Cyclical

Kineserne betragter metallet som et element. Jeg holdt mig til den vestlige tankegang i kvartetten, men metallet blev ved at spøge og dukker op i denne bog, hvor den knytter sig til smagssansen. I digtet vises forbindelsen mellem flere elementer, dels når de forholder sig produktivt til hinanden, dels destruktivt. En cyklus, der kan gå begge veje. Det produktive kan afføde mere positiv produktion, men kan også slå om i sin negation, så det destruktive tager over. Det er to sæt af kræfter, vi må forholde os til, to forskellige kræfter, der griber ind i vores liv.

The Chinese view metal as an element. I stuck to the Western way of thinking in the quartet, but metal continued to haunt it and it shows up in this book, where it is linked to the sense of taste. In the poem the connection of several elements appears, partly when they relate productively to each other and partly when they do so destructively. A cycle that can go either way. The productive can generate more positive production, but can also turn into its negation, so that the destructive takes over. There are two sets of forces we must relate to, two different forces that intervene in our lives.

- Pia Tafdrup, in a note on her new collection Smagen af stål (The Taste of Steel), Gyldendal 2014

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

In poetry, the body acquires articulation. I cannot write outside my gender or my history. The angle of vision in my poems wants to reveal that a female ‘I’ is perceiving and finding her voice. However, the relegation of woman-created art to an autonomous rival world is tantamount to letting it degenerate into a ghetto.

Of course, the problem lies somewhere else. In the sphere of the sexual, porosity and the ability to empathize with the other are all-important. When a poem comes into being receptivity is essential, but so are the outlets connected with male sexuality. Both are present in the process of any poem.

In the fields of sexuality and art, one state is common to both men and women: the moment when integration and personality break down. In sexuality, when one approaches the animal, in art the place where the writing ‘I’ is saturated and completely filled, where the ‘I’ lacks a face.

*

In the process of the poem’s inception I am not a gender-determined being. In the moment of writing I do not think of myself in terms of gender, I am simply absorbed. I am bi-gendered, androgynous or hermaphroditic – which does not mean demonic, but merely that in the poem it is clear that, explicitly or implicitly, the perceiving subject is female. In my poems there are traces of female perfume.

*

In poetry the genders are related like brother and sister.


translated from Danish by David McDuff

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

translated from Danish by David McDuff

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

translated from Danish by David McDuff

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

IN DER MITTE SIEHT MAN ALLES

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

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

translated from Danish by David McDuff

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V


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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[68-71]

I once saw a poet reading his poems aloud as he stood barefoot on the floor. Had I not been able to hear him, I would have been able to see from the spellbinding movements of the muscles under his skin how musical his poetry was.

*

A poem is more than words, it also evokes countless physical states. The rhythmical element in particular designates the poem’s essence. The poem’s rhythm is what stimulates the imagination, what constitutes the poem’s forward-driving power. Akin to song and dance, the poem enters the blood of the reader or listener.

*

I don’t write to music, but listen my way into the poem’s own music. It is best if I can bring everything around to silence – or at least avoid listening to anything but the poem that wants out.

*

Silence is the central concept in The Bridge of Seconds. Silence is the precondition of everything, after silence everything can begin. The nightingale that introduces the book is a bird which, almost following to a mathematical principle, “works” with the pause. It is in these intervals that the most important things happen, when strictness and order in one dimension or other unfold behind all the beauty.

A poem does not consist merely of words, but also of silence, the space between one letter and the next, between word and word, stanza and stanza, interstices that point to what is implied or quite simply to the empty space itself. Even the single word has a blind spot called silence. It is this silence that is an ineluctable value, silence which works to organize the written and make it comprehensible.

*

The poem speaks, listens and is silent. All at the same time.

*

If a poem is not to drown in its own noise, it must have a relation to silence. The silence that is almost impossible to find anywhere any more must be heard in the poem. Silence is a very relative value. Here just now there is silence because I am absorbing myself and cannot hear the distant noise, but if I lose my concentration for a moment, the sound is back again at once. There is a world beside the poem, and it is full of sounds that cannot be heard as long as the concentration lasts.

*

Poetic language is not just a chance to set oneself out over something, but also to set oneself open to something. The poem is a magic potential.

*

What you see is not everything: there is more to hear.


translated from Danish by David McDuff

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Note: the posts with the translated text of Chapters I, II and III can be accessed here, here, and here.

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[66-68]

Not only words will express something. Both Tarkovsky and Wim Wenders tell stories cleverly, overwhelmingly, and almost without words. Their films are not poems, for poems are words, but they are great poetry.

