Poet
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Inger Christensen 1935-... country: Denmark language: Danish |
is the author of an impressive oeuvre. Apart from poetry she has written short stories and criticism, and translated work of Paul Celan and Max Frisch. She won international fame with her collections Det (The) and Alfabet (Alphabet) in which she explores the relationship between the world and the self. For her poetry she received the prestigious Swedish Academy Nordic Prize in 1994. The Danish poet and novelist Inger Christensen (1935) made her debut in the early 1960s with two small collections, Lys (Light, 1962) and Græs (Grass, 1963). She followed this up with two novels, one of which, Det malede værelse (The Painted Room, 1976) is now also available in a Dutch translation (Meulenhoff, 2003). This historical novel, counting a mere eighty pages, is an intricate web of diary and narrative, featuring three main characters at the sixteenth-century Ducal Court at Mantua, and revolving around the murals and ceiling frescoes of the Italian baroque artist Mantegna and the triangular relationship involving him, his wife and the Duke’s secretary. With the equally tripartite collection Det (1968, It) she continues her oeuvre, combining self-imposed restrictions of form with great freedom of content. In her collection Alfabet (Alphabet, 1981), the poet again imposes a strict formal regime, with the first fourteen letters of the alphabet forming the initial letters of the poems or cycles of poems. The length of the poems, moreover, depends on their position in the Fibonacci numbers, being 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21..., each number in the sequence being the sum of the preceding two. Christensen’s masterpiece, the sonnet cycle Sommerfugledalen (The Butterfly Valley) appeared in 1991. In the eighteenth century the sonnet cycle was a challenge to members of poetic societies, but it soon deteriorated into mere virtuoso display. In the sonnet cycle each sonnet must conform to the normal properties of the sonnet in verse pattern and rhyme, but the last stanza also serves as the first of the next sonnet, whereas the fifteenth and last sonnet is composed of the first lines of the preceding fourteen. A well-nigh impossible task, yet one which Christensen not only accomplishes brilliantly in form, but with a convincing consistency of content as well. The collection’s theme links the ephemeral butterflies in all their colours and shapes with the motifs of vanitas and mourning. A Dutch translation of the full sonnet cycle is in preparation; Dutch readers are offered a foretaste with the first four sonnets presented at the festival. Author: Annelies van Hees Translated by Ko Kooman Poets: |
