The Book of the Serpent

By Ursula Andkjær Olsen

THE BOOK OF THE SERPENT / HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED: GOD CREATED THE SERPENT. THUS THE SERPENT ALSO HAD UTOPIA BEHIND THE EYES: HAPPINESS AND HARMONIOUS COHABITATION WHEREVER POSSIBLE. SOMETHING TO GROW. BUT UNLIKE MAN THE SERPENT SHOWED A GREATER INCLINATION FOR DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH THAN FOR ETERNAL LIFE, SO IN PARADISE HE TURNED TO THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE AND ITS SHINY PEARS. EVEN THOUGH MAN FLATTERED HIMSELF FOR HAVING GIVEN NAMES TO THINGS AND PUT LITTLE SIGNS ON THEM HE DID NOT MANAGE TO NAME THEM ALL, AND AFTER THE SERPENT AND MAN TOOK KNOWLEDGE DOWN FROM THE BRANCHES, NONE OF THE NAMES STUCK TO THINGS ANY MORE AND MANY FEELINGS WOULD COME AND ALSO MANY THINGS THAT WOULD LATER LACK A NAME. THEN THERE WERE THE WARS ABOUT THE THINGS AND THE WARS ABOUT THE NAMES OF THE THINGS AND MANY LAY DEAD AND WOULD LIE DEAD ON THE FIELD. WHEN PARADISE WAS BLOWN OPEN THE SERPENT TOOK WITH HIM THAT SMALL PIECE OF THE GARDEN OF GARDENS WHICH HAD BECOME A PART OF HIMSELF: HIS EYEBALL WITH THE ENCLOSURE, WITH THE SIGNS, WITH THE GRASS AND THE LION AND THE LAMB AND THEIR SIDE BY SIDE. AND THE TINY LIGHT PEAR THAT WOULD HELP THINGS TO GROW. SO AS HE TWISTED THROUGH THE FOLLOWING CENTURIES ON HIS BELLY IT WAS WITH AN INVITATION TO ALL MEN TO SURRENDER THEIR SOVEREIGNTY TO THE COMMON GOOD: "WHO ARE YOU? LET USSS TAKE CARE OF THAT, SSSWEETIE, GIVE USSS DESSSTINIES! AMENAM." BUT ALSO ALWAYS WITH A PICTURE OF PARADISE – HAPPINESS AND COHABITATION AND BEAUTIFUL NAMES ON SIGNS – ON THE TIP OF HIS TONGUE, FOR THE GREATEST COMMON GOOD:" LET USSS FORM A CLOSED SSSIRCLE OF GIVE AND TAKE. FROM USSS YOU HAVE COME TO USSS TO USSS YOU MUST GO FROM USSS YOU MUST RISSSE AGAIN. AMENAM. AND LLLICK YOUR BIG TOE. HEEHEE. SSSWEETIE." THE SERPENT GREW AND HAD MANY NAMES: THE MIDGARD SERPENT COMBINED WITH THE GIANT YMIR AND AT ONE TIME HE WAS DISCOVERED AND SPOTTED AND CALLED BY YET ANOTHER NAME: LEVIATHAN AS THE STATE MONSTER HE WAS. IT COULD HAVE BEEN GOD WHO SLAUGHTERED THE SERPENT TO LET THE RIGHTEOUS SUCK ON HIM FOR THE PROMOTION OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT. BUT IT WAS THE SERPENT HIMSELF WHO SLAUGHTERED THE PART OF MAN THAT WAS SERPENT. ZIGZAG: HE WAS SO DIALECTICAL THAT HE HAD TWO PERSPECTIVES IN HIS EYE, THE UNIVERSAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL. HAPPINESS AND COHABITATION WHEREVER POSSIBLE AND SOMETHING TO GROW. AND THE SLAUGHTER WAS SALTED AND DISTRIBUTED FOR ALL TO SUCK ON IT SO IT WAS A FEAST. THE SERPENT GREW SHOCKINGLY AND BECAME A COMPLEX CREATURE OF BRIDGES AND PASSAGES TO TRANSPORT BODIES AROUND IN RISING FLEETING AND FLEXIBLE PATTERNS: "WE ARE THE SSSCENE AND WHAT MOVESSS AROUND ON IT. HOLY SSSHIT! IT ISSS USSS. GIVE USSS DESSSTINIESSSS! SSSOME LIKE SSSTARSSSS TO SSSHINE IN THE SSSKY JUSSST LIKE OPIUM FOR THE PEOPLE AND SSSOME TO LAY A SSSORT OF FOUNDATION. THE PEOPLE WE FUCK WILL FORM THE BASSSISSS. YOU WILL FORM THE BASSSISSS LITTLE HEART, PURE LAMB." HE GREW AND HE GOT MORE AND MORE NAMES: FLEXICURITAS REX FOR EXAMPLE. AND MORE GENDERS: BIG PRICK AND CARROT, BLING BLING MÖTHERFÜCKER, STATE PUSSY, FAIRY QUEEN AND THEN THE HERMAPHRODITE TYRANNOSAURUS FLEX, STATE AND MARKET IN ONE WIN-WIN, JUST THE NUMBER OF HEADS: IN ADDITION TO STATE AND INDIVIDUAL ALSO THE PRIVATE SECTOR AND THE ARMY OF THOSE WHO STRUGGLE FOR POWER AND GLORY AND THE BIG CAR WITH TV. AND THE SERPENT WENT ON EXPANDING WITH NETWORKS, INCENTIVE STRUCTURES AND PROJECT RECRUITING. HE WAS ALL THE HANDS THAT DON’T KNOW WHAT THE OTHERS DO. COLD ONES AND HOT ONES. AND ALL THE BREASTS, BOTH GOOD BREAST AND BAD BREAST, FROM WHICH WHIP AND CREAM AND LIFELONG LEARNING FLOW FREELY. THE BIG CAR AND THE LION AND THE LAW AND COHABITATION WHEREVER POSSIBLE. AT ANY RATE PARTS OF THE SERPENT SAW HOW BIG HE HAD GOT AND THAT THIS WAS NOT NECESSARILY A GOOD THING, AT ANY RATE ONE VOICE IN THE SERPENT WANTED TO MAKE THE NAMELESSNESS IN MAN REMAIN NAMELESS, GO ON BEING AN OBJECT FOR DEFINITION, BECOME A SOURCE OF EVER NEW NAMES AND NEW THINGS. FOR ALL TIME. IT WAS A STRANGE UTOPIA. IT WAS A UTOPIA OF BREATHING HOLES IN THE SERPENT. OF HOLES THAT THE SERPENT MADE OPEN IN HIS FLESH, IN HIS TOTALITY. A UTOPIA OF A FREE GARDEN FOR EVERYONE IN THE HEART, CONTAINED IN THE GREAT GARDEN, WITH SIGNS AND NAMES AND HAPPINESS AND LAMB AND SOMETHING TO GROW. SOMETHING TO SPEND ONE’S TIME ON. PARTS OF THE SERPENT SAW AND HOPED THAT IT WAS GOOD ENOUGH.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Mein Kampf