*

Condensed expression has its source in selection. Attention to choice is all-important. But choice also affects that of which, consciously or unconsciously, nothing is said. Something must be left untouched. There must be a secret to return to.

*

Just as the moon’s sickle paradoxically emphasizes that part of the moon which cannot be seen, so every poem points to what is not said. Each time language mentions something, something else is left out. There will always be a residue. It is the body that registers that it is there, that to every poem belongs something unsaid. It is this irreducible but changeable value that forever makes it possible to enter new constellations. What cannot be captured in a poem can perhaps be discovered later, and there is hardly a dizziness greater than the thought of language’s unutilized resources.

*

To write something is to put it at a distance, so as to be able to move somewhere else, in freedom.

*

Poems were originally connected with song. Poems are not sung nowadays, but are bearers of music. Words unroll sounds. The poem has its level, its tone, which may alter in strength and volume. Its authenticity is greatly dependent on the phonic aspect, the integration of the sound-figures.

*

Language is not merely words. It breathes. It opens and closes. Is pushed forward or filters quietly out of one person and into another. With their dreams.

So many forms of breathing are censored. The song and the poem are the places in language where breathing is allowed to unfold itself with a maximum of freedom.


translated from Danish by David McDuff

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Note: the posts with the translated text of Chapters I, II and III can be accessed here, here, and here.

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[65-66]

To leave one’s trace in language is to make use of what renders one different from others. Poetry is born by discovering its own figure. In the same way that pollen has a pattern of its own, or a finger leaves its specific imprint. Each poem is neither more nor less than an isolated phenomenon.

*

Originality is a danger that should not be avoided. Originality means that one is authentic, distinctive and completely oneself. Originality is not a guarantee of quality. But the courage to go one’s own way is an essential condition for growth.

*

It is self-evident that, in a sense, poetry is untranslatable. While music, dance and pictorial art can be transported across borders, poetry is subject to different conditions. Poetry is also in a different position from the other literary genres, which can usually be translated into other languages without too much damage. But even though language most frequently attains its most extreme sensitivity and refinement of structure in poetry, one should aim not for real translations, but for re-creations.

If poetry is to be presented to a foreign public, it must of course be defensible in semantic terms. This can usually be managed, but it must also be poetry that has a strength of sound and expression in the other language – and that may prove to be more problematic. Good poems can turn out awkwardly in a foreign language, while less successful poems sometimes gain in strength. A volume of selected poems in the original language will therefore not always be identical with a selection that has been translated into another language.

So re-creation is possible, but these are different poems, and they remain so. The ideal solution would be for the reader of the foreign language to be dissatisfied with this echo of the real thing, and instead to learn the poet’s language so as to be able to read his work in the original.


translated from Danish by David McDuff

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Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 6
Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 7

Note: the posts with the translated text of Chapters I, II and III can be accessed here, here, and here.

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 7

[63-65]

Syntactical accretions can give words unusual weight, but the image is the place where all the original meaning disappears and a new concretion emerges. What is often overlooked is the fact that image-like effects are also attained through devices like sound, rhythm, displacement, crossing and synchronization. All the devices in poetry are more or less image-creating.

Images are not merely thoughts, but summings-up of a different kind: associative leaps. In images elements from widely different spheres are brought together, values that are apparently contrary to one another. Here we meet the impossible, yet it seems obvious. The images in a poem have such a disturbing effect precisely because of their special intensity and sensuous quality.

*

It is not only the individual image that is decisive: much depends on how the images appear within the poem. They must balance, sometimes in a soft and delicate dance. If the images fall too closely they lose weight, and if they point in different directions they cancel themselves out instead of throwing light on one another. They are like spotlights, all of which must be trained on the poem’s idea. Does it sound like a search for harmony? No matter how experimental the work, it is of the essence of art that the work should “open”. In one sense or another, striving is always beauty. The images can form complex inner relationships, but they must speak inwardly, it is in their combination that the leap takes place and a new meaning is created.

*

Poetry’s image-language is not necessarily a two-dimensional value. It is precisely when the metaphor becomes sculpture that a higher degree of sensuous reality is attained. The plasticity of poetry should be a simultaneous expression of thought and feeling, and also contain a philosophical, existential dimension.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 1
Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 2
Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 3
Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 4
Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 5
Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 6

Note: the posts with the translated text of Chapters I, II and III can be accessed here, here, and here.

