A New Mouthpiece
With its renewed website, the NLPVF has also acquired a new mouthpiece. In the future, and with a certain regularity, various members of the Foundation’s staff will provide a report on their work. We hope it will be infectious but also clear and comprehensible, so that you can gain insight into our progress. We also wish to give people who are engaged in the same thought processes as we the opportunity to respond to the information on our site. Dutch literature cannot have enough ambassadors. Fortunately, we can observe a steady annual increase in the number of readers. Dutch literature is becoming increasingly available in more and more countries and languages.
We have just dispatched our annual report. In this, I conclude my introduction with the sentence that the Chinese Minister of Press and Publication uttered when our Secretary of State Van der Laan introduced me to him:
‘Mister Director, the gates of China are open to you.’
That sentence will remain long in my memory, in view of the fact that it contains more than a courtesy-based formality. We have been speaking about globalization for years. However, we tend to see this through Western eyes, almost as a matter of necessity. Working for the NLPVF makes it possible to obtain a glimpse within the gates of numerous countries, to discuss with publishers and writers the specific significance of globalization at that particular place.
Such occasions frequently indicate that there is an unprecedented interest in Europe, in the European range of ideas, and also in the Dutch body of thought. There is immense curiosity in many countries about original work from Europe, which stands in sharp contrast to Americanization, the uniformization of the international book market. I also suspect that an unprecedented stimulus will issue from the new markets that are arising in South America, Asia, Eastern and Central Europe, the eastern Mediterranean area, and the Arabic world. I applaud this development.
This compels us, however, to take a closer look at these markets in search of creative spirits there. The Netherlands in particular and Europe in general will have to open their gates with a much broader gesture, with the gaze no longer only oriented toward America. The world remains large and replete with wonders.
by Henk Pröpper