In Hbl, Arne Toftegaard Pedersen looks at the "Knausgård phenomenon". Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) has recently published the first volume of a book which bears the not exactly promising title Min Kamp (My Struggle) - a projected 6-volume work which will run to 2,700 pages, narrating the author's life story. In Norway the first volume has topped the bestseller lists, and the author has become a literary superstar. Now the book is on the shortlist for the Nordic Council Literature Prize... 

The picket fence

by Per Kirkeby

We are all temporary dots in the great milky way
Stars that blaze violently before they go out and
the nothingness stretches further into space
If only there had been a picket fence

Picket fence
As a child I clung to the mattress by my last
fingernail when it struck me that there were no
limits out there in space
that it just went on and on.
There must be a picket fence somewhere
but what came after that picket fence
another? and another? It went from bad to worse.
(Perhaps that's why at one time in my life I painted many metres of picket fence.)

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Shady characters? - 2

Yet another example of how Finland and its complex history get distorted in the eyes and minds of Finland's Nordic neighbours. From The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo:

How well do you know the history of Swedish Nazism?”

“I’m no historian, but I’ve read a few books.”

“In 1939 the Second World War began, and in 1940 the Winter War in Finland. A large number of the Lindholm movement joined as Finland volunteers. Richard was one of them and by then a captain in the Swedish army. He was killed in February 1940 — just before the peace treaty with the Soviet Union — and thereby became a martyr in the Nazi movement and had a battle group named after him. Even now a handful of idiots gather at a cemetery in Stockholm on the anniversary of his death to honour him.”

See also: Shady characters?

