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  • Annie M. G. Schmidt:Dutch Children's Poet
  • Henrietta Ten Harmsel (bio)

Windmills, tulips, canals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh: these are the words and names, all nonliterary, which many foreigners associate with Holland. For Dutchmen themselves there is another name that has become a household word: Annie M. G. Schmidt. Hollanders of all ages read, memorize, and sing the poems of this prolific and versatile prize-winning writer. Her twelve volumes of children's poetry are never out of print and continue—with her children's stories, other light verse, and recent long-running musicals—to captivate large audiences. Although Annie Schmidt has already been translated into German, French, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, and Finnish, her poems have only recently appeared in English (my own translations, in Pink Lemonade [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1981]). A brief introduction to her and her work is, thus, in order. It is based on interviews with her in her home, on comments furnished by her publisher in Amsterdam, and on glimpses and analyses of the poems themselves.

Annie Schmidt was born on an island off the coast of southern Holland in 1911. Her father was a minister in a small village in the province of Zeeland, where she led a rather lonesome existence, isolated from her schoolmates in their provincial costumes by her more modern clothing and literary background. But she had other companions: the books which she constantly read, beginning at age four. She read all the children's books and girls' stories she could find, read Andersen's Fairy Tales "to shreds," lived with Alice in Wonderland so much that its fantastic images still continue to amuse and inspire her, and raided her father's library whenever she ran out of books for children. She smilingly reports that she had there first selected Ibsen's A Doll's House, thinking that it must contain something for a girl of her age. All of this personal reading, the stories her mother told and read to her, and the generally literary atmosphere of her home laid the first foundations for the imaginative world in which Annie Schmidt's poetry began to develop.

Although she wrote for her own amusement even as a child, [End Page 135] Annie Schmidt's schooling, in the old, classical tradition, did very little to encourage her imaginative talents. Her love for books led her naturally to prepare for a library career, which gave her opportunities to work in various Dutch libraries, finally, for more than a decade, in the children's room of a library in Amsterdam. Since Dutch children's literature had been dominated by a highly didactic, moralistic tone, she was urged to use such literature—or at least highly "literary" materials—to edify the children who came to hear her read or tell stories on Wednesday afternoons. From this period Annie Schmidt reports an amusing incident which she says was much more instructive for her than for her young listeners.

One day when she was attempting to inspire them by reading something very "uplifting," they staged a noisy rebellion, demanded the return of the two cents apiece they had paid, and finally had to be dismissed by the concierge. When Annie Schmidt left the library that day, several children again accosted her for their two cents, for money was precious to them in that depression era. "They taught me a lesson I never forgot," she says. "After that I began to read and tell only stories and poems which would genuinely appeal to children, even including some of my own things, which I had then never considered publishing." Again Annie Schmidt's imaginative world was being formed: a genuine children's world containing no condescension but allowing plenty of room for stimulation, fantasy, and challenge. She learned that "something must happen" even in poems, which for her always contain narrative and dramatic as well as rhythmic and lyrical elements. She believes that any "edification" which occurs must be so subtle that it seems only to amuse and so natural that the poem could not exist without it. Children all over Holland, therefore, are now willing to pay far more than two cents to buy or hear the...

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