His Specialty? Making Old New York Talk in Dutch

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By DANNY HAKIM

ALBANY — Henry Hudson bobblehead? Check.

One-legged Peter Stuyvesant statuette? Yes.

A mirror emblazoned with the logo of New Amsterdam beer? Absolutely.

These are office knickknacks that only a true connoisseur of Dutch Americana could love. And there surely is no one who loves Dutch Americana more than Charles T. Gehring.

How else to describe a man who has spent the past 35 years painstakingly translating 17th-century records that provide groundbreaking insight and renewed appreciation for New Netherland, the colony whose embrace of tolerance and passion for commerce sowed the seeds for New York’s ascendance as one of the world’s great cities.

Toiling from a cramped office in the New York State Library here, Mr. Gehring, as much as anyone, has shed light on New York’s long-neglected Dutch roots, which have been celebrated this year, the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the river that bears his name.

Mr. Gehring, by the way, only has about 4,800 pages left of the 12,000 pages of Dutch-era letters, deeds, court rulings, journal entries and other items that have been housed at the State Library for decades. They paint a rich picture of daily life in the colony, which the Dutch surrendered for good in the 1670s.

“Most historians don’t think much of the Dutch; they minimalize the Dutch influence and try to get out of that period as quickly as possible to get into English stuff,” Mr. Gehring said, explaining why he has spent half of his 70 years mining Dutch colonial history. “What you find out is how deeply the Dutch cast roots here and how much of their culture they transmitted to this country.”

Mr. Gehring, whose official title is director of the New Netherland Project, looks as if he has not trimmed his sideburns since he started translating the records in 1974, and he seems like the kind of mirthful man who would make a good Sinterklaas — the Dutch forefather of Santa Claus.

Mr. Gehring’s translations served as raw material for Russell Shorto’s critically acclaimed 2005 book about Manhattan, “The Island at the Center of the World.” The Netherlands of the 17th century, Mr. Shorto said in an interview, was “the melting pot of Europe.”

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“It was a place that people fled to in the great age of religious warfare; it was a refuge,” he added. “At the same time, they were known for free trade; they developed a stock market — and those things, free trade and tolerance, are key ingredients of New York City.” Mr. Gehring’s translation work, Mr. Shorto writes in his book, “changes the picture of American beginnings.”

Mr. Gehring, who was born in Fort Plain, N.Y., about 55 miles northwest of Albany, did his doctoral work in German linguistics at the Indiana University, where he specialized in Netherlandic studies. He came to Albany in the late 1960s to teach German at the State University of New York at Albany, but his real interest was Dutch history.

Mr. Gehring’s work is the most ambitious translation project in nearly two centuries. In 1974, shortly after Nelson A. Rockefeller became vice president and Malcolm Wilson replaced him as governor, a series of phone calls helped make it possible. It started with an idea at the Holland Society, a group dedicated to preserving the history of New York’s Dutch history.

“This guy in the Holland Society knew Rockefeller, and so he called Rockefeller and said, ‘Could you see if Malcolm Wilson could put money in the budget to start the translations up again?’ ” Mr. Gehring recalled.

The governor, he said, “put $20,000 in his discretionary budget — his slush fund that they had — and in the early ’70s that was a decent amount of money.”

And Mr. Gehring found himself uniquely qualified for the State Library job that came open as a result. As he put it, “I was the only one around who could read 17th-century Dutch.”

Although Mr. Gehring is a state employee, the translation project has survived largely on grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and donations. This year, however, the Dutch government decided to invest 200,000 euros — nearly $290,000 at current exchange rates — to help finance the project for the next three years.

The documents have held up through what Mr. Gehring called “a harrowing history,” including a 1911 fire in the State Library that singed many of the pages. The first set, records from 1638 to 1642, was lost completely.

“The translator at that time, Van Laer, has them out on his desk,” Mr. Gehring said, referring to the archivist and librarian A.F. Van Laer. “He’d just finished a new translation, and he’s checking his translation against the original, so his translation burns up and the originals burn up, but we still have an older translation to go by.”

In the mid-1980s, Mr. Gehring was joined in his work by Janny Venema, a Dutch-born translator and writer who, in Mr. Gehring’s estimate, has helped him translate about 7,200 pages. The project has brought to life the characters of New Netherland and its capital, New Amsterdam — which became New York City.

Some of those characters are well known, like Peter Stuyvesant, the domineering director general of New Netherland.

Mr. Gehring’s translation of the journal of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, a barber-surgeon and a likely ancestor of Humphrey Bogart, was turned into the graphic novel “Journey Into Mohawk Country,” by the artist George O’Connor. The journal chronicles van den Bogaert’s journey through the Mohawk Valley to Oneida, a pathbreaking trip in the winter of 1634.

Years later, van den Bogaert was made commander of Fort Orange, site of present-day Albany, but fled back into Indian country after his fellow colonists discovered he was gay. Van den Bogaert was pursued by the Dutch, captured and brought back, but he escaped when a sheet of floating ice damaged the fort. He drowned in the Hudson before he got very far.

These days, Mr. Gehring is translating records from the period of the Flushing Remonstrance, a 1657 document that helped lay the groundwork for religious freedom in America.

This chapter begins when a ship filled with Quakers, headed for Rhode Island, ended up in Manhattan instead.

“They started quaking in the streets,” Mr. Gehring explained. “Stuyvesant had them packed up and sent off right away.”

When Stuyvesant continued the crackdown on the Quakers, 30 people living in what is now Flushing, Queens, wrote a formal letter of objection. The Dutch West India Company, which operated the colony, ordered Stuyvesant to end the persecution.

Some figures in history present particular challenges to a translator, like Johannes Dijckman, a commander at Fort Orange whose scrawled script is difficult to decipher because, well, “he was a drunkard.”

After so many years, Stuyvesant, Dijckman and many other figures have become “not necessarily old friends,” Mr. Gehring said, “but they’re acquaintances,” and he has no plans to say goodbye.

“People keep asking me when I’m going to retire, or they assume I have retired,” he said. “Eventually I’ll fade out like the Cheshire cat, with nothing left but my smile.”

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