from The sea is a scene

by Ursula Andkjær Olsen

(Excerpt from a text that runs like a subtext/subtitle, an undercurrent at the foot of each page in the book, all the way from cover to cover).

What will they do when the branches coalesce in a fog? What will they do when the sea simply splits into droplets. Droplets. Droplets? They probably think they must choose between identity and difference. Between wave and particle between motion and solid form. It is an inconsistency in the skin and the hairs rise up. An inconsistency in the skin and the sea. The sea the sea the sea rises up. The storm is in the news how are they to think? When there’s always a rushing in their ears. Should they just take their sleeping pill now? They could. Their sleeping pill. Now? (...) For creatures with their defective emotions celebration and exorcism are not so dissimilar. Means and ends. And wave and particle. Ends and means turn into each other while they burn their sight at both ends. Their defective senses. At both ends they should take their happy pill now. Their live-and-cry-with-happiness pill their let-me-live-and-love pill. Now. The sooner the better? (...) Their bones will soon have forgotten all about them. They will wash up on the beach white and smooth. Without a single memory. They will wash up from the sea is a scene and they are its tiny tiny watercourses while they surrender their rhythms to the dust. Carrying eternity’s DNA. It dreams in them. Their bones dream in them of jumping out while they become more and more. Hill of the elves. Wormholes. One could call it a deadly kinship with eternity. Big and shiny. Shiny and white. They might as well take their sleeping pill. Now. They cling to more and more eternities. They could take their sleeping pill. They could. Their sleeping pill now. Their sleeping pill. Sleeping pill now. Sleeping pill.

Translated from Danish by David McDuff

More crime

Back again - to find among the mail on my doormat an invitation to yet another Nordic crime novel-related event. This time it's a literary function at the residence of Sweden's UK ambassador, to which members of the translators' association SELTA  are automatically invited as part of their membership. My address on the envelope, after my name, begins with "SELTA", as if SELTA were housed at my home, which it's not - I'm just an ordinary member.

The evening, to be held on March 18, is called "Crimes of the Millennium - Stieg Larsson and the rise of Swedish Mystery Fiction", with Barry Forshaw, Eva Gedin, Lynda La Plante, Mark Lawson (chair) and Håkan Nesser.

Readers who've followed this blog over the past year will know that I'm not a fan of this form of fiction, and believe that the "Nordic Crime Wave" is likely to have negative consequences for the chances of non-mass-market Nordic literature in translation, which is steadily being crowded out of the picture by the serried ranks of detectives. It seems perverse of the Swedish embassy to be hosting this event - in effect, raising the profile of Mystery Fiction (an elevated name for thrillers) still further when really it needs no more raising. Is it churlish of me to react in this way?

Break

Nordic Voices is taking a short break. Posting will resume in a week or so.

A woman in space

by Henrika Ringbom

Why not send a woman into space? Why not send her on a really long space flight? She would be forced to function. She would be forced to function as a functioning member of the crew. She would not be taken along as a guest. Already here on earth woman has shown that there are tasks for which she is better suited than a man. She can go from one home to the next, cut up meat, bread fish, fry fillets and freeze the dainty bits. At the wheel of the car she is best naked! The woman and the corset are a lethal combination! Unmarried mothers have more difficult childbirths. Unmarried and mother are a lethal combination! But the housewife has a dream. Her dream begins with the perfect contraceptive pill. And her dream ends. Her dream ends with the perfect water-jug. Why not send her into space? Why not send her on a really long space flight?

(1962)

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Electric verses

"Christmas 2009 was the time when e-book sales in America began to have financial significance," writes Clare Alexander in the Bookseller, and as someone who has recently begun to use a Kindle, I think I can see why. The convenience of being able to download books, newspapers and magazines instantly, without having to visit a bookstore, is certainly something new, and the lightness, clear display and portability of the device is also a factor that speaks in its favour. To be able to read not simply one book, but three or four simultaneously, without having to prop them up or otherwise support them (large volumes can be hard on the hands and wrists), is to me a definite step forward. Recently, when reading a biography of T.S. Eliot, I wanted to have several other Eliot-related books available, including the poet's own works, and on the Kindle I was able to do this neatly and without effort, switching between automatically bookmarked pages in different volumes. It's also possible to bring up Wikipedia while reading in order to check references. The whole experience is a bit like having a reference library in the palm of one's hand.

When the royalties question is settled and some kind of standardization takes place in the matter of e-book formats, I can see foresee that e-books could even come to replace the paper versions. Whether this development will be truly international or confined to the English-speaking world, it's hard to know at present. Certainly in Scandinavian publishing circles there still seems to be some resistance to the electronic incursion, but this may change as countries like Finland and Estonia, which have always been at the forefront of developments in information technology, begin to respond. It would obviously help if Amazon were to acquire a presence in the Nordic countries, and one wonders if that will happen any time soon.

Inshallah

Donald Boström, author of the Aftonbladet article that alleged IDF organ theft, is currently seeking a Swedish-English translator for his book Inshallah (which contains similar allegations), via his publisher Ordfront.  It's to be hoped that translators  who are approached in this way will register a strong protest with Ordfront about the book and its contents.

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (VIII) - 1

Paternal authority has been distinguished by its absence during this century, something that has made it possible for women to be active in new fields. Paradoxically, however, the world of art is permeated by myths and prejudices, with the result that creative women are still marginalized. Even among the most recent generations, again and again we see women being given a peripheral existence in relation to the ‘real thing’. It is the activities of men that are perceived as respectable and valid, the world of their experience that has priority when receiving an accepted public form, while work by women is viewed by many as uninspiring.

*

The term ‘women’s literature’ has been used partly in order to raise the profile of works that have been ignored, and partly in an attempt to provide women with access to a number of institutions. This was needed, but at the same time the term has become an encumbrance, as it points to a deviation from a norm. The concept is clumsy and discriminating. It makes the books that are written by women into a subsection of literature. One would prefer that those books were treated on their own merits and were read and evaluated according to the same criteria that are applied to literature written by men. One might also dream that this problem may soon be a chapter in the past. So that the readers’ concentration can focus on the thing that matters: the work.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Afraid in Denmark

In the Jerusalem Post, Bloomberg writes about Kurt Westergaard, the Danish graphic artist who for the past four years has faced death threats because of the cartoon of Mohammed he published in 2005. Excerpt:

“The worst thing about being stigmatized is that I can’t do anything about it,” Westergaard says. “The more I speak out, the worse it becomes.”

His defiance has had a price beyond becoming a social pariah. In 2007, he and his wife, Gitte, lived in hiding for eight months as the police investigated two Tunisians and a Dane over allegations of a plot against his life. On January 14, two Chicago men and two Pakistanis were indicted in the United States for planning an attack on Morgenavisen Jyllands, the paper Westergaard works for.

Gitte worked as a substitute teacher at a local kindergarten in February 2008, he says. She was fired because other staff feared that her presence would endanger children. When this emerged in local newspapers the next day, an alderman forced the kindergarten to reinstate her and the mayor invited her for tea at the city hall.

Online auction house Lauritz.com last month refused to sell one of his paintings of fabled characters as part of a national effort to raise money for earthquake victims in Haiti, fearing for its employees, the company said on its Web site.

The time is set

by Susanne Jorn

January

This rotating earth.
This olive tree.
These roads.
Labyrinths
in crunching cold.

February

Growing
lightlonging.

Midnight blue.

March

Torture
somewhere
in screaming black terrordarkness.

Survivallaughter.
Prisonecho.
Buddinglife.

April

To believe in something
trust someone,
is to be one
who loves.

May

Pas de deux.

Cat ballet
in the moonstripe.

June

FLAME-COLOURED
Lifebreath –
SIMPLY

July

Buddhasmile
in cornflower field.

Is everything okay.

August

Longing
The lips

The pomegranates.

September

The uncertainty about
the future’s
mystery.

The certainty of
the sky’s
vitality.

October

War.
No!
Ethnic cleansing.
No!
Suicide bombers.
No!
The Danish flag trampled and burned
No!

Peace.
Yes!
Freedom.
Yes-yes!
Tolerance.
Yes-yes-yes!
Cosmopolitanism.
Yes, please!

November

Fog-blue daylight.
Almost no verdigris towers.

Wintry figures in snail gallop.
They are cycling home.

December

Year
at its zenith.

