Pâté de Foie

As part of the publication of the newest TWO LINES, we're featuring short essays by translators on the pieces they have in the new volume. Today we have Susanna Nied on the great Danish poet Inger Christensen. Nied translated three of Christensen's poems for Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, the newest TWO LINES.

If you're intrigued by what you see, you can order Some Kind of Beautiful Signal directly from the Center right here, or on Amazon right here, or Indiebound right here.

It was 1975. I was browsing through the library at the University of California in San Diego. Years earlier, as an exchange student, I had developed a taste for Danish literature. Now I wanted something in Danish to read for pleasure. In a bibliography of contemporary Scandinavian poets I found a listing for Inger Christensen, an author new to me. Only two book titles followed her name: Lys [Light], 1962, and Græs [Grass], 1963. "Nature poetry?" I wondered. "Let's find out." The librarians, patient souls, searched for weeks. Finally they located one copy of Lys, on the other side of the country, at the University of Virginia. Interlibrary loan brought the book.

Again I encounter
a light in the language
the encapsuled words
that exist to be loved
and repeated until they are simple
. . . .

Language and light! I was hooked. Soon a copy of Græs arrived, this one from the University of Washington. A slim volume like Lys. Poems compact as seeds. The poet's voice soft, inevitable as grass itself. And the more I read those two books, the more they fascinated me. Images from daily life—a simple room, water birds, gray haze, a thorny branch in frost—became insights into the human heart, the human mind, and human language. Again and again I found myself asking, "How does she do that?"

That's how I started translating Inger Christensen.

It was 1982. February. I had taken a semester away from my job as a lecturer at San Diego State University. After a year of work on Christensen's monumental det (it, 1969) collaborating with her via air mail, I was arriving in Copenhagen to meet her and revise the translation. I stepped off the train into the cold, searching for someone tall and poetic-looking. A little boy in a parka saw me and pointed, tugging at the hand of a small, plump, slightly flustered woman laden with a full shopping bag and a baguette. Here was my poet. She welcomed me in her soft Danish, introduced her eight-year-old son, and whisked me home to dinner. Later, I told her that I had visualized her as tall and dark, with a house like an alchemist's, full of exotic things. She laughed. "When you like someone's poems and then meet the poet," she said, "it's not so different from liking pâté de foie and then meeting a goose."

That's how I became friends with Inger Christensen.

It was 1984. I went to hear Denise Levertov read at San Diego State. Quiet, low-key voice, simple words, devastating power. As the audience sat stunned, I sat remembering another poet's quiet voice and devastating poetry: Inger Christensen and her 1981 alfabet.

apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;
bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

cicadas exist; chicory, chromium,
citrus trees; cicadas exist;
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death

. . .

I mailed a handful of translations to Denise Levertov. A reply came fast. "Your package arrived just now. . . . I groaned, 'Oh, God, yet another aspiring poet who thinks I'm some sort of nonprofit agent!' Then looked in (pessimistically) and was immediately grabbed. Apricot trees exist!! Read the whole thing at top speed. Loved it. What a discovery. I am sending it to my own publisher. Thank you for giving me the pleasure, and finding an affinity between her and me." [Denise Levertov. Personal correspondence. April 25, 1984]

That's how people react to Inger Christensen.

It was 1992. I sat on my sofa, about to open a package from Inger, her newest volume of poetry. Just then a neighbor knocked at the door. "Come see this," she urged. I stepped outside into clouds of butterflies. They were painted ladies—common in Denmark, less so in Southern California. They swirled overhead, blanketed the bushes, landed on sidewalks, perched on our arms. In my 20-plus years in San Diego, nothing like this had happened before. They were beautiful, yet somehow also disquieting. Back in the house, I opened Inger's Sommerfugledalen (Butterfly Valley).

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.
. . .
And who has conjured this encounter forth
with peace of mind and fragments of sweet lies?
. . .
My ear gives answer with its deafened ringing:
This is a death that looks through its own eyes
regarding you from wings of butterflies.

That's why I love translating Inger Christensen. Her poems are gifts: clear vision and unflinching focus. By revealing language and symbol as the basic human music, she opens ways to the inexpressible.

Publication information for excerpts quoted in this post:

First excerpt from Inger Christensen, Light. Translated by Susanna Nied. Forthcoming from New Directions, 2011.
Second excerpt from from Inger Christensen, alphabet. Translated by Susanna Nied. New York: New Directions, 2001.
Third excerpt from from Inger Christensen, Butterfly Valley: A Requiem. Translated by Susanna Nied. New York: New Directions, 2004.