PORTRAIT – In his village, between Flanders and Wallonia, the translator writes about the wars that devastated Europe. After a tribute to the dead of the Great War, he salutes the memory of an American poet killed shortly after the Normandy landings.
It is impossible for a visitor from Paris to get off the train at the small station of La Hulpe, about twenty kilometers south of Brussels, without thinking of the magnetic blues of Magritte, the harmonic opulence of César Franck, the films of ‘André Delvaux, whose characters devoured by the unknown take trains that lead nowhere. Impossible to approach the forest of Soignes, within cannon range of Waterloo, without thinking of this sentence from fireflies fire : “I must have gone to the wrong door, entered a place where I had nothing to do.”
In La Hulpe, we are in Belgium and not elsewhere. Both in the realm of strangeness and in the land of knowledge. In this small town of 8,000 inhabitants located near the dividing line between Flanders and Wallonia, Xavier Hanotte led a dreamy, solitary, happy childhood, under the sign of poetry, withdrawal, and nature. An architect, his father drew up the plans of the house in which the French-speaking Belgian writer…
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