The lines of life.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Google and the DOJ

The U.S. Justice Department has criticized the Google Book Settlement, saying that the proposals still present copyright and antitrust issues. In particular, it is concerned that the settlement in its current form forces authors

to "opt out" of having their books scanned and digitised, rather than opting in, which is the usual assumption for copyright law.  (Telegraph)

In search of an antihero

In the Guardian British actor Antony Sher, who is currently rehearsing Enemy of the People, writes about his quest to find Henrik Ibsen. Excerpt:

Nearby stood ­another statue of the playwright – a ­giant figure, striding forward with bearded chin held high, heading for the history books. It looked preposterous, particularly as, along with Chekhov, ­Ibsen invented the theatrical antihero.

St Petersburg

by Martin Enckell


in the city of the sphinxes, and the mothers,
in the city where death’s sphinx
rests in double majesty, and where the mothers
bear the bread home, out to the infinities of kneeling concrete,
where the children, the children increasingly often refuse to find their way home,
in this city of the mothers, and the sphinxes,
life writes its shadow script, as in fever,
as if an enormous tubercular angel had lain down to die
over the Neva’s delta, over the mirage of stone and the marsh river’s dark reflections,
over golden pinnacles and cupolas, over feverish gold, over façades doomed to beauty,
over palaces and portals where raw cold mist drifted in, over the trampled jewel
and the suburbs that mock, over the weighed-down marshes, and over weighed-down fates,
dizzying fates, and harrowed, that were scattered,
and are still scattered, into nothingness – in the city of the sphinxes, and the mothers.

***

she is old and bent, she begs, begs her way in
behind your eyes, by one of the passages down to the underworld,
and you implore her, implore her not to look like your mother,

night after night her youth rolls in over you,
night after night you approach requiems she will never write,
night after night she freezes into pictures you have no access to

***

in a white dress, by the window, in that light cool room,
she stands listening to the lingering echo
from a gate that has slammed shut, watching as through veils
the retinue of phantoms from the Marinsky, sylphides and future doomed
who silently stride across the Neva’s frail dark ice

***

dawn after dawn death stands
and polishes, caresses, caresses her doorknob,
dusk after dusk she locks you
in her gaze, a gaze that has swept over a whole century

***

and in a black low-cut dress, in the icy palace,
she dances then, all night long, her bridal waltz
with ghost after ghost, until she dances with the dawn
in whose eyes red spiders gleam, and she hears the iron gates
slam shut about the rooms, the rooms where the taiga and the tundra begin

***

night after night she freezes into the memories where death constantly divides,
night after night she approaches those she loved, over the Styx,
night after night she rolls a waxworks of torments over you,

she is one of the many, one of the dumb, she is all and each,
who stood and waited, for months and years, who stood and queued
and waited, outside Kresty, the martyrdom, the prison that sanctified the word.

***

life writes its corrosive shadow script over the most beautiful of cities,
as though an angel, an enormous tubercular angel, were trying to bless all that is doomed,
by letting itself be blessed down in the slowly sinking foundations of beauty,
while death, indifferent, apparently indifferent, watches death, in double majesty,
out of frozen stone, above the river, above the Styx – in the city of the mothers, in Saint Petersburg.


(Ny Tid / Kontur 4/98)

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Sampling the system

It's sometimes a good idea for a translator to approach an English-language publisher with short samples of a foreign poet's work, particularly as in the case of Nordic literature such projects can often be subsidised by  govenrnment arts agencies. Sometimes the procedures for filing the applications is a little vague, though. In one recent case I found that having permission from the poet concerned was not enough - it seemed that the Nordic publisher also needed to agree to the sample translations being made, even though there was no question at this stage of the translations being published anywhere. This seems an odd system, and one wonders whether the agency concerned has understood the situation with regard to copyright correctly.  According to one agency official, the publisher's agreement is required "in order to exclude support for projects where rights holders are not interested in taking part in them." Yet if the "rights holder" is the poet or author who has granted permission and actively wants the translations to be made, one wonders where the problem is.

Tobias anteckningar

Tobias Ljungvall's interesting and well-researched Swedish-language blog on global current affairs, with a special emphasis on Russia and North-Eastern Europe, has a new Web address:

http://anteckningar.fragebyran.se/

Subjects of recent posts include the politics of Swedish snuff, conspiracy theory and the Haiti earthquake, and Russia's recent ratification of an international agreement aimed at speeding up the work of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (VII) - 5

It could be said that the Psalms of David, written about 3,000 years ago, refute my point of view. If God is the highest authority, God will not only see the poem as it is, but will also know it before it is written. In Psalms 139, 4-5 we read: ‘For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.’

The first part of the quotation reveals an idea about fate and providence, while the second part expresses a present action. There is a big difference between God already knowing everything, and God being simultaneous with events. If God knows the poem before I have formulated it, then God must know ‘all things’ ending’. It is not necessarily true that God knows ‘the end’. That is no precondition of His almighty power. If God created Adam in his likeness, it must be supposed that God’s likeness is in Adam. I am incapable of saying anything that would surprise God, because I can never come before God, but God apparently resigns Himself in listening and being at the same time.

Since I myself do not know the poem until I have written it, or perhaps just because of that, it is possible to insert God as an authority who in the last analysis is spoken to, and not as the one who knows the poem in advance.

*

Every significant work is itself, but that does not prevent it from wanting a dialogue. On the contrary. Doesn’t art become art only when it is perceived? When the poem acquires its reader? In spite of the fact that some parts of it will remain foreign to the reader, the poem’s will is to reach the unknown mind.

Although I have my centre, there are none the less collective patterns that become valid beyond the subjective, but if today one constantly has a sense of living apart from other people, it is because it has become so difficult to see the structures that are shared. Perhaps in some invisible place we are more alike than apart? At least it must be said that we have fantasies and longings in common. And perhaps at certain happy moments there is a bridge of seconds, where not only can one individual’s aloneness communicate itself to another, but where also a process takes place.

On rare but definite occasions the unknown reader identifies himself with the poems in a surprising way. A reader once told me: ‘If I could write poems, I would like to have written yours’. Some of it was already there in the reader, but had not been put into words before.

I am incapable of knowing what a poem means to the person who reads it, but if a poem can have an effect on another person like the effect it had on me when I wrote it, can one ask for anything more?

A poem cannot find a response if the readers or listeners are not in the mood, prepared to be in the poem and at the same time allow it to be in them. When a picture is looked at, it is best seen from a given location, and in the performance of music there must be a balance between closeness and distance, but the poem also demands that its audience should take a position with regard to it. That it should take its bearings from it in a spiritual sense, whether it is read or heard.

 
translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk (VII)- 1
Over the Water I Walk (VII)- 2
Over the Water I Walk (VII)- 3
Over the Water I Walk (VII) - 4

SELTA, etc.

Well, I've sent off my annual SELTA subscription renewal - by my calculations it's now 29 years since I first joined the society, and I guess it hasn't really changed much in all that time, in spite of some members' aspirations to give it a wider focus. This time last year members were arguing the pros and cons of a broader coverage of Nordic literature in general, then this blog was formed, then it broke up and became a one-man effort - and SELTA stayed the same.

My situation is still that, like other members, although I've done a fair amount of literary translation from Swedish, it's not my only field of activity - my most recent publication is a book of poetry translations from Danish, and I'm currently planning another one. But SELTA still fulfils an important function in keeping the U.K.'s various Nordic translators in contact with one another. Even if the pan-Nordic element is underplayed to the advantage of a Swedish emphasis, and many of the associate members have published little by way of literary translations, this continues to be a unique professional body - for translation is after all a profession, rather than an academic subject or a stop-gap, subsidiary activity, as this intelligent post by B.J. Epstein points out.

A valley in the violence

In Hbl Philip Teir interviews Finnish-Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen, whose work is being published in Sweden and who is tipped to win this year's Nordic Council Literature Prize. Excerpt:

After Sofi Oksanen appeared on a Danish TV culture show and depicted the Finnish people as depressive and uncommunicative she heard criticism from many quarters. The fact that Finland has two brutal school shootings behind it and a bleak set of statistics relating to violence was no excuse. This is stuff one shouldn't talk about to foreign journalists... "It isn't sanitary," was the view of Finland's Professor Laura Kolbe.

"I've learned that while many people don't mind as long as you stick to writing books and winning prizes ... as soon as you say something like this, the reaction is "Get back to Russia, you Estonian whore," says Oksanen, who grew up in Jyväskylä with a father who is Finnish and a mother who is Estonian.