Points of the compass - 3

PT: I’ve focused on passages that make possible the meeting or give access to concentration and depth. Walter Benjamin takes the opposite position in The Arcades Project: to capture the transient and the diversionary, the multifarious and the fragmented. I sense a presence in both forms of perception. For me, exorbitant accumulations and quick impressions are often the prerequisite for a deep-going perspective. In any case, The Arcades Project gave me special pleasure during the writing of The Whales in Paris, and my book encompasses both overt and covert connections to Benjamin’s writing.

KES: Though haunting in their own right, the poems in The Whales in Paris have a lighter, more hopeful quality to them. The title poem celebrates “freedom for the soul,” for instance, and “Happy Hour” honors the “breathless wonder” of life on earth. Even the concluding poem, “The Silence After Us” — which opens with the line “There is one day left” and was written on December 31, 1999 — seems ultimately hopeful in that it finds “patterns” out of “chaos.” Is this a fair assessment of The Whales in Paris?

PT: The world exists on the strength of poles and electrical currents, political, social, cultural, etc. And I adhere to the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf’s view that human beings are battlefields. Ekelöf says that it isn’t the dragon or the knight who loses his life — it’s the virgin. She is the one who, like us, must fight. She vacillates, he says, and therefore is in balance: a telling picture of how our lives are influenced by strength and weakness, a balancing act, where a moment’s inattention can prove catastrophic. The body always has at least one wound — and the Earth has the same. It’s under these conditions that art is created. Against a backdrop of wars, destruction, psychic terror, that which causes pain. Art doesn’t necessarily need to make a politically explicit theme of this, but without a vested interest, poetry will hardly move the reader. Since I was a child, I’ve been interested in the world; it’s in everything I write. But mostly I choose an existential approach. It’s from here that I can speak — and I do that with hope. Let me also cite the Danish poet Ivan Malinovski. The title of one of his poems goes like this: Live as if there is a future and a hope. That’s also my view.

Points of the compass - 2

KES: The imagery throughout Tarkovsky’s Horses suggests a confused mental state. “Signs have been switched about,” for example, “roads have acquired different names.” How hard was it for you to write about such a personal experience— and, at the same time, give it the necessary poetic language to make it art while being true to the emotional experience at the heart of it?


PT: I wrote in the hope that my father would still be with me. Or that I could be with him a little longer. My mother was relieved when my father died; she had lived through all the grief when he was alive. I’d only glimpsed it, so I mourned differently. Naturally, I was filled with sorrow while writing the poems, but I was also buoyant and elated. That surprised me! My father was dead, but the material was very alive when I wrote. It was his presence that called forth the myth of Orpheus, even though the relation here is father-daughter and not the lover’s relationship. What is shared is that in each case the dead are there. That was a decisive point in the process, when I put the poems in Eurydice’s mouth and didn’t simply speak personally. Early on I knew that these poems were about many other people besides my father and me. With these poems I wanted to make my father so close that he could be, when he was now dead. . . . Death is not a fact that the poems try to change, but by writing the poems, I wrote—like Eurydice—my father out of the shadows and into the light. The Orpheus myth is very masculine. Orpheus leads his beloved up from the underworld. In the myth the woman isn’t just passive, she’s also dead. The myth’s dead woman has always provoked me. She alone is made into an object. But Eurydice has also had her own life, right? She must’ve had a father, whose death she also once mourned. I imagine—against the grain of the traditional view—that Eurydice must have had her joys and her worries. I try to turn the myth from the extreme objectification of the woman and make Eurydice stronger by giving her voice and life. In Tarkovsky’s Horses, she isn’t just a statue. For me, she becomes the opposite: a catalyst. I go into her life long before she’s retrieved from the underworld, and before Orpheus comes into the picture. Eurydice has both a longing after love and to belong to a communicative world — as opposed to the silent underworld. So Tarkovsky’s Horses turns the Eurydice figure from being a dead object into a living, thinking, and talking subject. The myth meant a transformation of the personal material, and maybe it was the myth that made it possible to write the book?

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice relates a precondition for art: the sacrifice of the beloved. In the traditional myth, Eurydice is away and must be resurrected. Orpheus loses Eurydice, but gets the power to “create.” He creates life from death by bringing forth the conception of Eurydice. In a short synopsis one can say that Orpheus loses his beloved, but wins the poem. The Orpheus myth is, in the same way, a myth about inspiration. As a woman poet I therefore find it necessary to make my stand in relation to it. In the myth, the voice is connected to the man. A woman poet can either choose to identify with Orpheus and de-prioritize her gender, or she can give voice to Eurydice. In any case, I have given Eurydice a more central position than I have seen elsewhere. It wasn’t the plan, but it grew on its own when I wrote. One can say that the original myth is gone in my treatment of it, or one can imagine my take on the myth as a counterpoint, a widening of it, what I myself wished — because it really interests me. This is a new telling, where Eurydice retrieves her dead father. A dead father cannot be reclaimed but can be revitalized in words, in poems. It’s really not the same as if he were resurrected to life.


