#inger christensen

[diana-andraste]

5.

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought; seclusion and angels exist; widows and elk exist; every detail exists; memory, memory's light; afterglow exists; oaks, elms, junipers, sameness, loneliness exist; eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar exist, and the future, the future

Inger Christensen, Alphabet fragment

(based structurally on  Fibonacci's sequence) trans. by Susanna Nied and Pierre Joris

[canesenzafissadimora]

Sotto la pelle

si difende

un cuore.

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"De stiger op, planetens sommerfugle / I Brajčinodalens middagshede luft..."

(translation by submitter: "They rise up, the planet's butterflies / In the midday heat of the Brajčino Valley...")

Read this in the original Dansk (Danish) here | Read an English translation of one of the sonnets in this sonnet cycle here

Reblog for a larger sample size!

[naoedicoes]

Colecção Traditore, #17 | COLÓQUIO Letras

"Fintar o infinito sem o fim", recensão de Margarida Vale de Gato a ALFABETO, livro de Inger Christensen com tradução de Ricardo Marques (2024). /// Revista COLÓQUIO Letras n.º 217, Setembro/Dezembro de 2024 (Secção Notas e Comentários, pp. 193-198) do livro: https://livrosnaoedicoes.tumblr.com/post/739804281203556352/colecção-traditore-17-alfabeto-autora-inger /// pedidos via nao.edicoes@gmail.com /// livrarias: https://naoedicoes.tumblr.com/livrarias

[woundgallery]

from Alphabet by Inger Christensen 

[elwenyere]

"Everything that a writer writes could just as easily have been different - but not until it's been written. As a life could have been different, but not until it's been lived."

-- Inger Christensen

[violettesiren]

If I stand alone in the snow it is clear that I am a clock

how else would eternity find its way around

from Light: If I stand by Inger Christensen (Translated by Susanna Nied)

[smaller-comfort]

-alphabet, Inger Christensen, translated by Susanna Nied

1 [a] apricot trees - 2 [b] bracken - 3 [c] cicadas - 4 [d] doves - 5 [e] early fall - 6 [f] fisherbird herons - 7 [g] given limits - 8 [h] whisperings - 9 [i] ice ages

[proustian-dream]

Poema cósmico.

[aboutbirds]

hydrogen bombs exist a plea to die

as people used to die one day in ordinary

weather, whether you know you are dying or know nothing, maybe

a day when as usual you have forgotten you must die, a breezy day in

November maybe, as you walk into the kitchen and barely manage to

notice how good and earthy the potatoes smell, and barely

manage to put the lid on, wondering whether you salted them before you put the lid on, and in a flash,

while puffs of steam leak past the lid, barely manage to remember your life as it was and still is, while the potatoes

boil and life, which you always have said must go on, really does go on, a plea, an ordinary plea, an

ordinary day, that life can continue completely ordinarily without it ever happening that any of all

the cruel experiments that the Teller group performed on Eniwetok where the waves of the Pacific raged in fury, or any of all the experiments that

the Sakharov group performed on Novaya Zemlya where the waves of the Arctic Ocean raged in fury without these experiments or those of the British French

Chinese ever reaching real real- isation here where we still live in a real real world as opposed to the unreality of Novaya Zemlya

and Eniwetok; here I walk down to the still blue of the Sound shining with evening, toss a stone into the water, see how the cirlces widen, reaching even the farthest shores

Inger Christensen, from alphabet, tr. Susanna Nied

[noxaeternaetc]

"When I’m tossing a die that alternately rolls and stops, coming up as 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 in random order, I amuse myself by imagining the certainty that the die would never stop. Not on 1 or 6, or 2 or 5, or 3 or 4 . . . I imagine it eternally rolling those opposing numbers around their impossible conjunction, deep within the center of the die, a three-dimensional seven in perpetual flux.

Why do I imagine things like that? Why do I keep playing with the thought that what’s impossible must be possible? That the inconceivable should be conceivable? That random chance could be caught in its own trap? It has to do with being a tiny part of a humanity that has desperately denied its own randomness. Denied its own randomness to such a degree that it has tirelessly built up enormous, all-inclusive traps, calling them god, where it has held fast and preserved the restive prey of random chance, without wanting to understand that the prey is humanity itself.

No creature, no condition, no god can be held fast without dissolving. No consciousness, maybe no humanity, without being overtaken by other parts of the inconceivable process that keeps moving — not back and forth, but maybe in a kind of pulsation, corresponding to the interwoven, osmotic story the universe is telling itself in human beings’ consciousness."