See also: Knocking Finland

Integration Poem. February 2006

by Susanne Jorn

I

They shout
“Death to Denmark”
and mean me too.

They burn Danish embassies
and burn me too.

They trample on the Danish flag,
and trample on my damned Danishness.

II

At Easter 2000 I stood
in Kastrup Airport
with the papers for my existence
in my hand baggage.

Stood for a long, long time
on the runway,
but knew that the first step
into my fatherland
was in the right direction.

First came foothold.
Then roothold.

III

The first time
they called me an immigrant
I was proud as a peacock.

The second time
deeply hurt –

The third time,
incandescent with rage.

IV

When Danes trample
on my expatriate Danishness,
they trample on my heart.

They can’t see it.
They don’t want to see it.


(from Med et halvt øje  [With Half An Eye], Forlaget Sohn, 2006)
translated from Danish by David McDuff

See also: Two Poems
Susanne Jorn: Two Poems
A Speech

A Speech

In 2008 Susanne Jorn gave the following speech in English at the Tokyo Poetry Festival:

IF I WERE TO MAKE STATUS of the poets in the world, I believe that all poets one way or another write poems to live and to survive.

IF I WERE TO MAKE STATUS of World Poetry, I must say that it will always survive, no matter what happens in the world. A few years ago I went to Istanbul and saw a tiny clay table from Sumerian times behind glass at a museum. It had cuneiform characters on it, that I did not understand. On a little sign it said that this was the world’s oldest love poem. As no translation was attached, it was then up to the spectators to guess what the love poem was about. I take it that since love between people is eternal, a love poem way back then and today would have the same essence of human daily life.

I also believe that World Poetry has the power to make people survive. One example of this is the famous story of a Chilean woman who survived the most painful moments of torture in a basement during the Pinochet regime by reciting love poems by Pablo Neruda.

Last year I participated in the 46th Sarajevo Poetry Days and met Goran Simic. Following Sarajevo Poetry Days, I wrote Goran Simic and asked him how Sarajevo Poetry Days happened during the civil war in the 90’s, he answered ... ”I was the main organizer of Sarajevo Poetry Days in 1992 and also in 1993, when we actually read poems in a basment. For each other mostly, because there had been severe bombings all day long. It was a protest, but essential to keep poetry alive”

IF I WERE TO MAKE STATUS of the World Poetry scene in Denmark today, less Danish poetry collections get published every year, compared to the 90’s. This is the case of foreign poetry collections as well. The problem in Denmark is that there is not enough focus on World Poetry translated from non-Western languages.

However not so long ago there was a World Poetry Series which included poetry collections from the 20th century. The series started in 1999 and of the twelve poetry collections that did get published, in fact Shuntaro Tanikawa was the only non-Western poet included. When the series stopped in 2004, an unusual selection of 10 New Chinese Poets came out, including both Chinese poets living in China and Chinese poets in exile.

Nonetheless I have translated poems from Chinese and Japanese for decades and the economy of words in my poems in fact stem from the influence of Chinese and Japanese poetry.

IF I WERE TO MAKE STATUS of my own poetry, all my poems have epigrammatic qualities. I boil the Danish language down to short poems, consisting of a few words. This minimalist approach allows me a space to express myself. At the same time, it opens up for a spontaneous, abstract visuality.

My poems start with one picture followed by another picture in succession like in a film. This flow is dominated by painterly qualities like colors, lines and figures. Every single poem of mine is luminescent.

The visual element is intrinsic to my poetry and most of my poetry collections are illustrated by visual artist as well. Yasse Tabuchi and Pierre Alechinsky are some of them. There was also a time in my life, when I wrote poems to visual art. In Tracks in Sand, I was asked to write poems for the Icelandic artist Sigurjón Ólafsson’s sculptures. These sculpture poems were written in English and translated by Kazuko Shiraishi into Japanese.

For me all poetry is music one way or another. Therefore I naturally focus on sound in my poems. Every single one of my poems has its own melody then. A song for to live - and to survive.

Susanne Jorn

Susanne Jorn: Two Poems

Summer Song

It was in the light of the year's longest day,
that people gathered for better or worse.
They sat silent in the shade of beech trees.

Life is colourful.
Lovely, lovely.

It was in the darkness of the year's shortest night.
people said to one another,
tomorrow things will go the wrong way,
tomorrow winter will come.


Winter Song

It was in the darkness of the year's longest night
that people gathered for better or worse.
They sat silent in the light from their lamps.

Life is colourful.
Lovely, lovely.

It was in the light of the year's shortest day
people said to one another,
tomorrow things will go the right way,
tomorrow summer will come.

(from Med et halvt øje  [With Half An Eye], Forlaget Sohn, 2006)
translated from Danish by David McDuff

See also: Two Poems

The irresistible call of Scandiwegian crime

London's Mayor Boris Johnson explains in his Telegraph column why the British are so fond of Nordic crime novels:

It's like our joy in the Iris Robinson story. We wouldn't be so thrilled to discover her in bed with a 19 year-old if she hadn't spent all those years ranting drearily on about family values. Nordic crime writers profit from the fact that the blood is all the more vivid on the snow, the corpse more horrifying on the swish hygienic IKEA furniture. Scandinavia is still a mental landscape where crime is shocking, and that is a great compliment to Scandinavia.

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (VII) - 4

I always hope that a poem’s intentions will be perceived by the reader. Perhaps just because reading seems to be such a problematic activity, I aim for a reader who does not intervene with the noise and disturbance of his subjectivity, but is able to see the text as it is, namely God. God is the person who sees the poem as I would like it to be perceived.

*

The reader nearly always wants to see the poet’s blood, but my poetry is not the witness of a quivering heart. That does not mean I am a non-person – I simply want to be allowed to be the person behind the poem.

The poem can never escape the fact that it is written by a human being, a subject with senses, but the question is whether the poem’s witness should be a text or a human experience... Poems must at least contain elements of life, individual basic components that function as reliable poles in the midst of the torrent of words that comes out. A shy nightingale singing through a summer night could be a verifiable springboard for thoughts about the universe. As long as there is this gleam of reality, the poem can allow itself almost anything at all.

My poems qualify themselves by being my truth, i.e. they are not necessarily a truth for someone else, but many readers expect to be able to use poems as examples drawn from life in their own attempts to find the words for their experience.

*

The poem excludes no one, it is open to anyone who wants to enter it. In one sense all poetry is written to a ‘you’. In love our yearning moves towards someone who loves us for all that we are. In poetry towards someone who understands all that we want.

Many of my poems speak directly to a ‘you’. One of them contains these rather banal lines:

reality is here
just not you

These lines may have been written with a definite person in mind. Because the other person – in this case the one who is loved – is not present, reality appears extremely unreal. The very distance from the loved person is a restriction that cannot be overcome. Only as the Other can the beloved be loved, but this ‘you’ also points back at the writing subject: reality is there, but the ‘I’ is not present in it, or unable to share in it. Or the person who is reading the poem is addressed directly. At last the ‘I’ appeals to the invisible authority, God. Thus, the lines may mean: The person who is loved is missed. I myself am not really present. The reader is involved. And fourthly: God is not here.


translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk (VII)- 1
Over the Water I Walk (VII)- 2
Over the Water I Walk (VII)- 3

Edith Södergran: a biographical profile - 12

(continued)

Raivola was to remain, then, the place from which Edith Södergran looked at the rest of the world. Raivola was the garden land' in which she wrote and suffered and meditated She was regarded as a curiosity by the other inhabitants of the place. Residents have told of how she would sometimes be seen standing alone in the courtyard of the dacha, staring up at the sky to observe cloud formations. Sometimes the inquisitive­ness of the neighbours turned to pure spite. In December 1919 Edith Södergran's favourite cat Totti, which meant as much to her as a child, was shot by the Russian neighbours mentioned earlier. An attack of Spanish influenza in early 1920 left her weak and exhausted. All this time the civil war was raging. Food was scarce, and Raivola seemed more cut off than ever from the rest of the world. Desperately anxious to work, to be of some use, Edith Södergran conceived the idea of preparing a volume of German translations of Finland Swedish poetry. Unfortunately the arrangement with the publisher fell through, and the project came to nothing.

