Eeltsje Hiddes Halbertsma

[11][12] Eeltsje Hiddes Halbertsma was born on 8 October 1797,[2][1][13] in his parents' house on Kowemerk ("Cow Market") street[13] in the village of Grou, in the central part of the Dutch province of Friesland.

[2][1] When he had finished his training in the Latin school, towards the end of 1814,[2] Eeltsje Halbertsma left for Holland, where he started a study of medicine at the University of Leiden which lasted until April 1818.

[2][1][14][23][7] In the student city of Leiden, however, he became caught up in the rough night life,[2] and that was why, by way of reorientation, he left for Heidelberg, in Germany, for half a year in the spring of 1818.

[2][27] Afterwards, Halbertsma became physician in Purmerend, in northern Holland,[2][1][27] where he lived for a year and a half,[2] and also became involved with a local girl whom he referred to as "the Little Peacock" in his letters to his brother Justus.

"[26][27] Because of his good education, but also because of his compassionate bedside manner, Halbertsma had a very spread-out practice, with patients not only in Grou, but also scattered around the countryside and in neighbouring villages.

[2] One of Halbertsma's biographers described him as "a fine-feeling spirit, an idealistic dreamer, an independent and courageous man, afflicted by periods of melancholy and doubt; a bohémien and a rascal, such as there has been no second of in all of Western Frisian literature.

[2] As for his views, Halbertsma had become influenced by Deism in his student days, but according to himself he had changed his opinion after reading the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder.

[32] Later, Eeltsje Halbertsma became a member of the Selskip foar Fryske Taal en Skriftekennisse ("Society for Knowledge of Frisian Language and Literature"), where he felt much more at home.

[33][34] Halbertsma's marriage was, after the first few years,[28] not very happy,[2][14][28] as he was much too fond of alcohol,[2][14][28] while his wife nagged constantly, was distrustful and reproached him continuously for living off her money.

[2] Halbertsma felt the drive to write for the first time, as his brother Justus would later tell it, when he came back from his half-year in Heidelberg, and noticed that the street songs in the Netherlands were of a very low quality compared to those in Germany.

[31] The linguist Philippus H. Breuker, who added an extensive and penetrating afterword to the reprint of Rimen en Teltsjes of 1993, observed, however, that this assertion could "never be more than half the truth," as Halbertsma's early poetry was not of a high literary value; quite the opposite, in fact.

[31] Although writing short stories and poems was something which Eeltsje Halbertsma could not do without, from approximately 1830 onwards the social prestige he won with it also started to play a role.

[29] In the middle of the 20th century the author and literary critic Anne Wadman stated that Eeltsje was the greatest poet of his time in the Netherlands; as neither Willem Bilderdijk nor Isaäc da Costa were fit to hold a candle to him (he wrote), one would look invain for someone of the same stature in the Dutch literature of that period.

[45] On the basis of Romanticism, which he had acquired in Heidelberg,[24][29][14][39][7] Eeltsje Halbertsma often needed a first impulse for his works, an existing text or melody that he could, as he himself put it, frisify "in such a way that no one could recognise the original anymore.

[29] Halbertsma was, however, also the author of the mildly humorous Ald Jan-om ("Old Uncle John"), in which a farm-hand of advanced years complains of the farmer's daughter's constant stream of suitors, who are always getting in his way,[47] and of the love poem Skipperssankje ("Skipper's Song"), a mariner's entreaty to his beloved not to forget him, even if his ship should sink and he should drown.

[29] In the longer story De Jonkerboer ("The Gentleman Farmer"), which some critics call a novella,[1] the main motif is a longing for a peaceful and diligent existence in the country-side.

[1][52] Striking things about Eeltsje Halbertsma's literary works are the wonderful sound patterns in some of his poems, especially Geale' Sliepke ("Geale's Nap"),[29] and his playful additions of phrases in other languages or dialects, which occur mostly in his stories, but also in some poems, like Jonker Pyt and Sibbel ("Squire Pete and Sibylle"), where the squire has just returned from fashionable France, and now believes it shows his breeding and social status to throw around French words and phrases.

[29][53][54] "Gibberish, odd names, strange types of people, stopgap words, [...] the most surprising metaphors, and the most unexpected jumps in a train of thought,"[29] all of these occur regularly in Halbertsma's prose.

[1] In his works he was guided by the ideal image he had in his mind of the Western Frisians as simple but genuine people, which he contrasted against the Dutch, who were in his eyes refined but insincere.

[2] After the death of all three Brothers Halbertsma, their short fiction and poetry was gathered under the supervision of librarian and archivist Gerben Colmjon and bookseller and historian Wopke Eekhoff.

[9] In 1993, the tenth reprint of the book was published, including for the first time some (earlier, lower-quality) work of Eeltsje Halbertsma which had until then remained outside of Rimen en Teltsjes.

[24] The Selskip foar Fryske Taal en Skriftekennisse hired the sculptor Willem Molkenboer in 1875, to make a stone tablet in which the likeness of Eeltsje Hiddes Halbertsma was chiselled out.

[62] The inscription reads: "TO DR EELTSJE HIDDES HALBERTSMA", with on the back of the column: "Ljeaf bliuwe ús Fryske tael en liet."

Gable stone with the likeness of Eeltsje Halbertsma in the front wall of the house of his birth in Grou , by Willem Molkenboer .
The statue of Eeltsje Hiddes Halbertsma in Grou .