KES: If Tarkovsky’s Horses is an emotional response to a father’s illness and death, The Whales in Paris seems an intellectual response to “insight’s expanding and constantly vibrating chaos.” Yet each book is informed by the haunting spectre of death, and in many ways it’s “death” that forms a red thread between the two books. Thematically speaking, how do you feel about seeing these two books published together in English?


PT: You’re right: Death is central to both books. From the very beginning of my career, death has always been a focus in my poems. But when you’re a young poet and a woman, reviewers sometimes concentrate solely on the erotic elements. Back then I was angry about this treatment. Today I’m only proud if readers find an erotic spark in the poems. But it’s misleading not to notice death. The two collections are connected to each other. They have the same structure, the same movement, and the same layout. It’s an advantage to read them together. But I’m writing the third book now. For many years I have worked in triumvirate fashion — thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—or, at the very least, with a group of books that enter into dialogue with one another. I hope that Bloodaxe will one day publish a volume including this third book. But as The Whales in Paris was published in 2002 and Tarkovsky’s Horses in 2006, I’m happy to see a translation. The third book will probably be published in Denmark in 2010. There’s an insight in every collection, but The Whales in Paris has a special background. Walter Benjamin’s Das Passagenwerk (Arcades Project) was a huge inspiration, even though I use the concept of “passage” in my own way. In the notes to the book I write: “A type of passage-thought—the shift from one state to another—has fascinated me from my first book, Når der går hul på en engel (When an angel breaks her silence), and it’s no coincidence that bridges and gates have since been in many of my titles. “The poem is a possible meeting place,” I write in my poetics, Over vandet går jeg (Walking over the Water).

(via WLT)

Points of the compass

News that in early May Gyldendal will publish the third part of a trilogy by Pia Tafdrup, the first two parts of which are represented by Hvalerne i Paris and Tarkovskijs heste. The new book, Trækfuglens kompas, centres on the poet's experience of global travel and its significance for her life and work.

Meanwhile, in its current issue World Literature Today has published an extensive interview with Pia Tafdrup. Excerpt:

Pia Tafdrup is one of the major contemporary Danish poets working today, and her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is the author of more than twenty books, several of which have been translated into English, and the recipient of numerous awards—including the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize (1999) for Dronningeporten (Queen’s gate). Bloodaxe Books recently issued a new collection in English, Tarkovsky’s Horses and Other Poems, translated by David McDuff, which is an important addition to translated Danish literature. In recent years, K. E. Semmel has translated several of Tafdrup’s travel essays into English. To introduce her work to a broader readership, he decided to ask her a few questions about Tarkovsky’s Horses.


K. E. Semmel: In January 2010 Bloodaxe Books issued another collection of your poetry in English — two books (The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky’s Horses) in one volume. Can you tell us a little bit about each of the books?

Pia Tafdrup: I see The Whales in Paris as a clash between society and nature. Paris is the quintessential cultural city in Europe. It’s a great city, just as the whale is a great mammal. French philosophy is a whale. French language and literature have had the same lavish status. The whales,huge forces of nature, are present in our lives, in our culture, in our modern world. The poems in The Whales in Paris range from conception to the afterlife. Life can be viewed as a confrontation with what’s larger than one’s self: love, desire, and death, primal forces that are at play even in a modern civilization. The Whales in Paris has such forces in life as a theme — first and foremost desire and death, but also the suffering we inflict on others, loss, despair, and pain—illuminated by motifs from childhood, our relation to our parents, our ancestors, and mythical figures from the Bible.

Tarkovsky’s Horses is about my father’s final years with dementia as well as his death. The book depicts loss in two ways: in part, the poems portray my father’s increasing forgetfulness, his loss of everyday skills; in part, they portray the loss of a father. Tarkovsky’s Horses charts the course an illness takes, an illness for which science still has few words—from when my father is diagnosed, to when he had to move into a nursing home, to when he dies. The relentless deconstruction of identity is augmented in each phase of the book with mythology from Orpheus and Eurydice.

