Talk:Multatuli

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Assessment comments

1 npov?
2 Controleur
3 Quality of the article
4 Why in the Category:National_Heroes_of_Indonesia?

[edit] npov?

I have removed this material from the article, as it is unencyclopedic:

It pleased him so much that he is said to have called it the greatest drama ever written. It is a fine poem, written in blank verse and stylistically resembling an English tragedy; but it lacks drama and so has not been widely performed.

[...]

Toward the end of his career he was the centre of a crowd of disciples and imitators, whose attentions have dimmed his own reputation. To understand his fame, it is necessary to remember the sensational way in which he broke into the dullness of Dutch literature of his time. He has been compared to a flame out of the Far East. He was ardent, provocative, and edgy, but he made himself heard all over Europe. He brought an exceedingly severe indictment against the egotism and brutality of the administrators of Indonesia, and he framed it in a literary form which was brilliantly original. Not satisfied with this, he attacked, in a fury that was sometimes blind, everything that seemed to him falsely conventional in Dutch religion, government, society and morals. He respected nothing, he left no institution untouched.

Now that it is possible to look back upon Multatuli without passion, we see in him, not what Dutch enthusiasm saw, the second greatest writer of Europe in the nineteenth century (Victor Hugo being presumably the first), but a great man who was a powerful and glowing author, yet hardly an artist, a reckless enthusiast, who was inspired by indignation and a burning sense of justice, who cared little for his means if only he could produce his effect. He is seen to his best and worst in Max Havelaar; his Ideas, hard, fantastic and sardonic, seldom offer any solid satisfaction to the foreign reader. But Multatuli deserves remembrance, if only on account of the unequalled effect his writing had in rousing Dutch literature from the intellectual and moral lethargy of the time.

If anyone would like to rewrite this text in conformance with Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, be my guest. -- Viajero 18:19, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Controleur

I see that Dekker’s job in the Dutch East Indies, controleur, has been translated as "a post in the Inland Service." Actually, controleur was a particular position/rank in the Dutch civil administration over the East Indies. "A post in the Inland Service" doesn’t come close. After considering several alternatives, I think the best translation would be "civil servant." (As ranks go, a controleur reported to an assistant-resident, the position/rank that Dekker got later on, at Ambon.) -- Iterator12n ^Talk 00:46, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Quality of the article

I have now read the whole article. The article doesn't do right to history or Dekker. There are several howlers, such as "all the secrets of Dutch administration were known to him." Major surgery is necessary to get the article right. The Dutch Wikipedia has a much better story. -- Iterator12n ^Talk 01:02, 6 October 2007 (UTC)