Grasses, trees and the lovable grouch of the Lowlands

For many years, no one knew the Dutch writer A.L. Snijders (b. 1937). But in 2001 he started writing zkv’s, very short stories. He sent them to his children and some friends, not thinking about publication. Now, fifteen years later, we have about 2,500 zkv’s (‘zeer korte verhalen’), collected in ten books.
Some of them were translated into German and published (by Reclam Verlag) but English translations were not available. Until—in 2011—the American writer Lydia Davis read some of his stories. Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize, is noted for literary works of extreme brevity and is also a short story writer and translator from French and other languages. Lydia Davis decided to translate some of Snijders’ stories:
    
I liked the concrete narration and the short sentences, the freshness of each piece, the good humor and the references to Dutch culture and history. I especially liked Snijders’ wit, thoughtfulness and often surprising conclusions.

Grasses and Trees brings us 72 very short autobiographical fables about the magical unmagical world of A.L. Snijders, a very Dutch world, imbued with humor and filled with animals, ordinary and extraordinary people, old houses, the city of Amsterdam and the countryside.

Readers of English can now enjoy Snijders’ distinct style and his artful blend of observation and imagination. It is to Lydia Davis’ credit that with her Snijders translations, people outside the Lowlands can begin to know this lovable grouch and the nation of lovable grouches of which and for which he writes.

Lydia Davis (1947) is the author of one novel and seven collections of stories, the most recent of which was Can’t and Won’t (2014). She is also the translator of Swann’s Way (2003) and Madame Bovary (2010), both of which were awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was published in 2009, and in 2013 she was awarded the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction. Atlas Contact has published, in Dutch translations by Peter Bergsma, the following story collections: Bezoek aan haar man (2011), Varianten van ongemak (2012),  and De taal van dingen in huis (2014), as well as her novel, Het eind van het verhaal (2014). Grasses and Trees is Lydia Davis’ first book-length translation from the Dutch.

A.L. Snijders (1937) was born in Amsterdam. He started writing columns for newspapers and is nowadays proclaimed as one of the greatest writers of very short stories, the so-called  zkv’s (‘zeer korte verhalen’). He started writing zkv’s in 2001. He sent them by email to his children and some friends, not thinking about publication. AFdH Publishers was founded because two readers thought: these beautiful short stories have to be published. So, in 2006, Snijders’s first collection of very short stories was published by AFdH. In November 2010, Snijders was awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize, one of the three most important literary prizes in the Netherlands. De libelleman (2015) is his most recent collection of zkv’s.