These poems about oblivion are located in an odd border region, which also calls forth certain comic and grotesque elements. In any case, the poems narrate the drama it is to be human.It’s certainly not your dream book to write about your dying father, not when he has been so incredible. But the book wanted to be written. At the peak of his life, my father asked me if I would speak at his funeral when that day arrived. I pushed the thought away for many years, but when he died, I knew I had to write that speech for him. What I didn’t know was that I was opening up something much larger. The speech became Tarkovsky’s Horses, most of which was written in Berlin immediately following his death.

KES: The lines “with all my might / I try to find / a bridge between his thoughts” from the poem “A River Flows By” are both touching and honest— portraying exactly that “opening up” you describe. Does the act of writing serve as your entry to understanding experience? That is, when you were finished writing poems about your father’s dementia, could you sit back and say, “Ah, I see now what we’ve been through and what I have learned”?

PT: In the poem “A River Flows By,” before and after become realities my father does not understand at all. On the telephone he could easily explain how his “hotel room” (nursing home) looked and didn’t remember that I’d often visited him there. Whenever I was there I tried to read his thoughts,but often felt that what I saw was a shattered self. Since I knew him so well—”as the night knows the stars”—it was especially important to see the connections, see a bridge, so that we could walk together, safely, over the bottomless stream that ran beneath us. That’s how it felt.

With my father’s death, much was left unresolved, because everything happened so quickly that I acted nearly on reflex. No doctor or nurse gave me any advice about his illness along the way. I didn’t know anything about dementia and had to rely on my own imagination:What is best for my father right now? When I began to write, understanding progressed slowly, or at the very least a certain understanding. The poems are not just a depiction of what happened; they map an independent universe, in which many surprises occurred during the process of writing.

When I wrote the eulogy for my father, I realized there was a lot more that I needed to say. Three weeks later I found myself writing in an apartment in Berlin, which had been the plan for nearly a year. I had another manuscript with me but quickly decided to follow the direction that attracted me most. That is, I wrote and wrote on what came by itself—namely, these poems about my father, who’d disappeared from the world. I had hardly opened my suitcase and sat down at my writing desk on Immanuelkirchstrasse when the poems tumbled out. Or better: the first draft of around three-fourths of the poems in the book.

I had no idea what I should do with these first poems, and I didn’t want to focus on the few years of my father’s life when he was dying. Not when I’d had such a wonderful father, wise, strong, and full of life. Nevertheless, one poem after another emerged.

My father’s illness had been so pressing that I could not write about anything else, so I’d not written anything for pretty much a year. The poems flowed from me, even though I didn’t want them. But after about seven poems, I gave in and allowed myself to write without thinking about what they would develop into, or how others would react to them. It was the only thing that absorbed me, so I had to start the process.

Poems - 4

By Morten Øen

this is how I tell you about us
all over again:
this is how I tell you about us. About summer heat or valley floor. The outbreak
of darkness

as Horizon
as Suggested =

your room. Your view

this is how one life lengthens the next. Otherwise it is

sequence:
voices to tell in

and so this is how it has become, I think

there is daylight here (or as close to it as one can get)
dream and hour

*

I rattle off The Sleepless Nights. Your reality as
more desirable than mine

the same dead end you regret

and when you are here, why point defencelessly backward

this under the trees
the white pavilion
what ploughed furrows. What a place

what a place

how much can you remember

once I was tall and comely like you
thought as bird/hand

we read our past
from earth to person. No context. All the same

read yourself into this. Once I was almost like you.

*

dust-yellow plains or forest
impending choice where journey is transfer that cannot be communicated
or presented

stone is not Stone As Burden
writing not approached

burnt paper, salt
earth in this fading light

land without us

translated from Norwegian by David McDuff

Poems - 1
Poems - 2
Poems - 3

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

As much of the poetry written by women has made plain, the secret desires of the blood are very probably quite identical in both sexes, but a stereotyped idea still persists in drawing a distinction between a female and a male sexuality. In this idea the woman, in spite of her seductive qualities, is perceived as the one who submits, while the man is the active and acting one. Since human beings are to a large extent defined by their sexuality, this is one important reason why many people find it hard to ascribe the same authority to female art as to art produced by males. In our cultural latitudes, women with power and self-awareness are often destructive of men’s sexuality. Or powerful and demanding women invite and encourage men’s aggression.