Inger Christensen (1935-2009) The seven within the die, 1977.

[canesenzafissadimora]

Sotto la pelle si difende un cuore.    

[intellectures]

Wenn Texte atmen

Pünktlich zum Österreich-Schwerpunkt auf der Leipziger Buchmesse erscheint »Literatur und Kritik« in neuem Gewand. Unter der neuen Herausgeberin Ana Marwan zeigt sich die österreichische Zeitschrift auf der Höhe der Zeit: vielfältig, offen und innovativ.

Pünktlich zum Österreich-Schwerpunkt auf der Leipziger Buchmesse erscheint »Literatur und Kritik« in neuem Gewand. Unter der neuen Herausgeberin Ana Marwan zeigt sich die österreichische Zeitschrift auf der Höhe der Zeit: vielfältig, offen und innovativ. Continue reading Untitled

[naoedicoes]

NOVO LIVRO ALFABETO, de Inger Christensen, tradução de Ricardo Marques Capa a partir de gravura de Basilius Besler Edição em português Tradução do inglês e do espanhol /// Colecção Traditore, #17 https://livrosnaoedicoes.tumblr.com/post/739804281203556352/colecção-traditore-17-alfabeto-autora-inger

Alfabet [Alfabeto], publicado em 1981, é a obra mais conhecida e traduzida de Inger Christensen. Trata-se de um longo poema sobre a fragilidade da natureza perante as ameaças humanas da guerra e da devastação ecológica. De modo a salientar a perfeição e a simplicidade de tudo o que existe, a autora decidiu estruturar a sua obra de acordo com a sequência de números inteiros de Fibonacci, que está na base de muitas das formas do mundo natural (como a geometria da pinha, do olho do girassol ou do interior de certas conchas). Como tal, Alfabeto apresenta catorze secções, desde a letra A à letra N, sendo que o número de versos de cada uma é sempre a soma do número de versos das duas secções anteriores. Ao longo destes capítulos, cada vez mais extensos, Christensen vai assim nomeando todas as coisas que compõem o mundo. Este livro, verdadeiramente genesíaco, é a primeira tradução integral para português de uma obra sua.

Inger Christensen (1935-2009) Poeta dinamarquesa, nascida em Vejle. O seu trabalho explora as ligações entre o som e o significado e desafia as fronteiras tradicionais entre géneros literários, muitas vezes de forma lúdica. Christensen aplicou estruturas repetitivas nos seus livros (como em Det [Isto], de 1969), construindo uma obra profundamente influenciada pela Matemática e marcada por uma aguda consciência linguística e ética. À data da sua morte, era considerada uma das mais importantes poetas experimentais do século XX, tendo sido indicada várias vezes para o Prémio Nobel da Literatura.

A Inger era uma pessoa adorável e uma escritora maravilhosa. Sempre acreditei que lhe fosse atribuído o Prémio Nobel. Quando ela morreu (…) eu disse: ‘deixaram que a Inger morresse’. Eu não me importava de ter esperado. Podia receber o Prémio mais tarde ou talvez nem sequer ganhá-lo. Mas eu queria mesmo era que ele fosse para a Inger. (…) Ela não era nada pretensiosa. Era uma escritora brilhante mas, ao mesmo tempo, uma pessoa tão normal. Era incrível. Talvez ela possa estar a ouvir-nos. Eu não acredito em Deus e não sou supersticiosa. Mas pela Inger estou disposta a ser um pouco supersticiosa.

Herta Müller (Prémio Nobel da Literatura 2009) /// Pedidos via nao.edicoes@gmail.com /// A partir da próxima semana nas livrarias habituais: https://naoedicoes.tumblr.com/livrarias

[woundgallery]

from Alphabet by Inger Christensen

[violettesiren]

in mid-November, a season when all human dreams are the same, a uniform, blotted out history like that of a sun-dried stone

a couple of mute parents stand there, a dog and some children run round, an arrival they try to imagine as water that's raised to my mouth

I lay sleeping inside my hotel room; it was like an alien dream that the guest before me must have shouldered aside in his sleep and forgot

in the dream there was no one familiar; I met only the blank scruitny of an apricot tree in bloom, turning around as it left suddenly

perhaps it was left there one summer when the world was as white as a feast, before I had learned that a dreamer must dream like the trees, be a dreamer of fruit to the last

from Alphabet by Inger Christensen