VAN OSTAIJEN, Paul

Though born in Belgium, van Ostaijen was by common consent the most advanced Dutch-language writer of his time. Residing in Berlin in the early twenties, van Ostaijen assimilated Dada and wrote satires he called grotesques that often depended upon ironically contrasting the present with the past and the sublime with the disgusting. Back in Belgium, he started an art gallery that failed and worked as a journalist before succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two. The single English-language...