In 1889 the Dutch poet Herman Gorter published a 4,381-line poem, entitled ‘Mei’ [May]. You can view a scan of the original on the Internet Archive.

‘Mei’ is considered a canonical work in Dutch literature but also has a reputation as a poem that is ‘known’ more than it is ‘read’.

As one of the primary outputs of the so-called ‘Tachtigers’ generation, the poem is typical of a specific strand of late 19^th-century Impressionistic writing that may seem outdated or anachronistic to some readers today.

While the text of the poem is over 130 years old, two recent translations—into West Frisian and English—demonstrate the ongoing fascination with ‘Mei’, among poets at least.

Indeed, ‘Mei’ can be described as a poem about poetry, with all the potential for self-referential game-playing that phrase implies.

In this project, my aim is not to translate the original poem (which is more than 4,000 lines long) but to reimagine it, incorporating elements from everyday life in 21st-century Fryslân, as well as impressions of other cultures and places.

I am writing a new poem, entitled ‘May.be’, which negotiates each stanza of ‘Mei’ according to the spaces I negotiate as a writer: physical spaces (e.g. the Waddenzee islands, which are close by the village where I live), virtual spaces (including online repositories and forums), cultural contexts (the unique position of Fryslân both within and outside the Netherlands).

This project builds on a process I developed in my 2013 collection Leaves of Glass, which reimagined correspondence between Walt Whitman and Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd to interrogate questions of identity, imperial ambitions and masculine desire.

Earlier this year, I published a reimagining of the poem’s opening stanza via my Substack newsletter. You can now read it here on my website too.

I’ve since succeeded in ‘translating’ a few more stanzas, including the third and fourth. I look forward to posting further instalments as the months and years progress.

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