While it is probably impossible to measure the degree to which men’s sexual images of women are significant for women’s self-understanding, attitudes and ways of behaving, and for men’s perception of women outside the sexual sphere, it is obvious that many sexual fantasies still constitute a barrier to the appreciation of female art. Woman is not an image. She is a living being. But very few men are able to perceive that a woman may be at once a passionate and a thinking individual, both at the same time. That she may entertain a wish to be the one of whom the man dreams – partly because she desires and yearns for this, and partly because she has the pride and the strength for it – and also a wish for a high degree of awareness. That she possesses the ability for self-abandon and is at the same time capable of putting on a show, and that she can do other things besides be an object for man’s lust and desire. Or make him into such an object. That in other words she is a complex being. On the other hand, women who emancipate themselves have also had a tendency to lose their humility. Freedom does not mean making men weak. That is either tyranny or great stupidity.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

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

Poems - 3

By Morten Øen


as streetlamps are reflected in water the sky above us is first the
one, then the other

summer then rain. The pavements’ curves. Direction which accessible
now

added as real is maybe time sign. This is my name

like: Are swallows lonely
or: This is a flower made of paper

then you make it difficult again

day 1: Enrichment. You are a word
so it tears and tears. My hand against another’s, just images
cheek. Mist. 8 mm.

word against word, or

all this just because a romantic setback is exactly
like Old Friends or Child

just as text emerges from text so sound too is a string

we are 12 years old. The child is a stranger’s

*

seen in relation to the landscape’s size there are not many places
I have been. No one misses me

not the illusions, but ear-splitting silence is used
as in four three four

one colours. One sits and one stays sitting. One thinks that something is lacking…

translated from Norwegian by David McDuff

Poems - 1
Poems - 2

The two Scandinavians

The two Scandinavians did not "get on" with each other. Both Berthe and Suzette warned me of this, in diplomatic terms, soon after I came to La Grenadière. According to the girls, [the Norwegian] Monsieur Örn complained that [the Swede] Monsieur Lundquist was " too proud;" while Monsieur Lundquist had actually stated openly that he considered Monsieur Örn to be lacking in chic. Monsieur Örn, like Monsieur Dubuisson, rarely spoke, spending most of his time writing lists of French words in a note-book. Berthe said that Monsieur Örn had confided to her that all Swedes were proud often for no reason at all; Monsieur Lundquist especially so, for no better cause than that his father happened to be an official at the Law Courts. Monsieur Lundquist himself was going to become a journalist, and Monsieur Örn had told Berthe that Monsieur Lundquist was much inclined to exaggerate the social position that this calling would bring him. Although Monsieur Örn did not talk a great deal, he would sometimes look sternly across the table at Monsieur Lundquist, the whole of his craggy face slowly setting into a gloomy, hostile state: " comme un Viking," Berthe used to call this specially organised physiognomy.

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time, vol. 1, A Question of Upbringing (1951), Chapter III

Blogdahl

I recently noticed that Lars Bukdahl's blog has moved to a new home on Blogger. Bukdahl is presently in Shanghai, China, where he is taking part in the Literary Festival together with colleagues Sjón, Riitta Jalonen and Åsne Seierstad.

More crime - 2

A few signs of what may be a slight change in the attitudes of some SELTA members to the issue of the current dominance of crime writing in the Nordic – and particularly the Swedish – book world, and in translation. One U.K.-based member writes of the present vogue:

I would guess that Swedish "culture" has never had such widespread
coverage in this country ever before.

And the next issue of Swedish Book Review will apparently contain an article on this thorny subject.

See also: More crime

Poems - 2

By Morten Øen


Too close to the sun one evening as though it is immortal we are
ruin’s attractions, unstoppable like the past, a
lacking call for mercy, or on inborn frequencies of
skill; diverging and processed by others, shaped like
metal, lacking ardour of life or death

*

tears hearts in sleep
in realities’ attack of intimacy, the spread of city darkness, the steel
of buildings

…circle and you are out of position. That fundamental vagueness you
explain yourself with, this you have me in

*
I am not the lover you asked for, that remorse-light gaze
through the winter mirror of the city light, or softer cries muted year
by year

but like the darkness I yearn into you, gather and
sink just as continuously as ill-timed. As elaborate as
the difference between born and dead.

