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Inger Christensen was a woman with a passionate personality and what excites The Grandma most about her poetry is the use of mathematical patterns (such as the Fibonacci sequence or combinatorial systems) that make you, as a reader, feel that language grows like a natural organism. And indeed, it does.
Inger Christensen shows how individual existence is part of an immense order where plants, animals, humans, language and the universe function as a network of interconnections, as the Mallorcan philosopher Ramon Llull said in the 13th century.
Inger Christensen's work is based on the philosophical idea that language not only describes the world, but also creates it. Her poems often seem like experiments with reality, as if she were trying to discover how far language can go to explain existence, and for this reason, these poems explore the contradiction between order (patterns, mathematics, language) and chaos (war, destruction, entropy) and this is amazing.
It is difficult to highlight one work above the rest as a whole, but today The Grandma has decided to highlight Sommerfugledalen: Et requiem, a cycle of sonnets about butterflies and mortality, where it talks about how the beauty of nature coexists with the awareness of the fragility of life.
The butterfly is a mythological insect for many cultures. Diderot's Encyclopédie cites them as a symbol of the soul. Accordingly, the ancient Greek word for butterfly is ψυχή (psȳchē), which primarily means soul or mind. In some cultures, butterflies symbolize reincarnation. In Japan, the butterfly is seen as the personification of a person's soul; whether alive, dying, or already dead. In China, however, it symbolizes love, in an image similar to that of the Western heart. In many countries it is an allegory of beauty and fragility, which is why it is a metaphorical image of young women. Her life is also a symbol of transformation and change; coming out of the chrysalis to become better. In Devon, England, people rush to kill the first butterfly of the year to avoid a year of bad luck. In the Philippines, a persistent black butterfly or moth in the house means a death in the family. Several states in the United States of America have chosen the butterfly as their state insect.
For this reason, the so-called butterfly effect is an image to explain that everything is related and as Inger Christensen and Ramon Llull said, the universe works as a network of interconnections.
And while The Grandma was reading Sommerfugledalen: Et requiem, she has arrived at her destination, Roskilde, where an intense morning of work awaits her, with another vital network for territorial development: the railway.
More information: Visit Fjordlandet
Inger Christensen (16 January 1935-2 January 2009) was a Danish poet, novelist, essayist and editor. She is considered the foremost Danish poetic experimentalist of her generation.
Born in the town of Vejle, on the eastern Jutland coast of Denmark, Christensen's father was a tailor, and her mother a cook before her marriage. After graduating from Vejle Gymnasium, she moved to Copenhagen and, later, to Århus, studying at the Teachers' College there. She received her certificate in 1958. During this same period, Christensen began publishing poems in the journal Hvedekorn, and was guided by the noted Danish poet and critic Poul Borum (1934-1996), whom she married in 1959 and divorced in 1976.
After teaching at the College for Arts in Holbæk from 1963 to 1964, she turned to writing full-time, producing two of her major early collections, Lys (1962) and Græs (1963), both examining the limits of self-knowledge and the role of language in perception. Her most acclaimed work of the 1960s, however, was It, which, on one level, explored social, political and aesthetic issues, but more deeply probed large philosophical questions of meaning. The work, almost incantatory in tone, opposes issues such as fear and love and power and powerlessness.
In these years Christensen also published two novels, Evighedsmaskinen (1964) and Azorno (1967), as well as a shorter fiction on the Italian Renaissance painter Mantegna, presented from the viewpoint of various narrators (Mantegna's secretary Marsilio, the Turkish princess Farfalla, and Mantagena's young son), Det malede Værelse (1976, translated into English as The Painted Room by Denise Newman and published by Harvill Press in 2000).
Much of Christensen's work was organized upon systemic structures in accordance with her belief that poetry is not truth and not even the dream of truth, but is a game, maybe a tragic game -the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us.
In the 1981 poetry collection Alfabet, Christensen used 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 she 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. As with It, however, despite its highly structured elements this work is a poetically evocative series concerned with oppositions such as an outpouring of the joy of the world counterposed with the fears for and forces poised for its destruction.
Sommerfugledalen of 1991 (Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, 2004) explores through the sonnet structure the fragility of life and mortality, ending in a kind of transformation. It consists of 15 sonnets and is a so-called sonnet redoublé.
Christensen also wrote works for children, plays, radio pieces, and numerous essays, the most notable of which were collected in her book Hemmelighedstilstanden (The State of Secrecy) in 2000.
In 1978, she was appointed to the Royal Danish Academy; in 1994, she became a member of the Académie Européenne de Poésie; in 2001, a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin. She won the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poésie in 1991. She received the Rungstedlund Award in 1991, Der österreichische Staatspreis für Literature in 1994; in 1994, she won the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, known as the little Nobel; the European Poetry Prize in 1995; The America Award in 2001; the German Siegfried Unseld Preis in 2006; and received numerous other distinctions.
Her works have been translated into several languages, and she was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The complete Butterfly valley has been set twice by two Danish composers, Niels Rosing-Schow and Svend Nielsen. Both versions were, separately, recorded by Ars Nova Copenhagen with poetry reading by the poet.
More information: Rough Ghosts
Happiness is the change that comes over me
when I describe the world.
It comes over the world.
Happiness is the change that comes over me
when I'm afraid.
It comes over the world.
For instance I can be afraid of and for the world
afraid because the world consists among other things
of me so swiftly dying.
Inger Christensen
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