his fondness for the Low Countries.

This publication includes modern English translation and an extensive Introduction on Boswell’s life in the Netherlands and his interest in the Dutch language.

James Boswell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1740 of an old and honored family. As a young man, Boswell was ambitious to have a literary career but reluctantly obeying the wishes of his father, a Scottish Judge, he followed a career in the law. He was admitted to the Scottish bar in 1766. However, his legal practice did not prevent him from writing a series of periodical essays, The Hypochondriac (1777-83), and his Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785), was an account of the journey to the outer islands of Scotland undertaken with Samuel Johnson in1773. In addition, Boswell wrote the impulsively frank Journals, private papers lost to history until they were discovered by modern scholars and issued in a multivolume set. Known during much of his life as Corsican Boswell for his authorship of An Account of Corsica in 1768, his first considerable work, Boswell now bears a name that is synonymous with biographer. The reason restsi n the achievement of his Life of Samuel Johnson published in 1791, seven years after the death of Johnson. Boswell recorded in his diary the anxiety of the long-awaited encounter with Johnson, on May 16, 1763, in the back parlor of aLondon bookstore, and upon their first meeting he began collecting Johnson's conversations and opinions. Johnson was a daunting subject for a biographer, in part because of his extraordinary, outsized presence and, in part becauseJohnson himself was a pioneer in the art of literary biography. Boswell met the challenge by taking an anecdotal, year-by-year approach to the wealth of biographical material he gathered. Boswell died in 1795.

Paperback, 54 pag., register

Uitg. Acadamic Press Leiden, 1994

ISBN 9074372104

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