About
the Poets & Translators
Katarina Frostenson (1953-)
lives in Stockholm. Her poetic work extends over ten
or so volumes. Her monodramas have been produced on
the stage and broadcast as radio plays in many countries.
She has written the libretto of an opera (The City)
by the Swedish composer Sven-David Sandström.
A number of prizes have come her way, including the
Swedish Academy's Bellman Prize and she has been twice
nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize.
Her poetic world reveals itself through a mosaic of
poetic shards. Poems are crafted with words she has
permitted into her poetic treasure trove. They become
pieces in an ever-shifting puzzle as new poems are
constantly created, the process continuing on through
a succession of poetry collections. She is a member
of the Swedish Academy.
Lene Henningsen (1967-)
Her works include seven collections of poetry, each
of which reflects a natural poetic talent. Touching
the air with her eyes closed, she begins to open them,
adapts to the light, makes note of the emerging forms.
In addition to poetry she has written lyric drama.
She is the recipient of the Claus Rifbjerg Debutant
Prize For Poets (awarded by the Danish Academy) and
the Danish Writer's Union's Emil Aarestrup Medal.
She lives in Copenhagen.
Einar Mar Gudmundsson
(1954-) Translated into many languages, he is perhaps
Iceland's best-known writer. He has written novels
and short stories in addition to poetry, is in fact
less known as a poet than as a novelist. Numerous
awards have been bestowed upon him including the Nordic
Council's Prize for Literature. His work is resolutely
life-affirming and he peers into the darkness with
little trepidation. He lives in Reykjavik, that small
place teeming with writers, musicians and late night
discussions of ferocious intensity.
Inger Christensen (1935-)
Denmark's most celebrated poet of the day. To the
delight of her readers she is finally being discovered
by the non-Danish world, with translations into various
languages, including English. Born in the seaside
town of Vejle on the mainland of Jutland, she has
lived in Copenhagen for many years. Her works include
several collections of poetry, drama and radio plays
(a literary form still very much alive in Germany
and Scandinavia). She is the author of a number of
prize-winning essays on poetry and the arts. Inger
Christensen is also a translator of writers into Danish,
including Birgitta Trotzig who also appears in this
volume. Her poetic work is characteristically elaborated
through various systems, mathematical sometimes or
poetic (a circle of sonnets). And she has a marvellous
ear.
Birgitta Trotzig (1929-)
Deep and full of truth. She lives in the old university
town of Lund, in southern Sweden. She has published
a number of what might be described as poetic novels.
Though she is a member of the Swedish Academy and
respected in her own country as a writer of the highest
order and though she has been translated into a number
of languages, she has never before been translated
into English. Why this should be is a mystery. She
is the recipient of various awards including the Selma
Lagerlöf Prize for Literature and the Gerard
Bonniers Prize. The book from which the selections
here have been made, Sammanhang Material, was nominated
for the Nordic CouncilÕs Literature Prize.
Willum Peder Trellund
(1944-) is one of the few true wielders of poetic
fire in Denmark. His poetry is that of a man who has
truly been through heaven and hell and survived both.
To hear him read can be a life-testing experience.
He simply lives and breathes poetry. If you want to
meet him you have to visit his pub. There he will
greet you with warmth and intensity, no matter who
you are.
Birgitta Lillpers (1958-)
Born and raised in Orsa, Sweden, in the rolling countryside
to the north of Stockholm (Dalarna), she lives in
the house of her birth. She is the author of several
books of poetry as well as novels. Her poetry haunts
you for days after you have heard her read it, a musical
experience no one is likely to forget. She is the
recipient of Aftonbladet's Literature Prize and Restaurang
Prinsens Prize for Literature. Hers is a gentle way
of reflecting. One imagines her standing alone on
a field in Sweden, listening...
Stein Mehren (1935-) Lives
in Oslo, Norway. He is the author of over twenty poetry
collections and is an accomplished essayist. After
living for a year in Denmark, he took up painting,
an enterprise he often combines with poetry. He is
no "post-modernist" relativist. No fan of
the arid terrain of semiotics. He is a born poet whose
poems sing of love and he is not afraid of pointing
out the real enemies of mankind, those things that
are inhuman, cold, of the beast. Several of his published
books combine his paintings with his poems. A clear
and forceful head living side by side storms of the
heart. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including
the Norwegian Academy's Literature Prize.
Didda (1964-) Born in
Selfoss, Iceland, she grew up in Reykjavik where she
now lives. She has written some poetry and two novels,
both of which have caused quite a stir in Iceland,
for their bare honesty. She is seen as a fiery speaker
of the truth, a shatterer of false images. She has
collaborated with a number of Icelandic singers (including
her friend Björk), most recently Magga Stina.
She has travelled to various European countries to
read her work, sometimes with music, sometimes alone.
Bernard Scudder (1955-)
is a distinguished translator of Icelandic into English.
