I see them with my blurred understanding - more Inger Christensen

All of Inger Christensen’s poetry in English comes from one translator, Susanna Nied, who worked closely with the poet, who knew English well.  So I have been able to enjoy six books of Christensen’s poetry, five tiny and one the beast, it, I described yesterday.

The first two, Light (1962) and Grass (1963) seem typical of a lot of European poetry written at the time.  I would never have guessed that the highly formalized, schematic, and long it (1969) could have grown out of them.

Christensen also wrote some novels around this time.  Azorno (1967) and The Painted Room (1976) are in English, both translated by Denise Newman.  They both seem to me like good but unexceptional imitations of the French New Novel.  The Painted Room is about Andrea Mantegna and the perils of being an artist in the Mantuan court, which could be pretty exciting in different hands.  These are formalist, intellectual novels. 

Likely I am misunderstanding most of these works.  Luckily, from here on out Christensen returned to poetry, and the poems are shorter, warmer, and easier.  “Luckily” really just applies to “easier” – I don’t mind the help.  The books are Letter in April (1979), alphabet (1981) and Butterfly Valley: A Requiem (1991).

Since alphabet is built from a two-part scheme combining the alphabet with Fibonacci numbers, that is not the poem to use to make my case:

I write like wind
that writes in water
with stylized monotony  (59)

The formal poetry in fact is personal, working with the world as she sees it.  But it does help that Letter in April has people, characters, the poet and her daughter on a vacation in Italy:

We arrive early one morning
almost before we’re awake.
The air is pale, a bit cool,
and it curls a bit over our skin
like a membrane of moisture,
We talk about spiderwebs
– how do they work –
about the rain that washed the water
as we slept along the way
while we rolled
over the earth.
Then we’re at the house
and we bathe in the dust of the gravel walk
as among sparrows.  (103)

The next poem continues the water imagery as it moves into the house (“this waterfall / of images”), but another direction is offered as each poem in a section is marked so that the poems can be read in at least two different orders.  I can stay outside and follow the spiderweb theme rather than the house theme.  The result is not too different stories but rather two different poetic ways of thinking.

Who knows,
maybe the pomegranate
itself is aware
that it’s called
something else.
Who knows,
maybe I myself
am called
something else
than myself.  (109)

the title poem of Butterfly Valley lacks people, aside from the poet,  but has butterflies.  She is in Macedonia, watching the butterflies.  The work is a sequence of fifteen sonnets, as traditional a scheme as Christensen uses, except – of course there is another rule – the first line of a poem is the last line of the previous poem.  Then the fifteenth and final poem is nothing but the first lines of each of the previous fourteen poems.  Every scrap of that last poem has thus appeared three times. 

Up they soar, the planet’s butterflies,
pigments from the warm body of the earth,
cinnabar, ochre, phosphor yellow, gold
a swarm of basic elements aloft.

Is this flickering of wings only a shoal
of light particles, a quirk of perception?
Is it the dreamed summer hour of my childhood
shattered as by lightning lost in time?

No, this is the angel of light, who can paint
himself as dark mnemosyne Apollo,
as copper, hawk moth, tiger swallowtail.

I see them with my blurred understanding
as feather in the coverlet of haze
in Brajčino Valley’s noon-hot air.  (Sonnet I)

And now you have the first two lines of the last poem, too.  “Butterfly Valley” is the most openly beautiful poetry of this tricky poet, beautiful in the way most people understand beauty.  But Christensen finds beauty in form, in repetition, less an antipoet than a poet of the greatest possible purity.

Build into the rules of the game the inevitable breach of the rules as if it were a rule - Inger Christensen's it

Build into the rules of the game the inevitable breach of the rules as if it were a rule.  As if inevitable death were a natural turn.  Needing only to be rephrase right.  O death where is thy breach?  So changed now that the system catches hold.  So free.

I have been reading, over the last couple of years, the works available in English of Danish poet Inger Christensen.  The above is from early on (p. 4 of Susanna Nied’s translation)  in it (1969).  The word “it,” with no capitalization, that’s the title.  In Danish, det. 

It.  That’s it.  That started it.  It is.  Goes on.  Moves.  Beyond.  Becomes.  Becomes it and it and it.

Those are the first lines, while up top are the last, of the first part of the PROLOGOS of it, which in Danish consisted of 66 lines of 66 characters each.  The translator had to relax that last constraint.  The second part of the PROLOGOS is two poems of 33 lines each, 66 characters across, on to the eighth part which has 66 poems of one line of 66 characters. 

Someone walks into a house and looks at the street from his window.

Someone walks out of a house and looks at his window from the street.

Someone walks down a street and looks at the others on this way.

Etc. for 63 more lines, remembering that in Danish each line is exactly the same length.  Passages like this can have the feel of reading a completed crossword puzzle.  In translation.

This is just the prologue!  Each of the poems subsequent parts has its own formal restrictions or purpose, some relatively traditional.  The first connection to A. R. Ammons is obvious – it is another typewriter poem, like, Tape for the Turn of the Year, where ideas about how the poem will look comes before ideas about content, and will inevitably, or so the poet thinks or guesses, influence the content.

