This chapter presents an archive-based case study of the Bibliotheca Neerlandica, a project launched in 1955 by the newly established Foundation for the Promotion of the Translation of Dutch Literary Works, which aimed to publish commercial English translations of seventeen volumes of Dutch literature, but ended abruptly in 1969 with the publication of the tenth. Through analysis of the underlying aims, the prevailing culture of literary translation, the choices of text and the notion of a ‘Dutch canon’, the structure and management of the commissioning body and the relationship with the publisher, Heinemann, the chapter provides a nuanced cautionary tale about the use of imaginative literature for cultural diplomacy. The chapter documents the breakdown of the project’s relationship with Heinemann, prompted not only by the publisher’s major commercial difficulties in the period, but also by the quality of the translations, which regularly needed review, revision and correction, and the unsuitability of the texts chosen. It highlights the negative reception of those volumes that were reviewed, which found in the texts precisely the claustrophobic provincialism that the series had been conceived to overcome.
‘They’re coming’: Precarity and the white nation fantasy among South African migrants in Melbourne