He has translated old things, like Eigil's Saga and
the Voluspa (The Prophecy) and new things, Thor Vilmjamsson's
novel, Justice Undone and Einar Mar Gudmundsson's
Angels of the Universe as well as a number of Icelandic
poets. He was short-listed for the Aristeon Literary
Award in 1999. Born in Canterbury, England, he somehow
found his way to Iceland in 1977 and has lived there
ever since.
Gordon Walmsley (1949-)
lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. His most recent collection
of poetry is Terebinthos
(Salmon, 1999).
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Reviews
Review of Fire & Ice in POETRY
IRELAND REVIEW, Autumn/Winter 2005
Stuck in the old geographic model of
core and periphery, the Scandinavian countries have
long had to struggle for inclusion in the continent's
cultural imagination. Topographical isolation is partly
to blame, but so too are the fiendish intricacies
of the regions' languages. Poetry from Scandinavia
has perhaps made the least impact of its cultural
exports. This is true of its impact even here in Ireland,
where one would expect our long history of contact
with Scandinavia to have generated at least some interest.
It is fitting then that Salmon, an Irish publisher,
should be responsible for Fire and Ice, an anthology
of translations from nine Northern poets, edited by
Gordon Walmsley.
'What is written will avenge itself',
writes Denmark's Lene Henningsen, and this is exactly
what is happening in the translations available here.
For the most part they are loyal to the kind of language
one might expect from a land of snow and sharp mountains.
Though there is an occasional drift towards melodrama
to be found in the words, their stoicism sometimes
replaced by artifice, the failures in this anthology
are far outweighed by the successes.
Walmsley has chosen well, and the poetry
is seldom at a loss to solidly conjure the realities
of northern living. 'The Faeroese was trying to tell
/ the Greenlanders I was a nice person', writes Icelandic
poet Didda of her experiences aboard the Atlantic
trawler. The three poems she has included in the book
show the benefits of her own work as one of the translators.
'I am my own opposition,' she says in 'Passion', and
her work displays the honesty of a true poetry well
capable of gutting open the psyche of her land. In
'Iceland's Honour', she tells us she 'tried to gather
all the inferiority complexes / we small nations have
into one,' and it is along this road that the best
of her poems travel. More of her work would have been
a welcome inclusion.
In Katarina Frostenson's poetry, the
reader finds the deep connectedness which characterises
the Northern peoples. 'We resemble one another,' she
begins. 'There is hardly any difference.' The two
long poems translated here, 'Negative, Twinkle' and
'Tempest' develop this theme, but are quick to remind
us that the intricate relationships within Scandinavia
are a result of their collective marginalisation:
'I stalk the border world,' she writes. 'I will hound
you to the rim.'
Meditations on bordres and divisions
also drive other writers collected in Fire and Ice.
Birgitta Trotzig's prose poetry is consumed by the
concepts of thresholds and dividing lines, of being
'not on this side, not on the other side.' The long
series of excerpts from her Sammanhang published here
are her first English translations. They do not disappoint,
revealing a keenly focused poetic talent through a
series of raw landscapes and, more soothingly, depictions
of new life:
The delicate
cranium of a child is a fullness of
completion no other form knows.
The eyelids
of a child are woven into
transparency. In its pupils
the world moves within a mirror.
Lene Henningsen's contribution is slightly
different from the rest. Her four poems are accompanied
by another section of seven untitled pieces, 'Thoughts
on Poetry'. However, this poetic discussion of the
creative process is bereft of the hooks found in some
of her other vrse, particularly 'Underground', with
its stylised typographical punctuation.
Following Henningsen, the reader is
presented with a poetry which could not be more different.
Einar Mar Gudmundsson is probably Iceland's best-known
writer, and the work presented here, solid traditional
poems on contemporary Icelandic subjects, serves to
reinfoce that impression. The language is deceptively
simple. 'He walked from the quayside / and took a
cab that drove him / along the rain-grey streets /
where sorry houses passed by.' Yet despite this focus
on the ordinary, Mar Gudmundsson's poetry seldom shies
from the questinos posed by his nation's curious relationship
with the rest of the globe. In 'A Farewell to Arms',
he writes: 'This is the cliff... / the cliff / where
an abandoned / radar dish lies in the fog / sleeping
without contact / with the world.' Certainly Mar Gudmundsson
represents a major northern talent and his inclusion
here is one of the highlights of the anthology.
Fire and Ic also presents work by Inger
Christensen, Willum Peder Trellund, Birgitta Lillpers
and Stein Mehren. The anthology is a fine primer of
poetry from the near-familiar traditions of Denmark,
Norway and Sweden, but it is with the inclusion of
poets from Iceland that the collection shines. Too
often overlooked by Western Europe, Iceland's strong
showing here is perhaps an editorial reminder that
poetry is a universal compulsion practised in even
the furthest lands, and that now more than ever we
should not forget its importance in defining our personal
relationship with the world, however far from the
core we may find ourselves. In 'The Eye of Chaos',
Mar Gudmundsson distils just this moral for us:
Do
not talk about
large nations and small nations
outposts, corners and peripheries.
This
is a globe; its centre
rests beneath your feet
and shifts its ground and
follows
you wherever you go.
© Copyright Poetry Ireland
Review 2005.
