About the Author
E.M.
Beekman was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 1939
as World War II spread across Europe. During the Nazi occupation
he was separated from his parents and forced to forage and steal
from farmers in order to survive. After the war, he was reunited
with parents who were strangers. His problems were compounded when
his roving and abusive father, a mining engineer, accepted a job
in Indonesia and took the unhappy family with him.
It was in the Indies that Beekman
encountered another completely different world. To this day, he
remembers the exotic smells of the tropics and the richness of that
tropical world. Though he has never returned to the Indies since
his adolescence, he has made use of the extravagant beauty in his
poetry.
Beekman came to the United States
as a teenager in 1957. After a brief stint in the U.S. Army, he
kept himself alive with a variety of jobs (oilman on the Rock Island
Railroad, bartender, plastics factory worker, janitor, bouncer,
lab assistant) before earning his B.A. in English and Comparative
literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963
and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University
in 1968. He has taught for more than three decades in the Department
of Germanic Languages at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
and is the author of more than two dozen books including novels,
short stories, scholarly works and poetry.
Beekman is a noted scholar and translator
of Dutch colonial literature. Recent works include his highly acclaimed
translation of the seventeen-century Dutch naturalist Rumphius’
Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet published by Yale University
Press. Beekman has been awarded a Guggenhim Fellowship in support
of his continuing translation of Rumphius’ writings.
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