Hans Heyting facts for kids
Hans Heyting (born Johannes Heijting) was a talented Dutch writer, poet, painter, and radio personality. He was born on August 13, 1918, and passed away on June 9, 1992. Hans Heyting mainly wrote in the Drèents language, which is a regional language spoken in the Drenthe province of the Netherlands. He was one of the first Drèents writers to share his personal feelings and thoughts in his work. Many people consider him to be the first truly modern Drèents poet who brought new ideas and styles to old forms of writing.
Contents
Early Life and Challenges
Hans Heyting grew up near the village of Beilen in a family that didn't have much money. His father was a clogmaker and also hunted to help support the family. His father also enjoyed painting and drawing in his free time, using brushes he made from his own hair! Sadly, none of his father's artwork was saved.
When Hans was about ten years old, his father passed away. This was a very difficult time for him. He didn't like the strict atmosphere at his school and started to feel different from those around him. He once said that he felt God was watching him all the time, which made him scared. Around this time, he met another Drèents poet, Roel Reijntjes, who was also from Beilen.
Hans was a bit of a rebel. He was even expelled from a vocational school in Hoogeveen for causing an explosion in the bicycle shed. As he grew up, he started to drift away from his family and his background, eventually cutting ties completely. For a while, he worked as an electrician's helper and a paperboy.
Becoming a Painter
Because of a curved spine, likely caused by a childhood illness called rickets, Hans couldn't do jobs that required a lot of physical effort. So, he trained to be a painter at a studio in Assen. He mostly painted portraits of children.
He became very interested in art and books after meeting a journalist named G.A. de Ridder and a literature expert named Hendrik Fernhout. Fernhout especially introduced him to the famous poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
Hans became friends with and fell in love with Ina Konings, a girl who lived next door and was sixteen years younger than him. He painted and drew her often, and she became a big inspiration for his poems and children's books. For a long time, people thought she had passed away young, and that's why she was such a strong inspiration for him. However, in 2005, a scholar found out that she was still alive and living abroad!
Life in Borger
During World War II in 1944, Hans Heyting went into hiding in the village of Borger to avoid trouble. After the war, he briefly returned to Beilen, but the memories of his strict childhood made him go back to Borger, where he lived for the rest of his life.
In the years after the war, he continued to paint. He joined a group called the Drents Painters Society and wrote articles about painting for different magazines. In 1946, he lived for a short time with another painter, Anton Heyboer. Hans also showed his paintings in exhibitions in Assen and Emmen. After these shows, he received many requests for portraits. However, he started to feel that he wasn't talented enough as a painter. He even wrote a poem asking if his efforts were pointless. The painters' group he belonged to eventually broke apart due to disagreements.
Many of Hans Heyting's paintings were sadly lost when the museum farm where he lived burned down in 1967. The few paintings that survived show a style similar to Magic Realism. After the fire, Hans focused more on writing, and his work became more about literature. In 1954, he married Wilhelmina Carolina Hilverink, who was known as 'Wil'.
Radio Work
Hans Heyting became a director for a local drama group in Borger. After their plays, he would often perform his own poems, play the lute, and sing his own songs. In 1950, he was seriously hurt jumping off the stage and had to stay in bed for almost a year. In 1951, he directed his own play called De vrömde vögel (The Oddball), which was about a painter who moves to a Drents village.
He then started working as a writer and performer for the regional radio station, Regionale Omroep Noord. He even got voice training from the station's director. He wrote Drèents texts for singers and hosted a show about art in Drenthe every two weeks. Hans Heyting became a very popular radio personality in the province. His radio sketches often featured funny village characters and their quirks. His Drèents-language radio shows really helped people become more interested in their regional language. When he was 62, Hans stopped working in radio because it became too physically demanding.
While working in radio, Hans also worked at a library for the blind in Groningen. His job there was to choose voices to record books for people who couldn't see.
Poetry and Writing
Hans Heyting published four collections of his own poetry: Tweetalig (Bilingual, 1973), Spiegelschrift (Mirror Writing, 1977), Toegift (Encore, 1983), and Dubbelfocus. Een cyclus gedichten (Bifocal. A Poetry Cycle, 1986). He once said he wasn't the type of person to push his own work, which is why he collected his poems later in life.