She did receive some visitors from the outside world during the last years of her life. Elmer Diktonius, a literary lion of the Helsinki avant-garde, came to Raivola and saw to it that she was able to write articles for Ultra, a literary journal of the new wave. But as a rule she was alone with her mother. More and more her thoughts began to centre on the person of Christ.

Steiner and Nietzsche were forgotten. She read the New Testament. In 1921 the Kronstadt revolt erupted, and again the Södergrans could hear the shooting and see the flashes of gunfire in the night sky. The end came in 1923. Edith Södergran died while Hagar Olsson was on holiday in the south of France, where she received the sad news.

This was contained in a letter from Edith's mother, and a part of it read as follows:

Do not think that Edith nurtured any bitterness towards Hagar because Hagar was not with her before her departure; she understood that Hagar was not travelling alone and perhaps had to comply with the wishes of her travelling companion Certainly she yearned to see Hagar and on her last day she said `I wish Hagar and Diktonius were here.' And she was full of gratitude for all the proof of friendship she had received she said the day before her departure: `We have had so much help and friendship that I should write a book of gratitude, if only I could manage it.' And she often, often remembered all that Hagar and Diktonius had done for her.

The last poem Edith Södergran wrote contains these lines, which were engraved on her tombstone, now situated in the Leningrad District of the Russian Federation, at Raivola-Roshchino:

See, here is eternity's shore, here the stream murmurs by,
and death plays in the bushes his same monotonous melody.

Her destiny was to grow as one with her destiny-from her limited personal fate she aspired towards the condition of pure fate. Misunderstood in her lifetime - Gunnar Ekelöf described her as "a Persian princess in Lapland" - she became after her death one of the most widely appreciated poets of Scandinavia. Today her poetry is read and written about in all the Scandinavian countries, and her reputation there is comparable to that of Emily Brontë or Emily Dickinson in English-speaking countries, or to that of Anna Akhmatova in Russia. She has little in common with these poets. Her poetry, though imagistic in expression, is primarily a poetry of ideas. As such, it may remain alien to the majority of English-speaking readers.

DAVID McDUFF


Biographical profile - 1
Biographical profile - 2
Biographical profile - 3
Biographical profile - 4
Biographical profile - 5
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Edith Södergran: a biographical profile - 11

(continued)

In The Shadow of the Future there is a sense of giving-up, the struggle for material existence is abandoned and the poet's soul is freed The victory is not achieved at once. Often there are seemingly overwhelming doubts to be overcome. The soul often seems unreal:

I do not believe in seeming and soul, the game of games is so foreign to me. (`Materialism')

Physical suffering intensifies her sensation of her own body's grossness and helplessness. Yet even this grossness and animal­ity becomes transformed into a redeeming force, the power of Eros:

My body is a mystery.
So long as this fragile thing lives you shall feel its might. I will save the world.
Therefore Eros' blood hurries to my lips, and Eros' gold into my tired locks.

('Instinct')

Throughout the poems there is a sense that at last her body is exhausted, that in some sense her `I' is free of her physical self. Now that `I' is at one with cosmic forces and dimensions, the human body, which has been the means towards this liberation, can fall back into passivity. Life is no longer "my" life, but the life of nature, of God. The transition to this standpoint must have been intensely painful for her, as she loved the perceptions of her senses and enjoyed in every way her presence on theearth. But as her illness progressed, she must have become aware that this indirect experience of nature was not for her. As her body grew weaker she began to experience herself for moments as a part of nature. Naturally her thoughts began to turn towards death:

Truth, truth, do you lie in mortuaries among worms and dust? Truth, do you dwell there where is everything I hate?
(`Hamlet')

She senses that she will not physically survive the onslaught of the forces which have been at war within her:

My crown is too heavy for my strength. Look, I can lift it up with ease,
but my remains will fall apart.
My remains, my remains, you are wonderfully bound together. My remains, I believe you are beginning to long for a coffin. Now it is not the electric hour,
my remains, you do not belong to me.

(`Four Little Poems', II)

In the end, her body must count for nothing, her soul for everything:

But a little worm saw in a dark dream
that the moon's sickle cut his being into two parts: the one was nothing,
the other was all things and God Himself.

("There is no one who has time")

The story of Edith Södergran's involvement with Rudolf Steiner need not concern us in detail. It is enough to say that she was very well aware of the shortcomings of his philosophy, inherent no less in his personality than in his books. But he did bring her a measure of peace in the last, lonely years of her life, and there can be no doubt that he was a catalyst, the `dagger in the breast' that made the writing of The Shadow of the Future possible. There can also be little doubt that if ill-health had not intervened, Edith Södergran would have certainly travelled to Switzerland in order to become a pupil of Steiner. She announced this several times in her correspondence with Hagar Olsson. Such a discipleship would have been perfectly in accord with Edith Södergran's dreams of establishing a new world order of saints and mystics, poets and artists. Hagar Olsson did in fact visit Steiner, partly out of a personal interest and partly also to satisfy her friend's craving for at least some second-hand knowledge of her idol.


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(to be continued)

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (VII) - 3

Reading is about taking an attitude that is attentively listening, asking, interpreting and remembering, about being able to go in and out of the poem in an attempt to find models in the inner relations between the signs and to construct a meaningful whole, but the process is far from merely intellectual, it also contains receptive and sensitive levels. Reading is a constant balance between objectivity and empathy, an attempt to understand what is purely factually there, and how one perceives it oneself. The degree to which one becomes visible in the poem or aware of oneself was once revealed to me in a dream:

in my dream
books were shiny mirrors
each single page
every word a mirror for the one who read
in any book at all
the reader saw only himself
living

In the poem ‘The Dream about the Reader’ from my collection White Fever, the writer is present in more than one sense, but at the same time the reader becomes aware of his own being there, conscious of his presence, which is something different from merely seeing oneself confirmed.

Sometimes the reader does not see what the poem wants, but uses a strategy that is wrong in principle and sees only himself or his own purpose. Such a reading can only lead to him staring himself blind in the mirror.

*

After it has been published, a poem no longer belongs to me. Once I have given it away, I must be prepared for widely differing approaches to it. And there are as many versions of the poem as there are readers. Sometimes readers have presented me with aspects of my poems which I have not been aware of, but which I have taken account of because I found them convincing. In a sense they were already there without my having seen them. Feedback of that kind is rare, but I see it as an essential part of the process that poems I thought I knew inside out because I produced them can still surprise me. It is only when they have lain unread for a long spell, or when I have read them aloud several times, that I take possession of them, I will always be the person who inhabits the background of any of my poems, I am its “crown witness”, as Per Hojholt once put it, but it can never be my task to analyse the poem or interpret it.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk (VII) - 1
Over the Water I Walk (VII) - 2

War and Peace

Veteran Labour politician and ex-Cod Warrior Roy Hattersley reflects in the Times on the bloody minded Icelanders:

Reykjavik’s innumerable newspapers denounced me as the oppressor of small nations. If any of them still remember me, they will still not believe that I feel ( perhaps perverse) admiration for their concentrated bloody-mindedness. There are Viking tombstones in the Great Wall of China. Reasonable men would not have sailed open boats to the other side of the world.

Edith Södergran: a biographical profile - 10

(continued)

Between August and November 1919 Edith Södergran wrote no letters to Hagar Olsson. The reasons for the silence are unknown, but it seems likely that during this time Edith Södergran experienced some kind of inner crisis, similar in intensity to the one she had experienced in the sanatorium at Nummela. The result of this new crisis was to be the collection of poems entitled Framtidens Skugga [The Shadow of the Future, 1920]. The last letter Edith Södergran wrote to her `sister' before the silence reveals some of the elements of this crisis:

... Have all the time felt within me such an infernal electricity that it was almost too much to bear. As if I had lain in the arms of Eros himself the whole time. I feel like the most blessed creature of all that has arisen from the depths of existence. More than ever before it is now necessary to catch the mood Have written poems, but this is not yet a period of inspiration What I need is for someone to plunge a dagger into my breast. And there is no one I respect who can receive my suffering. Wound me, Hagar! If I could create now, everything I have written hitherto would be rubbish. This alone would be me... ... Near Christmas I shall publish a book called Mysteries of the Flesh... Schildt wí11 gape, along with the rest of public opinion. It is Eros conducting worship in his own Temple. It is the same Eros who is the `Wille zur Macht'...

