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From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Description
Norway's Rolf Jacobsen is one of Europe's most acclaimed writers yet, as Robert Bly points out in his introduction: "This magnificent poet is so little known in the United States." This bilingual edition, which selects the best work from Jacobsen's ten volumes, will help remedy that situation.
Three dedicated translators contribute to this book. Robert Bly's translations celebrate the radiance with which Jacobsen praised the complex beauty of the Earth; Robert Hedin focuses on the countryside, creature, and star poems; and Roger Greenwald draws difficult emotions from Jacobsen's charged last poems, composed while his wife struggled with fatal illness—as when he remembers their bitter-cold wedding day during World War II:
Road to the church was blocked with barbed wire.
I remember we clambered over the rail fence of the parsonage.
—Hey, your dress is caught
—no, not there—over there.
We tramped the furrows of an ice-crusted
potato field, up to the minister
who was in his surplice and had
the Scriptures ready.
—Love is a path you must walk, he says. Yes, we said.
But my lord what muddy feet we had!
When we got in bed that night
we cried a dab—both of us. God
knows why.
And then the long life began.
Rolf Jacobsen was born in 1907 and lived his adult life north of Oslo. He worked as a journalist and newspaper editor and played a critical role in introducing modernism to Norwegian poetry. His poetry has been translated into nearly thirty languages. A member of the Norwegian Academy of Language and Literature, he was honored with many prizes and awards, including the Norwegian Critics' Prize and the Grand Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy. Jacobsen died in 1994.
En hvit morgen i juni klokken fire da landeveiene ennu var gra og vate gjennem skogenes uavladelige tunneller, hadde det gatt en bil over stovet der hvor mauren kom synlende ut men sin barnal nu, og blev vandrende rundt i det store F i <<Firestone>> som stod presset i landeveissandet over et hundre og tyve kilometer. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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In his poem, The Age of the Great Symphonies, he juxtaposes the beauty of the music of a vanishing world with the harshness of the modern technological world. This subject seems as if it would be sad, but instead it is hopeful. He begins by stating that the "age of the great symphonies/is over", but we discover those great symphonies later on in the poem falling down like rain to a thirsty earth (we assume through the airwaves). It is comforting for me to think that all around me right now in waves that I cannot see or hear, are great symphonies. They inhabit the world around me, and all I need to do is turn on my radio to hear one.
Another favorite from this anthology is the poem, Sunflower. This poem asks the question "What sower walked over earth/which hands sowed/our inward seeds of fire?" It is a poem about death, and once again you might assume that such a poem would be dark, but instead it shines. Sunflower revisits the idea that in order for a flower to grow, a seed must fall into the earth and die. But it is "all for the sake of a sunflower that you haven't seen." How true, yet how hard to know before Spring arrives.
These poems will haunt you long after you read them, and you will never notice that they were originally written in Norwegian, the translation is flawless.
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