Dutch journalist, poet and translator of poetry and drama.
Voeten used the nicknames B. van Beenen, Hans van den Bosch en Leo H. van der Mark. Voeten debuted in 1944 with the illegal poetry bundle “Babylon herhaald” (Babylon repeated) when he had a relationship with Marga Minco. In 1945 he published “Amsterdamsche kwatrijnen”.
He was the successful translator of drama of Shakespeare, Kalidasa, Molière, Shaw, Masefield, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Christopher Fry en Wallace Stevens in the Dutch language. He got the Lucy B. en C.W. van der Hoogt Prize for his biography Doortocht (1946), the Jan Campert Prize of 1951 for “Met het oog op morgen” and the Martinus Nijhoff Prize of 1959 for his translations.
He died 26 December 1992 in Amsterdam.
Relationship with Marga Minco.
In August 1945 Voeten married the Jewish journalist and writer Sara Menco (11 March 1920, Ginneken en Bavel). Menco, better known as Marga Minco, wrote the famous autobiographical roman “Het bittere kruid” (1957, Bitter herbs, Les herbes amères). He met her in the Theatre in 1938 in Breda where she was an aspirant journalist for the Bredasche Courant. He was a journalist for the Dagblad van Noord-Brabant. Minco’s Jewish orthodox parents were opposed to a marriage and sent her mid 1940 to an aunt in Assen. They hoped she would forget her lover Bert Voeten. But early 1944 Voeten met her again when she took shelter for the Germans and got a relationship with her. In December 1944 they got a daughter Bettie at their shelter place in Heemstede. During the war Sara Menco lost both parents, her only brother and sister. In 1956 they got another daughter, the writer Jessica Voeten (Amsterdam, 1956).

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