The `Mysteries of the Flesh' were the poems that later became known as The Shadow of the Future. The original title is more apt, and tells us more about the experiences that went into the poems. Until now, Edith Södergran's world outlook had been conditioned to a large extent by her extensive reading of Nietzsche. She had tried to persuade herself that she did not believe in God, that she was a materialist and anti­mystic. She saw her dreams vitalised in the image of the superman. During 1919, however, she had received visits from a retired schoolteacher, a certain Dagmar von Schanz, who lived near Raivola. Although Edith Södergran had no personal liking for this woman, it was through her that she became acquainted with the works of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner.* Steiner's nature mysticism seemed to her to form a direct link with that of Goethe. It also appeared to stand in resolute contradiction to the philosophy of Nietzsche. A severe conflict between the Nietzschean standpoint on the one hand and the Goethean-Steinerian on the other began to develop in the poet's psyche. It soon acquired the dimensions of a desperate struggle between apparently irreconcilable elements of her personality. With Nietzsche was associated the great accumulation of sensual and sexual energy that lay dammed up within her, denied release except through the medium of poetry. This is the `Eros' of which she writes in her poems and letters. Steiner, and to a lesser extent Goethe, reflected her experience of childhood and nature, and ultim­ately of Christ and God. The poems of The Shadow of the Future show the conflict at its most acute, generating new forms of experience which carry Edith Södergran out of herself and into a transcendental mode of being.

The sense of intolerable restraint, of accumulated energy crying to be let loose, and threatening the human person, is the force that drives these poems:

In order not to die I have to be the will to power.
In order to avoid the atoms' struggle in their break-up. I am a chemical mass...

(`Materialism')

There is an impression of enormous size, of enlarged dimensions:

Eros does not see men's petty squabbles, he sees with his burning gaze
how suns and moons complete their orbits.

(`Eros is Creating the World Anew')

I lift up the riches of the earth on my shoulders. (`The Net')
In the light of blue heaven must the coffin stand blessed The coffin stands in eternity's room.

(`Resurrection Mystery')

Through my lips streams the heat of a god, all my atoms are separate and on fire...

(`Ecstasy')

This experience of immensity could be terrifying:

It is dangerous to desire when one is the powerful one, therefore my desires stand still. (`Ecstasy')

Such statements inevitably brought accusations of megalo­mania and even of madness from readers who thought that Edith Södergran was talking about her own personal import­ance and power. They overlooked a poem like `Premonition', for example, where it is clearly stated: `I am only one among others and others are stronger than I'.

The experience of increased size has nothing to do with any sense of personal grandeur, but is rather the result of an emotional charge, an electricity which filled her at this time of crisis, rendering her normal perceptions invalid. There is even a possibility that some of the poems may have been written under the influence of a pain-relieving drug, although this has not been proven At any rate, the experience was a hallucinatory one, though it was felt as intensely real, and was a way through to an ecstatic vision of the kind described by Jakob Böhme or Teresa de Avila. Certain late poems of Gunnar Ekelöf - in part­icular, those of Partitur (1969) - bear a striking resemblance to the poems of The Shadow of the Future. It is significant that these, too, were written during a painful terminal illness.


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(to be continued)

Two poems

by Susanne Jorn

Peace

The snow falls
softly, softly tonight.

I stand in the middle of
Kongens Nytorv
in Copenhagen.

Sparkling snowflakes,
twinkling snowflakes:

Snow me into my stars.


*

- - -

Worry is blackest
Sorrow, whitest.

Happiness is purple.
Unhappiness, grey.

Hope is primordial yellow.
Revenge, blood-red.

Non-violence is turquoise.
Violence, pale orange.

Lies are green.
Truth, violet.

Prose is pink.
Poetry, blue.

Death is colourless –
Life, a many-coloured painting.

(from Med et halvt øje  [With Half An Eye], Forlaget Sohn, 2006)
translated from Danish by David McDuff
NB read Lev Hrytsyuk's Ukrainian translation of the second poem here.

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (VII) - 2

The Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva said: “All the lessons that we derive from art, we ourselves put into it.” She gives the following example, based on The Sorrows of Young Werther: “One person reads Werther and shoots himself, while another reads Werther and, because Werther shoots himself, decides to go on living. The first reader behaves like Werther, the second like Goethe. Is this a lesson in self-destruction? Or in self-defence? Both. At that particular time in his life, Goethe needed to shoot Werther – the suicidal demon of Goethe’s generation needed to be incarnated precisely through his hand…

“Is Goethe to blame for the deaths that were one result of the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther? He said he was not guilty: “In his profound and splendid old age, he replied: No. Otherwise we could not dare to say even a word, for who can calculate the effect of a given word?”

Marina Tsvetayeva frees Goethe from blame, and so would I, but the example makes one reflect, as do the consequences that can arise when as a poet one does not distinguish between one’s life and one’s work.

In several places in his poetry Michael Strunge wrote about his yearning to burn into the darkness:

I could become a shooting star
and fall to rest,
fall to the ground on some planet or other

and for one disastrous moment got poems, dreams and reality all mixed up. A terrible thought, which I can’t help thinking as I read those lines.

*

The poem is at once sealed and decipherable. That is why reading is infinitely different from a conversation that is carried on between two people, where it is possible to break off, correct, expand or change the subject. Reading contains both cognitive and emotional components. Nothing can be understood unless one puts oneself on the line. It is not just a matter of getting something out that can be “used”, and even less so where poems are concerned. Beyond the cognitive aspects there is a demand that one be involved in an aesthetic sense, that one be able to listen to the emerging parameter a voice is, perceive the many intentions that take place on several levels at the same time in a poem.

*

Reading is usually an inward phenomenon, a graceful and entirely private activity that different people engage in very differently. In his short story ‘The Book’, Martin A. Hansen depicts – very movingly – how the boy Mattis makes his first encounter with world history an example of the fact that reading is an immensely individual process, one that is intoxicating and impassioned: “Mattis did not read like most people, reading was like a fever in him, his gaze moved over the lines like wooden clogs on the slippery ice, but the letters became tiny, living creatures that scurried into his brain and scribbled and scrabbled there so that the blood moved thumping through him. And if the contents were as intense and gripping as this book’s, the characters and events seemed to rise out of his own inner being, as though he were creating it all himself.”

The dynamics of the story are striking. A whole new world opens up to the boy. Later, when he lies exhausted in bed, we read: “Cold shivers ran through him. It’s fever, he thought to himself, I’m falling ill. Maybe I’ll die. But how I have read!’

There is a big difference between the identification patterns that are present in the case of texts that contain a gallery of characters, and what happens in poems, where other laws hold sway. The basis of poetry is not the same. One can orient oneself in the poem’s time, its landscape, and space, and above all listen to the voice that is speaking.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk (VII) - 1

Skating on thick ice

Tour skating in Finland!

(via Soila Lehtonen, who is out there somewhere)

Guest posts and others

As some readers will be aware, last September this blog passed from being a group endeavour to the status of a one-man blog. There were several reasons for this, I guess, though foremost among them was the issue of the Aftonbladet "IDF organ theft" article and the Swedish government's depressing reaction to it (look it up in the search box). The reaction of some of the blog's readers, as evidenced by their comments, was also a sticking point, as well as the inevitable slanging match that ensued over issues of "freedom of speech".

However, now that a new year is upon us, I'm hoping that it may be possible to restore the blog to the kind of Nordic literature forum it was in its earlier days. Nordic-related translations, book reviews, and articles on literary and other topics are welcome, and can be sent to the email address that figures in my Blogger profile.

Danish cartoon axe attack

In a second New Year terror-related incident in a Nordic country, the 74-year-old graphic artist Kurt Westergaard, who authored one of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons in 2005, was attacked in his home on Friday night by a Somali intruder armed with an axe and a knife, but managed to take refuge in a secure room and activate an alarm which summoned police, the AP reports.  According to the BBC, the attacker was shot and wounded by police. 

Links to Danish press sources:

Politiken

Jyllands-Posten

Ekstra Bladet

Berlingske Tidende

Gates of Vienna has posted translated excerpts from Danish press reports.

See also: Espoo mall shootings

Happy New Year

A Happy New Year to readers of this blog!

Espoo mall shootings

Aamulehti has some background on the gunman who carried out the shootings at the shopping mall in Espoo, Finland, today:

The suspect, Ibrahim Shkupolli (born 1966) is a Kosovo Albanian who according to Aamulehti's information came to Finland via Norway in 1990. He was placed in the reception center at Mikkeli [Eastern Finland], which he later left to live in Espoo, Finland.

