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.