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 6

[60-63]

The essence of language is also music, phonetics, metrics, atmosphere, mood. Poesie ist ein Zustand der Sprache, Helmut Heissenbüttel has said. Poetry is only one way of using language, but is characterized by a nuancing of expression. Poetry is a question of concentration, a language inside a language, where the crystals are packed closely together.

Poetry is not a mystical act, but taking Helmut Heissenbüttel’s idea further: An anti-grammar, an anti-syntax, a strange passion, a phonetic, acoustic and rhythmic possibility, which plays a part in determining linguistic expression. Poetry is an acrobatics of sound, an orientation in the world. Poetry is a life-form. Poetry is.

As Helmut Heissenbüttel emphasizes, poetry builds on the visual power of language, its musicality and ability to suggest, but also just as much on the area of meaning, of semantics. Poetry’s density of meaning is not a wish to block interpretation, but an attempt to open the way to multiplicity.

*

All creation also contains elements of destruction. Even though words cannot be cleared out of the way, the everyday use of language must be broken down for poetry to come out of it. Rather than something being destroyed, it is more correct to say that elements are separated from one another so that something can be built. The old meanings are what fall apart. Deconstruction in language is therefore not a purely disintegrative movement, but is equally a constructive device.

At some stage in their work all poets will experience phases of linguistic scepticism:

Language that cries so loudly
that there is only One leaf
to all the forests in the mountains around
One drop of the lake
whose shiny calm the body at any moment
may plough into furrows of silver.

If I want to travel beyond this experience of the limitations or inadequacy of linguistic expression, I must discover language’s liberating potential. Language is the prison in which I have complete freedom to tear down walls. Linguistic scepticism is a continuous and at times cynical insistence, not a stage that is prematurely “overcome”. The line between imprisonment and dignity is sometimes a surprisingly fine one.

*

Poetry is not a refuge for emotions. Every conception in language is hard work. This aspect of the poetic is developed in Rilke’s ‘Requiem für Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth’:

- O alter Fluch der Dichter,
die sich beklagen, wo sie sagen sollten,
die immer urteiln über ihr Gefühl
statt es zu bilden; die noch immer meinen,
was traurig ist in ihnen oder froh,
das wussten sie und dürftens im Gedicht
bedauern oder rühmen. Wie die Kranken
gebrauchen sie die Sprache voller Wehleid,
um zu beschreiben, wo es ihnen wehtut,
statt hart sich in die Worte zu verwandeln,
wie sich der Steinmetz einer Kathedrale
verbissen umsetzt in des Steines Gleichmut.

If the poet is to transform himself into words, language must be taken beyond the place where it is used every day. The language of art is therefore different from the one in which we communicate. In poetry the words must have an existence beyond their ordinary meaning, and, like the logic in a bird’s wing, enter into complex relations where musical and acoustic phenomena have precise equivalents with semantic values.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 1
Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 2
Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 3
Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 4
Over the Water I Walk (IV) - 5

Note: the posts with the translated text of Chapters I, II and III can be accessed here, here, and here.

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

[58-60]

Many things have never been given a name, because they are intangible. The depths of the sky and the beating of waves cannot be easily made precise, and yet the sense of infinity can be written as a network of distinctive images.

My poems attempt to give linguistic form to psychological and existential states, or to metaphysical dimensions for which I had no words before. Each word has its own sound and its own meaning, it points to something, but when the word is freed from its referential context it becomes capable of entering into a new totality – and re-emerges in another sphere.

*

Language contains large, abstract words which are particularly difficult to use in a poem: yearning, lack, pain, soul, and so on. Words of that kind cannot support a poem, even though they are deeply felt – or precisely because of that. Instead, it is the poem’s task to support them, in a dialectical tension.

*

When one considers that the material is language and the body is the instrument, the writing of poems is a strangely silent activity.

*

Only when language attains the character of material can it be shaped.

*

To see language solely as a material is too reductive. The words are an independent world freed from the rest of the world. A kind of realm of freedom, a realm of sounds from which the “I” discovers itself as an existing being. Language is a possibility that is one of the most exalted.

*

An animal can produce sounds that signal hunger, or that call to its mate, but it can never name the specific. All we know is that whales sing, or dolphins communicate over long distances. Animals probably have a form of consciousness which human beings have so far managed to suppress, but it is not language in the sense in which human beings develop it. The nuances in our language are unique, and we are equipped with a very impatient instinct to make use of its many functions. Creating, dreaming and remembering.


translated from Danish by David McDuff

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

Note: the posts with the translated text of Chapters I, II and III can be accessed here, here, and here.

