Harvest Moon — Web Exclusive
By Henrik Nordbrandt
Translated by Patrick Phillips
The winter was hard, spring late in coming, the whole summer slate-gray.
I watch bats fling themselves at the moon
that hangs low and red over the darkening beech trees
where I played hide-and-seek as a child.
My ancestors spoke Polish, Spanish, and surely some German.
But I only learned how to vanish in Danish. And very soon thereafter
I wrote this in a place called Söğütözü,
at a bus stop outside of Ankara.
The author of numerous books, Henrik Nordbrandt has been one of the leading Danish poems of his generation since the 1970s. He has lived much of his life outside of Denmark in the Mediterranean, and he received the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 2000.
Patrick Phillips began translating Henrik Nordbrandt's poems while on a Fullbright Scholarship at the University of Copenhagen. His translations from the Danish received the 2001 Sjöberg Prize and have appeared in American Poetry Review, Agni, and New England Review, among many others. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry and completing the manuscript of Cathedral of Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt, forthcoming from Open Letter Press in 2012.
This poem is published in conjunction with Counterfeits, the 18th volume of TWO LINES, which includes more of Patrick Phillips' translations of Henrik Nordbrandt. To learn more and order your own copy, visit this page.