Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Contributor

David Colmer

Contributor

David Colmer

David Colmer is an Australian translator who lives in Amsterdam. He has won many prizes, including the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker), and most recently the James Brockway Prize for his translations of Dutch poetry.

Articles by David Colmer

Overdue

By Annie M. G. Schmidt

Born in 1911, Annie M. G. Schmidt trained as a librarian. After World War II she moved to Amsterdam to work as the archivist at Het Parool, a newspaper that had begun as a clandestine resistance…

Translated by David Colmer

For an Easy Life

By Peter Terrin

She said that he could at least have the politeness to let her finish.

Translated from Dutch by David Colmer

On Tao Qian

By Nachoem M. Wijnberg

He writes the way someone who is no longer impatient speaks.

Translated from Dutch by David Colmer

Multilingual

Du Fu

By Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Every word Du Fu uses, he read somewhere.

Translated from Dutch by David Colmer

Multilingual

Su Dongpo and the Trick He Says He Learned from Tao Qian

By Nachoem M. Wijnberg

More to see left and right than he can list.

Translated from Dutch by David Colmer

Multilingual

Room

By Nyk de Vries

In that town there was a room I kept circling.

Translated from Dutch by David Colmer

February 2010 Worth Ten Thousand Words Part Iv International Graphic Novels From Waiting For An Island Marc Legendre Page Thumbnail

From “Waiting for an Island”

By Marc Legendre

Translated from Dutch by David Colmer

Quiet

By Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Quiet, you say. / I hardly hear you.

Translated from Dutch by David Colmer

Song

By Nachoem M. Wijnberg

I saw a shop / went in and bought / something I had forgotten / I already had.

Translated from Dutch by David Colmer

Shreds

I come from Spite and Remorse.

Translated from Dutch by David Colmer