In the 1950s, Hans was part of the Drentse Schrieverskring, a Drèents writer's group. His first poems were published in the Drèents-language magazine Oeze Volk, which he helped start and edited for many years. Later, he also published in the more modern Drèents literary magazine Roet, where he also worked as an editor.
At first, Hans Heyting was influenced by older Drèents poets and wrote traditional, story-like poems. But later, he became one of the first Drèents poets to move away from these old styles. His friend, poet Gerard Nijenhuis, noted that Hans's poems started to hint at ideas rather than describing them in detail, making them more "condensed."
Another Drèents poet, Marga Kool, noticed two main themes in Hans's poems: the idea of a safe home compared to a scary outside world, and the theme of a girl who has passed away. The poem Spiegelschrift (Mirror Writing) shows the first theme:
- We would like to stay
- together for a long time to come,
- press our threadbare bodies together
- firmly yet softly and listen to
- the wind and rain singing
- and write the following words
- on the steamed-up windows:
- 'two children, orphans, sheltered here'
- from outside it's mirror writing
- but outsiders needn't read it
The theme of the lost girl is similar to the work of poet Gerrit Achterberg. Hans Heyting also liked to use technical words as titles for his poems, like Optiek (Optics) and Dubbelfocus (Bifocal). His poems often shared very personal feelings, which was new for Drèents poetry at the time.
Hans also wrote funny poems using the pen name Hans Heideknupper. He planned to publish a collection of these comic poems, but it never happened.
Children's Books and Later Life
Most of Hans Heyting's books, including his poetry and nine children's books, came out in the 1970s and 1980s. He started writing children's books because other writers suggested it. He wrote them in Dutch because there wasn't a market for children's books in Drèents.
Hans had a special connection with children. His friend G. de Jonge said that Hans loved children, and it showed in his writing. Children also loved him. When Hans read to children, they would listen quietly, understanding him without many words.
His novel Om je dood te schamen (Shame!) was chosen as the best children's book of the year by a children's jury in 1979. A year later, his novel Eva en Bert alleen (Eva and Bert Alone) received the same award. However, Hans later felt that his publishers had made him change his early children's books too much, making them sweeter than he wanted and asking him to remove parts written in Drèents.
He received a lot of fan mail, especially from girls aged 12 to 15 who wore glasses, just like the main characters in his stories. Many of his fans even came to visit him.
In 1974, Hans Heyting received the Cultural Prize of Drenthe. In 1979, he was given a special golden medal of honor. In his final years, Hans stepped away from public life. He became weaker physically and suffered from pain. He also had surgery for cancer. When he could no longer ride his bicycle, he used an electric motorcycle to get around his village. He told his friend Gerard Nijenhuis that he loved life dearly and didn't want to die, but he thought he would accept it quickly. He just wished he could spend more time with his wife. Hans Heyting passed away in 1992 in Assen.
After His Death
A few months after Hans Heyting's death, the Roet magazine dedicated an entire issue to him.
A statue of Hans Heyting, created by Bert Kiewiet, was placed in the center of Borger. The plaque on the statue honors him as a "Writer, poet, recorder of the Drèents language" and a co-founder of the Drèents monthly magazine OEZE VOLK.
In 2004, the Drèents language institute released a video about Hans Heyting called Een kapotte bril (Broken Glasses) on DVD. In 2005, a publisher released his collected poems, De dichter en de wichter: verzamelde gedichten van Hans Heyting, which included a short biography. In 2006, a CD was released where Drèents writers read Hans Heyting's poems.
His Legacy
Hans Heyting's early plays were well-received. His children's books were described as "easy-to-read, simple popular stories for young people." One of his children's books, Esther en het geheim van opa (Esther and Grandpa's Secret, 1983), was even compared to the work of famous children's author Guus Kuijer.
While his painting had some weaknesses, his poetry was highly praised. Experts say his Drèents poems are among the best ever written in that language. He is seen as the first truly modern Drèents poet who brought new ideas to traditional forms. He moved from writing about general topics like nature and village life to sharing very personal feelings, such as sadness over a lost child or longing for a lost love.
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Hans Heyting
