Early August is not my favorite time to travel on the continent, but that is how things have worked out. Apart from Saarbrücken and Vienna, old stomping grounds, we’ll spend a week in Copenhagen. As is my wont when I travel to new places, I’ve taken up Danish. As Humpty-Dumpty said, I mean that what I want it to mean.
I’ve no illusions about what a few months of desultory study will achieve, though probably more will be than thirty years ago, since now I have the help of the web. Back then there were not even Post-It flags. You actually had to remember how to find something you had once read.
Technological change is a mixed bag. The social media have mind-numbing and no doubt obesity-producing effects on the gammas, deltas and epsilons of our brave new world. The alphas, that notorious one percent, will continue to reap bounteous wealth therefrom. That’s the way the law’s been writ.
A beta, e.g. my humble self, nonetheless has much to gain, though not much lucrative.
Several weeks ago I published a translation from Osip Mandelstam based on a yellowing typescript bearing fading handwritten notations from a Russian friend who shared my sense of poetry. The Danish translations below are instead spin-offs of the internet, its host of search engines and language apps.
The Canadian poet Doug Jones, who passed a few months ago, was a friend and a mentor. I think often of his observation that we are more inclined to like a poem by someone we know than someone we don’t. I have no notion about Henrik Nordbrandt I haven’t extracted from the web. Yet I feel I know both him and the older but roughly contemporary Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. The second Nordbrandt version below evokes in my mind the two poems by Tranströmer which I have so far translated (Från juli 90 and Spår). How artificial is this intelligence? Not for me to say. I am inside this box and so cannot run a Turing test on its output.
There is a subtext in Nordbrandt’s Den rigtige dansk sommer, one signaled by his choice of the definite as opposed to the indefinite article in the title and reflected in my own: den rigtige, not en rigtig Danish summer, the real not a real (he does have the latter in the body of his text, where the context is different). Nordbrandt on occasion criticized the notion of danskhed (Danish-ness) as a potentially totalizing construction of Danish identity. To my mind, though, he is after even bigger game. At stake is the concept of “ness-ness”, the seduction, to which we are deeply susceptible, of believing abstractions mean what they appear to say, at least as compared with the chaotic glut of sensual experience, the tumult of psychic life, the pell-mell tumble of language. This dimension of Nordbrandt’s work is reflected in the standard translation by Thom Satterlee, who chose to refer to “summerness” rather than just “summer” in his otherwise carefully literal translation.
These versions from the Danish belong in a batch with some of my others by the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa and the Catalan Gabriel Ferrater. See, for example, The Strangest of All or Icons, themselves akin to my “phenomenological” poems linked here.
- Tethering — For Davo
- Shinny
- Iris
- Beauty Sleep
- Stoic Garden
- Beauty is the Memory of the Flesh
- Making Nothing Happen
- Insomnia at Forty Below
Most are also, like Den rigtige dansk sommer, unrhymed or “mute” sonnets.
All of this might sound pedantic. Maybe it is, but what I am really wondering about as I write is what the weather will be in Copenhagen the second week of August.
***
The Real Danish Summer
The real Danish summer will be what this sonnet
is about, since whatever surrounds us should fit
into not thirteen or fifteen but fourteen verses,
everything in its proper place, form and content fused,
just as I am myself at one with this summer day,
itself at one with Danishness. Well and perfectly true,
except this poem wouldn’t be itself if it didn’t
point out that nothing can be one with anything else.
There must be spaces between. Still Danish summer
is when and where I could best do without myself.
I would have let nature speak in simile on my behalf
had not that mown lawn’s likely words made it risky.
There is a tall, red chimney, the crematorium’s.
What solace to be at long last free of oneself!
After the Danish of Henrik Nordbrandt,
Den rigtige dansk sommer (literal translation)
En rigtig dansk sommer skal være temaet for denne sonnet:
For det må da være rigtigt at det, som omgiver en, ikke skal siges
i tretten eller femten linier, men i fjorten: Sådan vil jeg mene
alting kommer på sin plads, så form og indhold bliver ét
sådan som jeg selv er ét med sommeren
som er ét med danskheden
der er det helt rigtige: Men det ville ikke være dette digt
hvis det ikke påpegede, at ingen kan være ét med noget andet.
Plads skal der være: En rigtig dansk sommer
er nok der hvor jeg bedst kunne undvære mig selv.
Og jeg lod gerne naturen tale på mine vegne, om ikke det vulgære
grønne havde gjort det for pinligt:
Midt i det står en høj rød skorsten: Den hører til krematoriet.
Hvilken trøst langt om længe at blive fri for sig selv!
Distraught Dream
A burst of dust obscured the sun,
spilled down the mountain slopes
to my love
and her lover’s
winter lair.
A footbridge swayed under
my steps as I stumbled
on without direction.
Just as far over that span
have I come as since childhood,
so death will be met in its place
somewhere between me now
and those gray shafts on the opposite shore.
(This all lasted less than an instant
– what rests of being.)
After the Danish of Henrik Nordbrandt,
Drøm om fortvivlelse (literal translation)
En støvet sky gik for solen
og lagde bjergsiden ned
til et vinterleje
for min elskede
og hendes elsker.
En bro gungrede under mine fødder
men mine skridt
havde ingen retning.
Der var lige så langt over broen
som jeg var kommet fra min barndom.
Så døden måtte findes
et sted mellem mig og de grå pile
på den modsatte bred.
Det hele varede mindre end et minut
men resten af verden.