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

[56-58]

Norms are bound up with conventions, with the expected. Art involves the opposite. Here all preconceptions must be got out of the way so that something can begin. The words are already there, but the poetic dimension only reveals itself during the creative act. It is when the elements are put together that the work of art arises. What matters is the way in which I use them. The words derive their value from what I put into them. Each time, a conquest and a new creation takes place.

To be a poet requires a certain amount of defiance. I cannot take everything for granted, cannot assume control of language with its lacunae. My editing and instrumentalization are what decide how successful the poem will be.

*

“The Plough, how fast does it go?,” my son asks.

*

Language makes a distinction between the actual world and the world of language, but writing should not be an excuse for avoiding the making of things.

*

Different languages rarely have the same word for the same object. Apart from a few examples of onomatopoeia, there is no relation that connects the sound with the word’s content. A word is not an adequate expression for reality, it is not identical with the object, is rather a symbol in relation to it. The letters are there, but everything else is missing. Language signals absence, but does not rank any lower on the scale of reality for that reason. Language constitutes a part of reality.

*

Even though language does not designate a reality, If I say “bird”, a concrete bird is absent, but the image of a bird is summoned forth. The idea of “bird” appears at the arbitrary sound of the word “bird”. If I say ‘knife’, correspondingly a knife appears on the inner video, but two different individuals will not see the same bird or the same knife. In poetry it is not the object but the word that is the centre. Poetry is an end in itself. The referential function is however a constituent feature of language, which not even a poet can escape… The problem with the critique of language is that poetry is considered in its isolated poetic function, where it is insufficient, because it is art. The condition for art is that one should suspend total referentiality. For language contains degrees of referential meaning. There are poems that point very directly, and others where the words have broken free in such a way that they are inwardly connected in an unusual manner. The words must have "five fingers on each hand", as Sophus Claussen says. The words must be valid. They must be able to catch hold of one another. Or they must function like a molecular model, in which each atom has its own value and can connect with the others in widely differing formations.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

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

Note: the posts with the translated text of Chapters I, II and III can be accessed here, here, and here.

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

[54-56]

I write, and draw a sparkling trail behind me: the Writing – ineradicable – where ‘I’ exist. My self is left behind, seeing differently from before. With each book my fate moves.

*

From the day when as a child I discovered a secret alphabet, a code that was mine, I gave up many of my earlier games, I lived in a different way. Both visibly and invisibly.

*

Individual words are not in themselves poetic, but if all goes well, words added to other words can produce poetry. It is not that the world must be poetic so that I can create poetry, but that I must be able to ascribe a value to words. The transformation into art takes place in words, and it is in concentration that the accumulation happens. It is here that the designated dimension is transformed into symbol or image-value, here that the syntax unfolds or is broken down, it is here that new words emerge and new rhythms, with their own pattern of pressures and tone-scales. In poetry tones and colours are set free, in poetry the words acquire a value beyond the everyday, here musicality and suggestion are very important qualities. And so for the reader, poetry first appears in the encounter with the poem.

Of itself, language is cold, the material is cold. By material I mean the sum of all the signs I use to write poems, but the material can be manipulated. It is I who make it warm and soft. Language is filled with my breathing, follows the movement of my body. Likewise, language is of itself sexless. It is only my noisy behaviour that makes it rise...

With its standard expressions, fixed idioms and figurative meanings language is not much different from a ruin which lays bare life’s transitory nature, its time and history. A concept like ‘eternity’ is static and dead, while poetic language points to the possibility of change.

Language is only language – and language should not be confused with things. I can’t write with the word ‘pen’. There is no agreement between the word and the thing, very rarely does the sound connect with the object. Whether I like it or not, I have to put up with the fact that a leaf is called: Leaf, a washtub: Washtub, and cream: Cream. Damn it, I wish I could have come up first with better words for the ones I find most impossible, the ones that billow like jellyfish in my mouth, but a word is a word and cannot be done away with.

Language has its geological layers. It contains several eras. I am not one of those who adhere to the idea that words have lost their value in a tragic way, or can only express vague reminiscences. The original meaning may have been lost, but one equally that is equally new and valid one can come into being. Language fluctuates. Obsolete expressions don’t necessarily need to be reactivated, but the innate potential of language will go on developing. Thus fresh nuances and fresh entities constantly emerge. So I’m not left with the last ruins of a language. I am filled with verbal visions, and continue to believe in the magic of language in poetry.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

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

Note: the posts with the translated text of Chapters I, II and III can be accessed here, here, and here.