*
A blue jug filled with water against the light’s heat…
movement in the book’s shoulder
an outline in your breasts, you who are reading, what do you read in this, you
who are her, are you not here

Then you write yourself in all the same
Then we write ourselves in
Then we write ourselves in equally

and it is summer

you consider yourself a visionary
you consider yourself

a different form. A life no one has anything against, that doesn’t arise
without further ado

and why this now, so precarious
why these deficiencies in a mirror for eyes

there is something of us here, and in order to confuse
I shut you out

there are songs for lost and lonely. Nothing
forsaken is forsaken

translated from Norwegian by David McDuff

Poems - 1

Swedish papers publish Mohammed cartoon

At least three Swedish newspapers have published a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog, after an alleged plot to murder the artist, Lars Vilks, was uncovered in Ireland, AP/Ynet reports. The cartoon was not, however, published on the newspapers' websites.

Poems - 1

by Morten Øen

overcome I build myths, time’s crystal wave, diverse
days’ correctness, the dream of inside, low sun, the feeling of
past, like structural elements, loved forth and earlier
seen: Towers of stone and glass. Oceans to disappear in. Forests against
oblivion

I build bridges, corners of the world, all material things. My
mirror-image is: blue eyes, a wrapped-up minute, ceded warmth, and I
rise like a survivor who almost lost his chance
and you say we are bodies, breathing machines, bought time. Floating
falling. misleading

*

it is I or the darkness. Experimentally meet over deeper seas
the flight you catch me at time after time

and from the mouth: Like that you lose sleep, sun, loss, but are more intensely
loved

it is here it bleeds. Ineffective in this undone attempt
obeying like neutralities, and hidden in everything that is physical

*

other evidence exists. Others exist
and are granted to you

inexhaustible body
sand
possible crossing
from lifelessness to reflection
and human
signs

*

I think: the Ocean’s thermohaline circulation
the weight of the trees on the forest floor

direct answers, temporary solutions

that in this swarm nothing is lost
nothing is forgotten

that from the gate to the stone stairway
it is your back that convinces

several pictures from the same time


translated from Norwegian by David McDuff

Happy birthday, Nordic Voices

This blog is now one year old. What began as a team effort between several Nordic-oriented translators, conceived as an alternative (or challenge?) to the Swedish-only focus of SELTA and Swedish Book Review, has developed over the months in several different directions. The initial emphasis on translation and translation topics has receded, while the sometimes relentless foraging among the work of obscure and little-read Scandinavian authors has given way to what I hope is a more balanced presentation of literary texts considered for their own sake rather than for that of encyclopedic inclusiveness or specifically "Nordic" content.

The blog became solely my own when I decided to allow posts on subjects that don't necessarily have a "literary" connection or context, but do reflect social and other attitudes prevalent in the countries of Northern Europe and Scandinavia. Some of my colleagues seem to have thought that this was cheating - but it may just have been that the strains of accommodating strongly differing approaches to the subject of Scandinavian writing and reality were too great to be contained within a single blog.

Anyway, Nordic Voices (often, but not always, in translation) will continue to follow its basic aim of acting as a listening post or sounding board for what is new, or characteristic, or troubling, or pleasing about the Nordic literary scene and life in the Nordic countries today. It will do so less in terms of scholarly reviews and studies than by means of intermittent, sometimes even fragmentary presentations, translations and news items drawn from the Web, the media and above all from the work and statements of authors themselves. My hope is that readers who have little or no knowledge of the languages of the region can gain some familiarity with what is happening in Northern Europe today, through the often enlightening prism of creative writing.

Happy birthday, Nordic Voices!

A Man Called Haavikko - 2

It looks as though Mauno Saari's controversial biography of the Finnish modern classic poet Paava Haavikko may have gone too far in challenging the accepted image of Haavikko as a standard-bearer of Finland's cultural and literary heritage. The book's emphasis on the less inspiring, human aspects of Haavikko's life and career, particularly in his final days, have upset many people, including the poet's son and carer Heikki, who last year tried in the law courts to stop publication of the work. More recently, the Council for Mass Media in Finland turned down a complaint from Saari about an article in the Helsingin Sanomat daily which reproduced part of an interview with Heikki, defending his father against the picture that is painted in the book.

See also in this blog: A Man Called Haavikko

Ice Floe

Shannon Gramse writes that Ice Floe, the international magazine which publishes poetry from northern latitudes - not only in English but also, with facing English translations, in numerous other languages including Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, Inupiaq and many more - is about to relaunch under the auspices of the University of Alaska Press. The first issue of the new series will include work by Tua Forsström and Bo Carpelan. See also:

http://www.adn.com/2009/12/05/1042357/the-return-of-ice-floe.html

Finnish wisdom

Following up on the last post, here's a rather different allusion to Finnishness, this time in the opening chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby:

He found the house, a weatherbeaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog - at least I had him for a few days until he ran away - and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

Shady characters?

