Beekman Translating
17th Century Herbal
City Scholar Heads for Florida
for 'Huge Work'

But all of those pages and pages listing his published works - scholarly, fiction and poetry, articles, translations - as well as chronological details of his lectures and fellowships appear to be dwarfed by his current task.

Beekman, who lives in Northampton and has taught at the University of Massachusetts since 1968, is in the process of translating into English from the Dutch the herbal of tropical plants - Ambonese Herbal - originally produced by George Eberhard Rumphius in the17th Century.

The original work ran to seven volumes of text in folio pages, which are twice the size of what we regard as a normal page. Beekman estimates his translation with annotations will be "a huge work," perhaps as many as 10 modern volumes.

And Beekman, who within the last year as been under treatment for cancer, says the "botany community is rooting for me; they want it done" because the work has never before been published in English.

Well into the daunting challenge, Beekman and his wife, Faith Foss, are now residing in Florida where for a year he will be a scholar in residence at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Coconut Grove. As McBryde Professor, Beekman (and Foss) live in a guest house in the middle of the sprawling seven acre tropical garden.

Beekman's special field is Dutch colonial literature, language and culture, although at UMass he has been a member of the English department, comparative literature and Germanic languages departments.

Born in Amsterdam in 1939, he came to this country at age 17 with his family and settled in New York as had Dutch immigrants for many generations before them. By 1962, Beekman became a U.S. citizen and did not retain any claim to Dutch citizenship, something he sometimes wished he had not given up.

He served in the U.S. Navy and then began what would become a long and distinguished career as a scholar, first as an undergraduate at Berkeley, then as a graduate student at Harvard where he received his doctorate in 1968.

That same year, he came to UMass as a member of the English Department and has taught there ever since, ranging over several departments and academic disciplines. In 1999, Beekman was named Distinguished Faculty Lecturer and Recipient of the Chancellor's Medal. His list of honors is dazzlingly long, - for example, Knighthood bestowed in the name of Queen Beatrix of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1997 - but Beekman, an often gruff, bear-like man, does not convey self importance. or pretense.

Besides more than 25 scholarly texts, Beekman has written two novels - 'Lame Duck' and 'The Killing Jar' - both published by Houghton Mifflin. He collaborated with artist local Barry Moser to produce a book of poetry, published by Pennyroyal Press with illustrations by Moser. Those broadsides, he says "are now worth a fortune," because of the Moser illustrations.

Over the years I have come to know Beekman as a visitor to the bookstore, and he did his best to conceal the range of his erudition. Only when I bought a quantity of books from him did I discover that his passions included natural history with a special interest in bears, literary criticism, religion, modern fiction and poetry, the history and lore of pirates, the literature of the detective novel, and word play.

Interestingly, on a visit not long before he headed off for his year in Florida, Beekman dropped off a questionnaire he had gotten in the mail which sought out his opinions about the increase in immigration to the U.S. The survey tipped its hand when it warned that "rapid influx of immigration has already severely impacted educational facilities, social services, welfare rolls, Social Security and Medicare costs, tax bases, crime rates, property values and job opportunities in many regions of the country."

The questionnaire was headlined: "Immigration Impact Survey, Northampton, Massachusetts area."

"When I first got the mailing," Beekman said: "I thought: Hell,. there must be something wrong with my status, then I said No, No, No."

He concluded that the mailing probably was based on a mailing list from a far-right wing organization, similar to the politically virulent anti-immigrant groups active in Britain, France and Germany.

Hardly guilty of excessive patriotism, Beekman said he found it shocking that such anti-immigrant opinions flourish in this country, which is made up almost entirely on people who came here from elsewhere.

Of the mailing and survey, he said: "It's nasty, it's subversive and really dangerous." He said the average citizen becomes scared, even paranoid, about immigrants as a result of such incendiary mailings, at a time the country, based on fresh census information, is becoming even more a nation of immigrants.

Why he was targeted for such a mailing is a puzzle. "I'm not associated with anything remotely political," says Beekman. "I hate politicians. I think they are the lowest form of life."

John Vincent, a spokesman for the Washington-based Immigration Control group, told downstreet.net that tens of thousands of surveys were sent out to recipients whose names did, indeed, come from mailing lists of various organizations. It is possible that only Beekman, among all Northampton residents, received a survey.

Of course, there is such irony in American Immigration Control Inc. believing that Eric Montague Beekman, native of Amsterdam and U.S. citizen for nearly 40 years, would be fertile ground for stirring up fear of foreigners.

Monty Beekman is much too busy with the far more important task of publishing a massive scholarly work about tropical plants that are useful to man because of their medicinal qualities.