In the early 1990s he already had a Finnish girlfriend who is one of the victims of the Sello tragedy. Aamulehti understands that Shkupolli later separated from this girlfriend and married an Albanian woman. He also had children in common with her. The whole family lives in Finland.

The suspect's wife and child as well as his parents and brother live in Finland.

So far, unconfirmed reports suggest a triangle as the background to the shootings. Shkupolli may have been driven by jealousy of his former, Finnish girlfriend's new life.

Edith Södergran: a biographical profile - 9

(continued)

The visit lasted only a few days. Hagar Olsson has left a slightly vague account of it in her edition of Edith Södergran's letters to her. One has the sense that the meeting was an uneasy one, and that the temperamental differences between the two women were too great for there to be much real chance of any fruitful development of the relationship. Edith Södergran saw her `sister' mainly as a vital link with the outside world, someone who was connected with the actualities of literature and politics and who could help further the 'cause'­the spiritual, moral and intellectual revolution of her dreams. But Hagar Olsson's preoccupation were more worldly, it seems, and in spite of her great admiration for Edith Södergran, her efforts to comply with the poet's wishes seem to have been largely in vain Nevertheless, the two women continued to correspond, though it must again be stressed that the letters came mainly from Edith Södergran. Isolated in Raivola, stricken with an illness which she hated and saw as a deadly sin, a vice which had to be overcome, she had more than enough time in which to weave imaginary fantasies around her `sister'.

That the friendship between the two was an unequal one can be seen from the many letters from Edith Södergran which begin skriv (write), berätta (tell), titta (look), and with ever-­increasing frequency - kom (come). Hagar Olsson was engaged in journalistic work in Helsinki, and frequently travelled abroad as part of her activity-to Stockholm, for example, where she interviewed Ellen Key. Edith Södergran lived these travels vicariously and often made urgent requests for books­Nietzsche, for example, was unobtainable in Finland, but available in Sweden. Hagar Olsson tried to fulfil these requests as best she could, and tried to keep Edith Södergran informed of her activities. On one occasion she even went to visit Selma Lagerlöf, not so much out of personal inclination as because her friend wanted to know what the great novelist was like. But long spells would elapse between Hagar Olsson's letters, and throughout the correspondence Edith Södergran's complaints about this grow more and more frequent. In the meantime Raivola was declared a restricted area by the Finnish military authorities, which meant that travel to and from it became extremely difficult. Nonetheless, Hagar Olsson did manage to make a second brief visit there in the summer of 1919, not without some early misgivings.

But how happy I was when I actually got out onto the country road, it was exactly as sun-warmed and happy and full of smiling 'delight as I remember all my summer roads to have been in Karelia. How well my soul felt in this nature, among these old Russian dachas, so inviting to the birds with their ornamentation and curlicues, which lay embedded in the luxuriant verdure and seemed to be mysteriously lost in their blossoming dilapidation. This was Edith's country, it should be seen in summer. She herself stood waiting outside her house, and I had the feeling that everything here was standing, waiting for something-the wonderful tall trees, the half overgrown garden where a few yellow raspberries and bright red clusters of currants gleamed among the weeds, the warm den of the suntrap between the bushes of the courtyard, and the great abandoned dacha, the ghostly castle where no one could live any more and which was guaıded by the enormous larch tree.* What was the old place waiting for, what was it dreaming about? It was so imbued with Edith's poetry that one involuntarily listened to its echoes when one walked in the garden under the catkins of the birch trees, and her own dreams about the future and the feast of two kindıcd souls seemed to wander around behind the locked doors of the eınpty, decaying house.

I stayed a little longer this time, and this was perhaps why I now had such a depressing insight into the truly Indian famine that reigned in the Södergran household. The situation had grown even worse. Even when she was able to procure a little flour, goixl Mrs Södergran was better versed in world literature than she was in the art of baking bread, baked, what is more, in an awkward old oven fired with home-gathered sticks and twigs, often green. It was dreadful to sit down at table. The food was such that it was hard to keep one's tears back when one thought that this was what a sick and utterly enfeebled human being had to live on. But at the same time a sense of tact forbade one to say anything that could have given offence or been badly received. The best thing that was obtainable was the milk, which they got on credit from the nearest neighbours, the Galkíns, but on no account would Edith drink this. These neighbours had an evil eye trained on her dear child, the beloved cat Totti or Råttikus, and one can understand therefore why the milk that came from them was `evil' to her. Edith's mother appealed to me, and I did try to talk Edith round, but this was almost as heartrending as to see her leave her milk untouched, so real and deeply rooted in her emotions was her aversion to the Galkins' milk. For the first time I saw how completely it depends on psychological factors whether our food can nourish us or not.

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(to be continued)

The fire

by Gösta Ågren

The fire was a story never
told. Pulsating
figures, motionless adventures
were glimpsed before they fell
apart, and the farm grew dark
and the wind called
from the future.

But the future is a place
from which the only road
that leads away is the one that leads
home. Now that everything is
told, I sit again
by the burning
story.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Edith Södergran: a biographical profile - 8

(continued)

The fear of betrayal was insistent. Edith Södergran had circulated a letter among the literary world of Helsinki in which she demanded that her friends should stand up and be counted: Hagar Olsson, Ragnar Ekelund, and others 'should take back their hasty condemnation of my press insertion' (the one about Septemberlyran). She based her demand on the authority of Nietzsche and claimed: 'I am an individual of an entirely new species. When I speak of the unprecedented [det oerhörda] in my art I am not talking of the content, but of the species.' This new insertion was hopelessly misunderstood. Most of the literary world in Helsinki considered it in the worst possible taste, and Hagar Olsson herself was by her own confession irritated at being solicited so directly for a reply.

She wrote a cross letter. Edith Södergran's answer was violent:

You have publicly exposed me to disgrace. I asked you if you thought that this insertion could be of great benefit to the cause. Naturally on the assumption that you would reply and by no means in order to criticise you. No one has ever acted like this towards me.

The worst of it for me is that I have lost the sister who had begun to play a wonderful role in my poetry. My health does not permit me to come to you. If you can tear yourself away for days I am now ready to receive you at any moment you please. If you refuse to do refuse to do this, I wish to brew.: with you forever, for I am a person of irrevocable decision.

... Remember that this letter is a letter of destiny. I will believe no letter-I demand a proof of your fair-mindedness in that you come here. With one whom I distrust I do not want to have any dealings and do not want to wait for her for several months. That is my character-I can be no other.

I demand that you pay the price of our friendship through this journey - otherwise I shall understand that I am to be alone. Bow before my will, Hagar, you are approaching something that more beautiful than any love, and we could experience that which is most wonderful.

And so Hagar Olsson published a long article in Dagens Press on 8 February 1919. She defended Edith Södergran against the attacks of the critics, and associated her with the "new wave" of poets and writers that was beginning to appear in the other Scandinavian countries. Of this defence Hagar Olsson wrote later: `I wrote what my heart inspired me with at the time. I tried above all else to make people understand that an inspired poet like Edith Södergran spoke in the name of the spirit, of the god that lives in all our breasts, and not in the name of her private ego. And that all talk of self-assertion in connection with her was just as tasteless and stupid as it would be in connection with the great mystics who felt the presence of the Almighty in their own souls.'

At the same time, Hagar Olsson wrote to her friend saying she would accept the invitation to come to Raivola. Edith Södergran's reaction was one of joy:

Schwesterlein,

Welcome to Raivola. Will be at the station, from where it is 2 kilometres to our home. My mother is very pleased you are coming. The cat Nonno and the dog Martti will also greet you cordially, as will our punikki [the 'Red' household help] Aino.The night before your malheur-letter I dreamt that a beautiful black horse had broken loose at me. The night before the press insertion I dreamt that a herd of cows was following me with ringing bells and I also dreamt that I was walking along the street wearing a red cap and that a pedant of my acquaintance was nodding to me from the church tower which you will see...

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(to be continued)

Tarkovsky's Horses

The book is now available for pre-order from Amazon UK (publication date January 28).

