Multatuli was the alias of Eduard Douwes Dekker, a Dutch
philosopher, writer and social reformer who lived from 1820-1887.
Multatuli
Eduard Douwes Dekker
1820-1887
He wrote an amazingly beautiful Dutch, had many
interesting ideas, and was one of the few true geniuses writing in Dutch.
If you do not read Dutch,
there is a translation of "Max Havelaar" by Multatuli in Penguin
Classics,
while a considerable amount of his work that he published himself has been
translated into German.
Of the "Max Havelaar" - a classic attack on
Dutch colonialism, first published in 1860 - there are many translations in
many languages, including French and Korean.
If you do read Dutch, see the left pane for a part of
Multatuli's IDEAS in Dutch, with my comments.
My comments to IDEAS 1
have been finished in a first version on January 27, 2003. Later that year
folllowed IDEAS 2 and
IDEAS 3. In May 2005 the full text of and
comments on IDEAS 4 followed.
IDEAS 5 and
IDEAS 6 and
IDEAS 7 were added in the first half year of
2006.
I now have commented all books of
IDEAS that Multatuli wrote, together over 2000 closely printed pages and must
have done something that happens in Holland at most once in 150 years.
For more see
Introductie Ideen
- if you read Dutch, for else you must abstain from the pleasures of meeting a
great Dutch writer.
There also are now
excerpts of my comments and
indexes to them. These are
complete for the first six volumes, but the seventh still has to be done.
There is a general index for
this, and it should be
noted this consists only of excerps of my notes, and still remains to be done
for IDEEN 7:
MM's NOTEN bij de IDEEN
In September 2011 I uploaded the first html-editions of
Minnebrieven and of a fine English translation, published in 1904, of
the first part of
Walter Pieterse,
that is originally part of the IDEAS. If you click on the last link, you can start reading straight away
in Chapter 1, and find out why Multatuli has been compared to
Heine and Voltaire.
Probably I'll need to do some more formatting
with each of the last mentioned two editions, but as it
is it is mostly quite readable (at least in Mozilla-browsers).
I wish you pleasurable and
instructive reading and computing!