James S. Holmes

In 1956 he was the first non-Dutch translator to receive the prestigious Martinus Nijhoff Award, the most important recognition given to translators of creative texts from or into Dutch. The youngest of four brothers, with two younger sisters (Shirley and Maizie) James was born to Ervin and Ethel Holmes and raised in a small American farm in Collins, Iowa. In 1941, after finishing high school, he enrolled in the Quaker College of Oskaloosa, Iowa. After a study journey of two years, he did a middle school teaching internship in Barnesville, Ohio. Some years later, after refusing to go on military service for the American Army or, alternatively, civil service, Holmes was sentenced to a 6-month jail term. Upon his release, he went back to studying: first at William Penn College, and later at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. In 1948, after obtaining two degrees, one in English and one in History, he continued his studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, one of the well-known Ivy League Schools, where the following year he became a research doctor. In the meantime he had written and published his first poems and had carried out some occasional editorial work.