Levels Two to Five

Not strictly a Nordic item, perhaps, but Anthony Briggs has some interesting reflections on judging this year's Rossica Prize. Incidentally, a literal translation of the piece's title is: "God deliver us from judges like these." Money quote:

There is no circle in Dante’s Inferno to accommodate this kind of punishment for a life conducted in sin; those of us who have tormented others with words will probably have to move in somewhere on Levels Two to Five alongside other incontinents: the gluttons, misers and spendthrifts, the wrathful and sullen. (Plenty of friends there, then, and no shortage of translators).

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (VII) - 1

I write for myself regardless of readers, in a process that deals with identity and continuous creation. Only later does the wish to be read arrive.

*

Usually when one wants to say something one addresses a specific living person, but with the poem it is different, and must be so. If I have a particular reader in my mind as I write the poem, I limit it, clip its wings by instinctively speaking into the shared space which the given reader and I have already established. The addressee ought to be unknown, an abstract subject, but the dream of a possible reader imposes itself on form and composition as an implicit and necessary structure. Only when I have surrendered the poem is it aimed at anyone who may read it. For a moment, the person who takes the poem into his or her hands is the chosen one.

*

As a poet I address something that exists outside me, something that is greater than myself. Even if one prefers to call this something God, it does not change the poems. The most important thing is that I who do the writing do not imagine that I am the highest, that I as creator do not confuse myself with God.

*

It helps to have literary models. Preferably dead ones, but God is and remains the highest authority. The poems do not have the character of prayers or invocations, but are written upwards towards this thing that is greater.

Yet I also replace God for another, but very important reason. Since God is an absolute value, God ‘sees’ the text differently from anyone else. God will not let himself be defined, but that does not prevent us from talking to God…

As the person who does the writing I am certain of at least one thing, namely that my poems will meet with countless divergent interpretations. Not necessarily because they are complex or unclear, but because every dedication is not just about the poem itself, but also implicates the person who reads it.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Edith Södergran: a biographical profile - 7

(continued)

She told the story of how the publisher had mutilated her work and how her publicity in Dagens Press had only been intended to forestall an attack which she knew already to be inevitable. Even so, one cannot help but feel that even had the book appeared exactly according to her wishes, the critical reception would hardly have been any the more favourable. The letter included some new poems which their author invited the critic to consider, and ended with a remarkable appeal:

Nietzsche says: Ich ging zu allen, aber kam zu niemand. Is it now to be that I am to come to someone? Could we reach a hand to one another? I am now launching my offensive against you, I want you to see me as I really am and I want you to show me who you are. Could there be a godlike relationship between us, so that all barriers between us would fall? I speak to you in a tentative, degrading language. Nietzsche is the only human being in whose presence I would be afraid to open my mouth. Are you the sea of fire I wí11 plunge into? If you laugh, you are my own If you do not laugh, you ought still to be worthy of the highest form of friendship, which Nietzsche advised his followers against on grounds of prudence

.Hagar Olsson's reply overwhelmed Edith Södergran. She believed that at last she had a found a companion with whom she could share the secrets of her experience. Hagar Olsson was her `sister', to whom she could confide the most intimate secrets of her life. Edith Södergran's side of the correspondence between the two women was eventually published in book form, with a linking commentary by Hagar Olsson.* It makes painful reading. Involved in the hectic early stages of a career as a publicist and socialist literary critic, Hagar Olsson had little time to spare for her 'sister'. While the published letters give a valu;ıhle insight into the development of Edith Södergran's nature mysticism and her gradual movement towards the Sufism of Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, they also reveal how far the 'godlike relationship' fell short of the poet's hopes. Raivola was far from the Finnish capital, and in reply to Hagar Olsson's invitation to visit her there, Edith Södergran wrote:

My charming young girl! Cannot come. Insomnia, tuberculosis, purse is empty (we live on the sale of our household effects and our furniture). What we have in Russian and Ukrainian securities could only be redeemed in the event of the f1ılI of Bolshevism. If the insomnia gets better I will try to come in a few months, but no certainty of this. Now I have found what l need: your objective view, and you have brains enough for us both.

May one ask; do you work for the cause in gencrıl, or will you meet certain individuals? Give a list of them, 1 want to capture certain souls. Hemmer to sing for the cause and Grotenfelt to sing or scrawl. Ragnar Ekelund does not conic into my plans. I share Severyanin's view that if a talent is a little boring it is not full enough of genius. Igor Severyanin is at present Russia's greatest poet. Saw him at a poetry reading, never spoke to him. But he is the one in whom I have a similar trust to the trust 1 have in you.

He is a very great power and should be ready for our ideas. But we must

first educate him, he has, to be sure, certain café-concert mannerisms and does not know how to discipline himself. He will be the bridge to Russia, with him we will certainly be able to get the best of Russia on its feet again. What do you think of Sweden? Will it go there? One fine day we will certainly seize hold of Europe. Do you talk directly to certain Iıecıple and have you the intention of doing this? You must read the best poems of Severyanin, they would quicken and enliven you, even though he is submerged in the boudoir and you will not find our heights in him.

I was reborn in September, whence The September Lyre. I knew suddenly with unmistakable certainty that a stronger hand had grasped my brush.

How old are you? Health? Nerves? I want you to be well and in full strength. Give a short biography! Mrs or Miss? Degree of education? Myself: residence: Raivola, Petrischülerin, tuber­culosis from age 16, Nummela, Davos, pneumothorax, waiting for someone to invent a cure for TB.

We must be ruthless with one another and sharp as diamonds...

I have a sister and have not heard her wonderful voice. I want to see your inner being, what is holiest in you.

The style and tone of this letter, its peremptory demands for concrete action at an absolute level, demands it would be impossible to fulfil in "real life" - all this is typical of the letters sent to Hagar Olsson with great frequency by Edith Södergran, even though she often obtained no reply. Hagar Olsson found the memory of this unequal friendship so painful after Edith Södergran's death that it took her twenty-five years to bring herself to look the letters out and publish them. For those twenty-five years she tried to forget about Edith Sodergran and her own failure to meet the demands of a soul that had in many respects already crossed over into another world.

The 'Sister' poems of Edith Södergran's third book, Rosenaltaret [The Rose Altar], grouped under the heading 'Fantastique', illustrate the poet's violent attachment to Hagar Olsson, and her fear that her 'sister' would betray her:

My sister...
Has she betrayed me?
Does she bear a dagger at her breast - the light-footed one? Answer me - laughing eyes.

('I Believe in My Sister')

(to be continued)

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Seeing the dark of print

WhyTranslator's Lev Hrytsyuk has a link to a site that specializes in unpublishable books. The site asks:

What constitutes an unpublishable work? It could be many things: too long, too experimental, too dull; too exciting; it could be a work of juvenilia or a style you've long since discarded; it could be a work that falls far outside the range of what you're best known for; it could be a guilty pleasure or it could simply be that the world judges it to be awful, but you think is quite good. We've all got a folder full of things that would otherwise never see the light of day.

In the field of Nordic translation one could think of a fair number of works that might fall into this category. How about the Collected Poems of Arvid Mörne, for example? Or even - The Unknown Soldier?

Cold comfort

Swedish crime fiction is very popular in Germany, but it's not so often that German crime fiction is translated into Swedish. Reviewing the third of three recent translations of detective novels by Andrea Maria Schenkel – the three books constitute Schenkel's entire output so far – Bodil Zalesky notes a disturbing trend:

The voices of the main characters are almost completely interchangeable and shorn of identity, which gives me as a reader a sense of discomfort. Perhaps this is the author's intention, and it contributes to the cold undercurrent that persists throughout the book.

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (V) - 2

The notion of a 'middle' probably has a religious origin. In the Bible it is displayed in many different contexts. In the work of the mystic Angelus Silesius, talking about the middle assumes the character of the soul’s union with God:

IN DER MITTE SIEHT MAN ALLES

Setz dich in Mittelpunkt: so siehst du alls zugleich, Was jetzt und dann geschieht, hier und im Himmelreich.