In HUB - the magazine of Helsinki University - Janna Kantola takes a look at how Finns are portrayed in foreign literature. Starting with Tacitus, the profile of Finns is an obscure one, to say the least (Tacitus appears to have thought that Finns and Lapps were the same), and their image in 19th century Russian literature is also quite a shadowy one. But it's not until we reach the modern era, and especially the era of the thriller, that the picture begins to clarify, and not always in a positive direction:. in particular, it seems that Finns are not liked by their Nordic neighbours, and have reason to feel insulted:

The Finnish characters appearing in Nordic literature are in a class of their own. Finns are primarily drunkards and on the wrong side of the law.

The shady characters in Stieg Larsson's recent Millennium series of detective stories frequently have Finnish names. In the series, the heroine, Lisbeth Salander, finds herself being chased by characters such as the simple duo of Sonny Nieminen and Hans-Åke Waltari.

Read it all.

Hat tip: Soila Lehtonen

Smooth talk

By Tommi Parkko

The land is a harbour struck by flowing water, struck by sun,
under clouds, where it rains, where an everyday thought hangs like a ship.

The land is an invoice that is seen, approved and kept.

The land does not exist. It is a story told by a fraudulent
explorer. It is the stretched scale of maps, a thirsty currency.

The houses stand in their rubber boots until they sink in the water.


1

I will receive all this if I do not hope or fear.

A city made of clay, steel and glass. All
this I can give, it is given to me and I will give it to whom I want.

The city is ready, the rain does not spray in its streets.
Behind the tree no murderer, rapist or robber waits. Each
well is covered by an iron lid, a lock.

And the city shines in the darkness, and no one understands this.


2

Water flows in the aural canals, the blood vessels, the ventricle
in the stomach, the sinuses, the petroleum springs, the well. In the darkness
all the subtleties of light.

I have unlocked the lid and built a body of flowing water.


The city builds a pipeline, a sewer,
a reservoir, an intake, a water tower and sells bottled water.
The rain permeates the city, in the well, the source, the river, the sea floods the streets.

When the moon is on its back one should mend boots, repair the roof,
be prepared for flooding, buy life-jackets,
make the dikes and embankments watertight.

What masters the water masters the world.


From Tommi Parkko: Sileäksi puhuttu [Smooth Talk]. Tammi 2004.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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

It is no good trying to issue bans on hypotaxis, or on any other phenomenon, and make them apply to one sex only. The available words, syntactical possibilities and techniques are universally the same. The fact that female and male poets sometimes use language differently is another matter. If their works are different, it is because now and then the two sexes choose to focus on different areas. Thematic content is important for aesthetics, but so is the point of view – the eyes that see.

Narrow subjects are as a rule confused with narrow-mindedness, but to zoom in on what is close is not tantamount to denying that larger perspectives are present. It is likewise false to assert, as some people do, that details are the special domain of women. Proust’s work is a refutation of this view: his works demonstrate exactly what can be attained by means of absorption. The posing of major problems does not necessarily produce poems that are more successful from an artistic point of view. If the poem lacks linguistic energy it loses its strength. Small things can point to larger ones, just as a stone from a mountainside consists of the same material and has the same colour and structure as the mountainside. One stone contains the whole mountainside.

If the concepts of “female” and “male” aesthetics are to have meaning, they must be strongly nuanced. While thematic material and point of view produce their own special artistic techniques, aesthetics is above all a matter for the individual. A personal staging of the script.


translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk (VIII)- 1

Schakel 8, keuze Hasso Krull

By Claes Andersson

You can live in a house you have never seen, that has never
    been built.
You can live there with a woman you have
   never met.
There’s a bed that you exchange because
   it’s too narrow.
At the kitchen table you look out over a garden where
   lilac and burnet rose bloom.
Right from the outset you feel that it’s a home
  although it is not a home.
The rent is so low that you can afford a bottle
   of wine every evening.
You can pack it full of friends, sing together
   all night.
Some stranger has lived there, someone who loved
   long-haired cats.
You can leave the doors unlocked at night
   without fear.
When the urge to depart becomes overwhelming you leave it
   with joy.
When you return you no longer remember
   the address, never find it again.

From: Huden där den är som tunnast [The Skin Where It’s Thinnest], Söderströms , Helsinki, 1991.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

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
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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


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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
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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.