Rico Sneller (Netherlands)

I still remember how, at a conference on holism in Essex in 2018, Richard invited me to the table where he was having his coffee break. I did not know him at all. The man intrigued me as he combined kindness with acumen — a rare combination. Our meeting initiated an ongoing contact which extended beyond the conference itself: Richard asked me to contribute to a volume on his most recent poetry book, Changing. As if it were a synchronicity, my subsequent familiarisation with this book accompanied — and even demarcated — a thorough change in my own intellectual life and a turn toward creativity and inspiration. Artists like Richard enhance synchronicities; they follow them as a comet is followed by its tail.

What were the features that immediately fascinated me in Richard? His Jewishness, beyond doubt. If it is indeed so, as I believe, that Judaism is a repetition of the always-new, Richard’s poetry must keep in store a promise. This expectation only came true, later, when I continued reading his poetry. What intrigued me too was his relation to and concern with Yugoslavia, a country whose cultural background I was ignorant of. Discovering Richard’s Balkan poetry and studying it for another essay Richard had kindly asked me to write, I was profoundly touched by his relentless attempts to bring the Yugoslav literary heritage to light. As if the damage done by the ethnic wars and the country’s dissolution were the reverse side of a dream, the dream of a blue butterfly or a springtime flower-girl. I was also charmed by Richard’s Jungian orientation. Jung’s thinking enables one to cross borders. If someone — like Richard — already crosses borders by following his innermost urges, Jungian thought is not needed anymore to enable it but rather to give expression to it, and confirm it.

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