When in certain neo-religious movements today an altered world view manifests itself in a seeking for divine identity, it is not simply a pure caricature of, for example, the internalized spiritual direction Angelus Silesius expresses, but also a loss of the Judeo-Christian understanding of existence. All is not one, and we are not God. Poems cannot possibly be written from such a position. The story of creation is a narrative about multiplicity and separation. The innermost zone is not identical in two individuals. And above all: the zone – and the individual – are not one with God.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk (V) - 1

Edith Södergran: a biographical profile - 6

(continued)

Her `dimensions', needless to say, were the dimensions of the entire universe, which she had experienced as a personal crisis and which had led her to reject all partial positions. Such an experience seemed merely luidcrous to the critic of Dagens Press. On 4 January 1919, signing himself `Pale Youth', he dismissed the poems of Septemberlyran as `31 laughing pills' and wrote a parody of the poem `The Bull' called `The Cow'. Referring to the passage in the Introduction about `dimensions', he directed his readers' attention to the portrait of the poet which appeared in the publishers' Christmas catalogue and wrote that `íf the body fulfils what the face promises, the dimensions could be reduced by a couple of dozen ounces without harm to her poetry.' As Tideström points out, the reviewer could certainly had had no idea that he was writing about someone literally on the brink of starvation.

Other reviews were equally offensive. The poet was accused of megalomania and called a `Nietzsche-crazed woman'. What had really drawn the ire and contempt of these critics was a notice Edith Södergran had published in Dagens Press before they had a chance to publish their reviews. Called Individual Art, it had stated that the new book was `not intended for the public, not even for the higher intellectual circles, but only for those few individuals who stand nearest the frontier of the future.' The poet could `not help those who will not feel that it is the wild blood of the future that pulsates in these poems.'

The inner fire is the most important thing that mankind possesses. The earth belongs to those who bear the highest music within them. I address myself to the exceptional individuals and exhort them to heighten their inner music, and build the future. I myself am sacrificing every atom of my strength for my great cause, I am living the life of a saint, I am immersing myself in the greatest that the human spirit has produced, I avoid all inferior influences. I look upon the old society as the mother-cell which must be sustained until individuals construct the new world. I exhort individuals to work only for immortality (a false expression), to make the highest possible out of themselves - to put themselves at the service of the future.

The notice ended with a plea:

I hope I shall not remain alone with the greatness I have to bring.

It is easy to see how such a statement could have aroused the conservative critics. Totally caught up in her experience of oneness with nature, revolution and the cosmos, cut off from the everyday world of literary journalism by sickness and political events, Edith Södergran never even considered that her words might be construed as the ravings of a megalomaniac, a pompous and hysterical female aristocrat. Her insistence on `the future' was seen as a craven alignment with Bolshevism, and her talk of `height' and `dimensions' as folie de grandeur. In order to overcome this tendency in an appreciation of Edith Sodergran's poetry-and it is a tendency that is not always entirely avoided even by her most devoted admirers (witness Tideström's constant reference to her `disturbed' state of psychic health in his critical biography)­it is necessary to understand how complete was the experience that she had undergone and would continue to undergo until her death. She had absorbed the whole of the external crisis, both that of the outside world and that of her own ailing body, into a subjective pathos which every so often gave rise to the writing of poems. It is important to see that she regarded the willed and conscious development of this extreme subjectivity as a kind of duty, a holy sacrifice. This is what she means when she says that she is living the life of a saint. The victim of this sacrifice was her uwn body, and she tried to communicate the sacrificial act by means of another kind of sacrifice, more symbolic: the poem. Georges Bataille has defined poetry as a sacrifice in which words are the victims.* His contention is that poetry leads from the known to the unknown, and the images conveyed by the words it uses are doomed to disappear and die. Edith Södergran's poems are imagistic in the extreme-but the images (of childhood, of Raivola and the lake, the garden, and so on) are nearly aways used not for their own sake, but in order to render more vivid an ecstasy, a state of mind and soul. In a poem like `Fragment', language is used to create a sensation of chaos, of time and space collided to induce a feeling of dizziness. Through her poems, Edith Södergran was trying to bring her readers into contact with the cosmic forces she had encountered. There is evidence that the act of writing the poems was for her a very arduous business. The excitement which accompanied their composition usually led to an attack of pulmonary bleeding. Thus the sacrifice was also a very real one.

Not all the reviews of Septemberlyran were as damning as the ones referred to above. Ragnar Ekelund sprang to the poet's defence, but his review was not published until 10 January. A literary feud began to develop around the book, until psychiatrists were even claiming in printed articles that the poet was either mad or immoral, or both, and a few literary "names" upheld her integrity and dissociated themselves from the published slanders. One review by a member of the latter group is of especial interest. Hagar Olsson, then a young Helsinki writer just beginning her literary career, wrote a sympathetic article about Septemberlyran in Dagens Press on 11 January. She wrote admiringly of the poems themselves, while deploring the damage their author had brought to her own cause by publishing accompanying `explanations'. Quoting Nietzsche (`Der Autor hat den Mund zu halten, wenn sein Werk den Mund auftuť*), Hagar Olsson reproached Edith Södergran for having set herself out on the market-place for the jeers of the crowd, and accused her of acting `like some cheap chanteuse out to make propaganda for herself.'

This latter remark stung very deeply. A few days later Hagar Olsson received a long letter from Edith Södergran (whom she did not know personally) which began: `You ascribe to me unjustly cheap motives for my public action' She went on to explain why she had acted as she had done:

I had asked for a selection. The publisher took a good part of the best poems out of the collection (thereby robbing the book of its weight).

(to be continued)

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Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (V) - 1

V


The word ‘zone’ carries within it a danger. It attracts and repels at the same time. A zone is something someone has designated as an alien region, a terrain in which one is not normally allowed to travel. A closed area, an independent and restricted world that is separated or liberated from the world outside.

I imagine that all human beings have within them a zone, a centre that is filled with energy. That innermost zone is the place where something dangerous is at stake. People’s dealings with the zone may be very different. Some will be able to live their whole lives without ever really coming into contact with it, while others will be knocked down by its power..

*

Although the innermost zone never permits itself to be defined, it is not simply an unconscious region, a centre of hidden vulnerability or of psychic gravity, even though it could be a specious idea, really more like the middle of being, and thus an existential category.

As an artist one needs to have an especially conscious attitude to the fact that the zone contains material which is inert. Though I may delve into the zone with great caution, I must return as quickly as possible. There is a kernel that must be respected, material about which I must be silent, mysteries that must be allowed to remain mysteries.

Thus the innermost zone contains something that can serve as a beginning, but must never be written out in full. An artist wandering about in this zone is not much different from those African tribes who, after all the depots are emptied of food – either in panic or from sheer ignorance – start to eat the grain that was being stored as seed corn.

The innermost zone is a complex value of consciousness, and is also linked with the anonymity that exists behind the artist’s deeply personal striving.

*

The innermost zone derives its vitality from what ought never to be spoken aloud.

*

In the work of forcing language into poetry one’s strength may turn into its opposite. When I demand total presence, I risk being destroyed by the forces I challenge. Rilke writes of how one it is possible to establish contact with one’s centre and either derive strength from it, which can form the basis for creation, or face the danger of being banished into total powerlessness. If the gaze tries to enter and lose its way, things go wrong. Creation always carries the risk of mental disintegration.

The consciousness that the zone exists gives me the strength to be myself. Being oneself is something that ought to be obvious, but this is not always so. It has nothing to do with spontaneity, it is a battle, and therefore a great victory when it succeeds. The innermost zone is a force field from which the new must grow. It is therefore a place that cannot be protected too much. Only one’s consciousness of the zone’s existence is of extreme importance. If I am careful with it, I can have dealings with it for time eternal.

Paul Celan is also an expert in this kind of topography, and he reveals a strange location on the map of the soul:

"Meine Damen und Herren, ich finde etwas, das mich auch ein wenig darüber hinwegtröstet, in Ihrer Gegenwart diesen unmöglichen Weg, diesen Weg des Unmöglichen gegangen zu sein.

Ich finde das Verbindende und wie das Gedicht zur Begegnung Führende.

Ich finde etwas – wie die Sprache – Immaterielles, aber Irdisches, Terrestrisches, etwas Kreisförmiges, über die beiden Pole in sich selbst Zurückkehrendes und dabei – heiterweise – sogar die Tropen Durchkreuzendes –: ich finde… einen Meridian."

 "Ladies and gentlemen, I find something that also gives me a little solace in having taken this impossible route, this route of the impossible, in your presence.

I find the uniting factor, and – as in the poem – the force that leads to the encounter.

I find something – like language – immaterial, but earthly, terrestrial, something circular, something that traverses both poles to return into itself and there – in the serenest of ways – even intersecting the tropics - I find ... a meridian. "

– Something of the same consciousness that Rilke expresses in his idea of a “medial praxis”, written from the centre or ‘middle’, as one seeks a reality that is not yet given.