Nordic Poets

I've started to get interested in Scandinavian poetry. I think I've mentioned before that I have Danish and Swedish blood in me from both lines of my family.

Sadly neither language was passed on to me. My father was half Danish on his mother's side, with a Swedish grandmother, but my grandmother died when he was eleven, in the middle of WWII, and contact was lost with her family and my father simply gave up on both languages.

My mother had Danish blood on her mother's side too, but was raised by her father's maiden aunt, after a short-lived marriage between her much older father and very young mother, so again there was no handing on of the language. Indeed I only confirmed her Danish connection by tracing my mother's maternal line after her death, as it wasn't a topic that our family ever discussed.

But I thought it would be interesting to read some Danish poetry, even if it is just in translation, as I often think my tastes and sensibilities are not really all that Scottish.

And from the little bits of research that I've done I've decided that there couldn't be a better place to start than with Inger Christensen.

Here are two extracts of her work:

1) The Butterfly Valley, a series of 15 sonnets, with the final sonnet being made up of lines from the first fourteen and

2) a photograph of a section of The Alphabet on a wall in Copenhagen with an extract of the poem. "Christensen wrote this masterpiece 1981. She uses the alphabet (from a [“apricots”] to n [“nights”]) along with the Fibonacci mathematical sequence in which the next number is the sum of the two previous ones (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…).

As Christensen has explained: “The numerical ratios exist in nature: the way a leek wraps around itself from the inside, and the head of a snowflower, are both based on this series.” Her system ends on the n, suggesting many possible meanings including “n’s” significance as any whole number."

I have just ordered The Alphabet in English and hope to obtain a copy in Danish too, so that I can look at both together.

But maybe I should just stick with this gem, The Danish Poet (winner of the 2007 OSCAR® for best short subject).