To call Diederik Grit merely a translator would not do justice to the multiple roles he played in cultural mediation: he was a lecturer, a researcher and a translator of literary and technical texts. He focused on was the cultural links between the Dutch-speaking world and Scandinavian languages, particularly Danish.
Grit studied Dutch at the University of Groningen, choosing Danish and Norwegian as minors without much forethought.1 However, that decision was to have important ramifications for his later career, during which he enriched the Dutch literary world with a significant number of Scandinavian works. He translated Thorkild Hansen and Åsne Seierstad, among others. Part of his translation oeuvre was produced in collaboration with Edith Koenders (1962).