The other link with Ammons is that it is, like Sphere, a cosmogony, a poem about the creation of all things, in the tradition of Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony.  Anne Carson covers all of this in the introduction to the New Directions edition, stealing my fun.  Epigrams in specific sections link the poem to William Blake and Novalis a number of French wild men like Bataille and Lautréamont, ecstatic Romantics:

a black storm in a sealed cave
black lilacs smelling of sulfur
black snow

conversations with death:
freedom freedom freedom

the snow falls
piles itself in great drifts on the sky
and the sky is completely black

In May the lilacs will bloom; they must!  (82)

it is maybe a poem where a question like “is it good” is beside the point.  Not always, perhaps not often.  Christensen, in the spirit of antipoetry, is writing poetry where “the standard expressions, torn loose, flutter around, turned to dust, tentatively seek a form…  the place where the unexpressed in the expressionless finds expression” (10).

As strange as it is, or because it is strange, and because the poem covers sex, drugs, ecology, and anti-war protests, it was a huge hit in Denmark.  From the translator:

Some of its lines are so familiar to Danes that they have slipped into conversational use.  For example,  the journal of Denmark’s city planners took its title, Soft City, from a line in det.  (p. x)

That last line is like a transmission from a distant planet.

It’s not random
It’s not the world
It is random
It is the world
It’s the whole thing in a mass of different people
It’s the whole thing in a mass of difference
It’s the whole thing in a mass
It’s the whole thing
That’s it
It                                           (p. 237, last lines)

Denmark, Sweden, Norway - more Scandinavian books - I can't read all this

More Scandinavian literature, this time from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.  I won’t read it all, I am no kind of expert, I am stuck with English, etc.  But it is easy to get me excited about literature, so suggestions are most welcome.  And if anything looks appealing, perhaps we can read it together.

Denmark

At the forefront are Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.  The former I read in some quantity just before I started Wuthering Expectations, which was a while ago, I admit, but close enough that I doubt I will revisit him now.  The latter is, I fear, a philosopher, and thus spinach.  In real life, I like spinach, so that is just a metaphor.

More to the point are two short books by Jens Peter Jacobsen, the 1880 novel Niels Lyhne and the 1882 collection Mogens and Other Stories.  Jacobsen has had a strange career in English, kept alive by the glowing testimony of Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, where Rilke seems to rank Jacobsen with the Bible.  I should see for myself.

Another novel, Pelle the Conqueror (1910) by Martin Andersen Nexø, I have meant to read for twenty-five years since I saw the magnificent 1987 Bille August film adaptation.  The novel will unfortunately not feature Max von Sydow, but it likely has other virtues.  It is long – the film only covered a fraction of the book – and grim.  I have no idea how it is written.

Isak Dinesen’s work is from the 1930s and later, but so many of her stories are set in Denmark’s past that she would fit well with the older writers.   I am thinking of Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and Winter’s Tales (1942) in particular.

By chance, unconnected to this project, I began reading the contemporary conceptual poet Inger Christensen, and I would like to continue my study of her work.  And I mean study – anyone want to help me work on her cosmic long 1969 poem it?  It (it) features elaborate mathematical patterns – tempting, yes?

Sweden

Even poking around, I still know nothing about Swedish literature.  August Strindberg obviously tops the list, and I hope to read a number of his plays, ranging from the 1888 Miss Julie to the strange 1907 Ghost Sonata.  But there are also novels, stories, essays, some freshly translated.  Please, I beg you, recommendations, guidance.

The Queen’s Diadem (1834) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist is a novel I encountered a year ago in this post by seraillon.  It is either deeply original, or a knockoff of E. T. A. Hoffmann, or something in between.  The Hoffmann connection by itself would give me something to write about.

Hjalmar Söderberg is another novelist I met through book blogs.  I have read a number of convincing posts about his short, intense 1905 novel Doctor Glas.  If I like it, there are a couple of other Söderberg books in English.

Norway

Henrik Ibsen, of course.  I have read six Ibsen plays, I realize, yet I still feel at sea.  I want to read or re-read a good chunk of them, although I will likely follow conventional opinion and ignore his early phase.  Critics are always dividing Ibsen’s work into phases.  Expect lots of Ibsen.

Knut Hamsun had a long, complicated career, but I know him from his early novels Hunger (1890) and Pan (1894).  Talk about intense.  I would like to revisit those and also read another from the same run, Mysteries (1892).  Then – then I don’t know.  Hunger would likely make my Top 50 Novels of the 19th Century list, if I were to make such a thing.

Off the track – far, far off – is Farthest North (1897) by Fridtjof Nansen, a favorite of min kone, the account of his insane attempt to reach the North Pole by freezing his ship in the winter ice.  Eventually, he just decided to walk.  Utterly nuts.  Sounds wonderful.

Now, some trouble.  Henrik Pontoppidan, Karl Gjellerup, Selma Lagerlöf, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Verner von Heidenstam, Frans Eemil Sillanpää – the early Scandinavian Nobelists, the ones who, unlike Hamsun or Sigrid Undset lost their place in English, or never had one.  I gaze upon these names in ignorant awe.

I have often thought that it would be a great book blog project to sort through these and other old prize winners.  I do not believe it is my project.  Yet already comments in the previous post have me warily eying a long, recently translated Pontoppidan novel, the 1904 Lucky Per, which sounds either like a standard attempt to move Naturalism into Danish, or else something much stranger.  Hmm hmm hmm.

Please feel free to correct my errors and recommend more books.