Autumn's archive

In Hbl, Clas Zilliacus writes about Bo Carpelan's posthumously-published novel Blad ur höstens arkiv (Schildts, 2011, 204 pp.), which takes the form of a semi-autobiographical reflection contained  in 101 diary entries. Commenting on this form, with reference to the Danish poet Paul La Cour, Zilliacus makes some topical observations about the history of the European novel, a genre which included not only the romance, but also the picaresque and the epistolary diary, neither of which was characterized by plot:

Hela genreproblemet är omdebatterat. Att Urwind fick Finlandia­priset 1993 vann allmänt gillande. Men att samma författare fick priset för Berg 2005 var oerhört i sig. Dessutom – priset hade snävats in till ett romanpris – utlöste utkorelsen en principfråga: Var detta verkligen en roman? Skön var Berg, och poetisk, men intriglös; den saknade den spänningskurva man har rätt att kräva av sina lässtunder.

Det var trångsynta invändningar. Romangenren hade en av sina första stora perioder under tidigt 1700-tal, då det kryllade av dagboksartade ting. Då kunde man ha trott att genren var bestämd att vara just fingerad dagbok. Visst blev det mer intrig efterhand, men vem säger att just intrigen var romanens bestämmelse? Är det dagens vurm för thrillerns whodunit som har skruvat in romanen i ett så litet hål?

The whole problem of genre is the subject of much debate. The award of the Finlandia Prize to Urwind in 1993 gained general approval. But that the same author won the prize for Berg in 2005 was unheard-of. Moreover - the prize had been narrowed down to a novel prize - the choice triggered a fundamental question: was this really a novel? Berg was beautiful and poetic, but had no plot: it lacked the tension one curve had the right to demand of one's reading hours.

Those were parochial objections. The novel genre had one of its first major periods in the early 18th century, when it swarmed with diary-like things. Back then one might have thought that the genre was precisely designed to be a fictional diary. While it is true that a greater element of plot gradually developed,  who will say that plot was the novel's designation? Is it today's craze for the thriller and the whodunit that has forced the novel into such a small pigeon-hole?

It's also significant that, as Zilliacus also aptly points out, in addition to his diary-like works of fiction, Carpelan also produced a traditional historical detective novel, showing perhaps that while he was perfectly capable of working in that form, he did not consider it the most suitable medium for the realization of his artistic  intentions.

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk - 1

These are some sections from a draft translation I've made of Pia Tafdrup's Over Vandet Går Jeg - Skitse Til En Poetik [Over the Water I Walk - Outline for a Poetics], which was first published by Borgen, Copenhagen, in 1991. The book is an important one, for as a work of philosophy it not only throws light on the poet's own work -- it also has much to say about the art of poetry itself, and is a reflection on it. Not since the publication of Paul La Cour's Fragmenter af en Dagbog (Fragments of a Diary) in 1948 has there been such a sustained attempt in Danish poetry to cross the divide between the personal and the universal. Just as La Cour sought to make a final break with the tyranny of literary naturalism and realism, so also does Pia Tafdrup seek a way beyond the limitations imposed by the modern dichotomy between socially committed art and the narcissistic art of the self: she does so in a movement that's informed by religion, ethics, science, language, aesthetics, form and universal nature.


I

[7-9]

My poetry comes into being between two poles: between hunger for life and fear of death, between excitement and thought, language and silence. The process is never the same, but - stretched quivering between extreme points - it contains a compelling necessity which seldom allows itself to be explained in any other way than: I can do nothing else, so I must do it.

Before the poem, a restlessness arises: spontaneous, unreflected and completely irrational phases, in which unknown energies are at work. Sleepless nights and convulsions, momentary irritation, melancholy, aggression and other conflict-ridden states. Seldom is it a harmonious situation that releases the poem. Very important, before the restlessness, a position of waiting, and endless patience. This period may last a long time, but may also be decisive in its invisibility. Associated with the patience is a humility, which is perhaps the real beginning?

The phase of pre-articulation with its different stages may easily be undervalued or quite simply overlooked, but what happens here is crucial as to whether the amorphous state will be released in a poem. Or: there are seldom poems without this phase, for what is involved is a degree of attention that is almost intolerable. It may be short or long, be scarcely perceptible, but it is here that there is an openness for anything that wants to find its way under an irritable layer of skin, here that sudden plunges under the surface of thought take place. Only afterwards does it become clear that the restlessness was the beginning of something new that was on its way. The state of pre-articulation may have so strong a grip that when I do eventually write, I no longer have any sense that it is me. Like an anaesthesia, an intoxication. Someone else or someone else in me, something else or something else in me acts, while I look on. Something that is more than me, or something that also exists in me,writes. What happens cannot be explained - thence the dizziness, but it is a question of reaching that point in the process where one forgets one's own personality and is able to eliminate the private.

Inspired by French symbolism, Paul la Cour called this phenomenon depersonalisation: 'In all great poetry there is an element of depersonalisation. It will not master you with individual soulfulness, but will shine into you with impersonal spirit.' Inger Christensen has called the phenomenon derealisation. Both definitions aim at the same thing, they touch on a fundamental relation in all poetic creation: a generalisation of the subjective. In Mallarmé's sense the depersonalisation is an aesthetic and metaphysical dimension in which the intellect leaves the space in the poem in order to let its own universe emerge - or as Rimbaud says of the poem's subject:

Car je est un autre. Si le cuivre
s'éveille clairon, il n'y a rien de sa faute. Cela
m'est évident: j'assiste à l'éclosion de ma
pensée: je la regarde, je l'écoute: je lance un
coup d'archet: la symphonie fait son
remuement dans les profondeurs, ou vient d'un
bon sur la scène.

And elsewhere:

C'est faux de dire: Je pense:
on devrait dire: On me pense.

An attempt to take the direct route to the representative will only lead to poems that are vague. Only when the personal sets itself out over the private can the general emerge. It is not our emotions but the patterns we create from our emotions that are the essential thing, as T.S. Eliot has pointed out.

I say: the angel dwells on the other side of subjectivity.

translated from Danish by David McDuff