alphabet
-
- 39,99 lei
-
- 39,99 lei
Publisher Description
Inger Christensen (1935-2009) was both a virtuoso and a paradox. Her fiction, drama, essays and children’s books won her wide acclaim in Denmark and other European countries, but it is her poetry – spanning a forty-year period – that best reveals her versatility and depth. Her poetry reflects a complex philosophical background, yet her most complex poetic works have enjoyed wide public popularity. Many of her poems have a visionary quality, yet she is a paradoxically down-to-earth visionary, focusing on the simple stuff of everyday life and in it discovering the metaphysical as if by chance.
In alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm-like forms that unfold like expanding universes, crystallising into words both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our world and our times.
‘The ecological crisis forms the starting point for a part ecstatic homage to the world and nature, which in spite of everything is still found: partly in the active sense that it exists, partly in the passive sense that it is discovered and understood – by the poet and by us.’ – Erik Skyum-Nielsen
‘Inger Christensen’s use of systems in no way inhibits the evolution of her poetry. On the contrary, it is as if the poetry comes about by virtue of the systems; as if it emerges in the interplay and friction with a random, but fixed order. In alphabet, Inger Christensen has created a system by combining the alphabet with Fibonacci’s numeric sequence, in which each number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 etc. alphabet is about the relationship between people and nature and, like it, is itself a form of creation. With the word exist as the pivot, the poems move – from the first wondering confirmation apricot trees exist – out into the world to life and death, the planet and calamity.’ – Christian Egesholm
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of Scandinavia's most honored poets, veteran Danish writer Christensen originally published her book-length Alphabet 20 years ago to great acclaim; this translation by former San Diego State Univ. English instructor Susanna Nied is the first in English and was awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN translation prize. The lengths in lines of each of this slim volume's 14 poems from "" to "" are based on the Fibonacci sequence. Beginning with zero and one, the sequence runs 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 600; "" begins where (0 + 1 = 1). One assumes the 977 lines "" would have required finally overwhelmed the poet and forced her to stop at ; Ron Silliman's similar alphabetic project makes no such allowances. As used here with controlled repetitions, the sequence gives the whole an almost medieval sense of restriction, as in the last four lines of "": "afterglow exists; oaks, elms,/ junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;/ eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar/ exist, and the future, the future." Abstracted cold war fears and post-'70s ecological concern and alienation give way to litanies of real world outrages "chemical ghetto guns exist/ with their old-fashioned, peaceable precision// guns and wailing women, full as/ greedy owls exist; the scene of the crime exists" which culminate in a post-nuclear holocaust nightmare, with birds and children somehow having survived in caves. The scenario may seem dated, but the threats remain very real, and Christensen's poetic appeal for sanity and humanity remains an abstracted call to action.