{"id":3502,"date":"2016-05-20T11:44:20","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T18:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alteritas.net\/GXL\/?p=3502"},"modified":"2016-10-25T19:50:07","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T02:50:07","slug":"the-real-danish-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/GXL\/?p=3502","title":{"rendered":"The Real Danish Summer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Early August is not my favorite time to travel on the continent, but that is how things have worked out. Apart from Saarbr\u00fccken and Vienna, old stomping grounds, we\u2019ll spend a week in Copenhagen. As is my wont when I travel to new places, I\u2019ve taken up Danish. As Humpty-Dumpty said, I mean that what I want it to mean.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0 the web. Back then there were not even Post-It flags. You actually had to remember how to find something you had once read.<\/span><\/p>\n

Technological change is a mixed bag.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A beta, e.g.\u00a0my humble self, nonetheless\u00a0has much to gain, though not much lucrative.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Several weeks ago I published a translation from Osip Mandelstam<\/a> 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Canadian poet Doug Jones<\/a>, 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\u2019t. I have no notion about Henrik Nordbrandt<\/a> I haven\u2019t extracted from the web. Yet I feel I know both him and the\u00a0older but roughly contemporary Swedish\u00a0poet\u00a0Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer<\/a>. The second Nordbrandt version below evokes in my mind the two poems by Transtr\u00f6mer which I have so far translated (Fr\u00e5n juli 90<\/a> and Sp\u00e5r<\/a>).\u00a0How artificial is this intelligence? Not for me to say. I am inside this box and so cannot run a Turing test<\/a>\u00a0on its output.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a subtext in Nordbrandt’s\u00a0Den rigtige dan<\/i>sk sommer<\/em>, one signaled by his\u00a0choice of the definite as opposed to the indefinite article in the\u00a0title and reflected in my own: den rigtige<\/em>, not en rigtig <\/em>Danish summer, the<\/u> real not a<\/u> 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<\/a> (Danish-ness) as a potentially totalizing construction of Danish identity. To my mind, though, he\u00a0is after even bigger game. At stake is the concept of \u201cness-ness\u201d, 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\u00a0the standard translation by Thom Satterlee, who chose to refer to “summerness” rather than just “summer” in his otherwise carefully literal translation<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These versions from the Danish belong in a batch\u00a0with some of my others by the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa and the Catalan Gabriel Ferrater. See, for example, The Strangest of All\u00a0<\/a>or Icons<\/a>, themselves akin to my \u201cphenomenological\u201d poems linked here.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n