Books Ireland,
Summer 2004. Review by Fred Johnston.
It is hardly a secret that European
poetry (for one example) is infinitely more stylistically,
as well as politically, exciting and imaginative than
our own. Even a half-baked amateur translator such
as myself knows that.
Hats off, then, to Salmon Poetry,
for producing a handsome anthology of Scandinavian
and 'North' poetry in English for us, the product
of ruminations and meditations by Gordon Walmsley,
a poet who lives in Denmark, working with Bernard
Scudder and a poet named Didda. "Where but in
Iceland," Walmsley asks, "could there exist
a special department of the government whose task
is to confer with elemental beings who might be disturbed
by building or highway projects?" Well, an Irish
cynic might observe, we have tribunals for that sort
of thing here, and the discovery of elemental beings
who seem to inhabit places where they deny they ever
were.
Some of the poets here have not
been translated into English before and so their appearance
is the difference and variety of style; from the almost-prose
appearance, the 'récits' taste, of the work
of Sweden's Katarina Frostenson to the enigmatic prose-poetry
and straight versing of Norway's Stein Mehren (both
of them born in 1953).
| In the poem: No guide. No dictator. |
So proclaims Danish poet Lene Henningsen
(b. 1967) in some poeticised thoughts on poetry; words
which would be in themselves enough to frighten the
grants off many a young Irish poet. Sweden's Birgitta
Trotzig is not afraid to ask awkward questions, for
example about the relationship between art and the
world:
| Now what is the connection between
art and the natural world? Where does imagination's
space arise? |
Didda, born in Iceland in 1964, has
collaborated with that other ageing angel of the enigmatic,
Bjork; 'Iceland's Honour' is a tough, éngagé
poem in which the narrator, workin on a trawler,
tried to gather all the inferiority
complexes
we small nations have into one, but the only
thing I felt was this active empathy
and fathomless interest in the effects of firewater. |
As in Ireland, a pint of plain (or
its Icelandic equivalent) is your only man when the
political going gets rough. The work here seems to
suggest that these poets, consciously or otherwise,
tread a slim path between the upper air and the lower,
between the real and the phantasmagorical, aware all
the time that silence is the enemy of life itself
and someone, always, should have something to say,
however fantastical. In this they differ functionally
from many of our own poets, for whom either an addict's
fondness for fields and soil and the like is tempered
with a feeling for the personal and the cosily confined,
or the know and the immediate takes precedence over
the world-wide, the politics of a greater place. This,
of course, is possibly an objectionable generalisation.
But some of the work here would not be out of place
alongside that of, say, Maurice Scully, and it is
a pity that more Irish poets have not let themselves
go a little more, leaped out of Kavanagh's untidy
bed into the great coloured, musical hothouse of the
imagination.
© Copyright Books Ireland 2004
Review of Fire & Ice in World
Literature Today, published by the University of Oklahoma,
September-December 2005
GORDON WALMSLEY has undertaken a laudable
task: to publish and translate (with the exception
of the Icelandic poems) a selection of texts by the
Nordic countries' leading poets. Readers will wonder,
of course: Why these nine poets? One must assume personal
preference, and the editor states his criteria clearly
in a brief preface. He quotes one of his poets, the
Dane Willum Trellund, who pronounces: "Unless
you have been / both in Heaven and Hell / I don't
believe your word." Walmsley prefers poets who
know both darkness and light--poets who move across
the threshold that takes them into that dark inner
world that may separate them from other human beings.
Walmsley is right when he states that these journeys
into such an inner world take courage, but he might
also realize that those sojourns may bring the reader
close to a world fairly difficult to enter.
To put it differently: in a sense,
Fire and Ice is a testimony to a type of criticism
called reception aesthetics, a school that gives,
in essence, preeminence to the reader. That is legitimate,
but, in this case, what makes wonderful sense to one
reader may not matter to the next. Some may swoon
over Inger Christensen's systematic poems, others
may find them dull. Some find beauty in Katarina Frostenson's
texts, others may find them utterly inaccessible.
In most cases, Walmsley's selection of poets results
in texts that take readers into private realities.
However, there are exceptions. Stein Mehren's splendid
poem "The Summer House" captures the common
experience of closing up a beloved summer place and
then returning to that haunting place during the winter
months. The poems of Didda, a raw and gutsy female
voice, conclude the volume with some frank and direct
texts that conjure up very tough experiences.
It seems that Walmsley is implicitly
making the creative process a subtheme of Fire and
Ice, for several poets write on "thoughts of
poetry," and in a marvelous text, Einar Mar Gudmundsson
imagines Homer arriving in Reykjav’k and questioning
a cab driver about storytelling in Iceland; the cab
driver's response says a lot about Nordic poetry.
Walmsley's selection shows that the poets' query as
to what they are doing as they write continues to
haunt those people who try to create well-wrought
urns--even if they have broken (with) the forms of
the past.
The texts read well--as poetry, not
as translations. I hope that this collection will
be adopted for college classrooms. It deserves to
be.
Niels Ingwersen University of Wisconsin,
Madison
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