Chameleon | Nachtroer by Charlotte Van den Broeck, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, Bloodaxe Books, 2020

Chameleon | Nachtroer is the first English translation of Charlotte Van den Broeck’s poetry, which combines the Belgian poet’s first two books—first published in Dutch in 2015 and 2017—in one volume translated by David Colmer.

The publication allows English-language readers to follow the development of the poet’s work from her debut to her next collection. It seems important, however, to read them separately as they were intended, allowing some space to breathe between their readings so that we can fully acknowledge the tonal and thematic shifts in the poems and appreciate each collection by its emotional unity.

Chameleon opens with an epigraph from Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry: ‘After nothing does the womanly desire to please strive so much as after the appearance of the naïve . . .’ Much of the collection plays around with the notion of naivety, from early childhood through to the distancing from the mother and the experience of romantic relationships; naivety becomes an unstable quality that hides both a nostalgic innocence and a darker vulnerability. READ MORE…