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T H R O U G H T A R J E I V E S A A S A Bilingual Edition
“Through Naked Branches startled and thrilled me. Tarjei Vesaas is a brilliantly original and speculative poet; in Roger Greenwald’s elegant translations, he has for the first time found an equivalency in English that makes his virtues obvious. ‘There is an endless seeing by no one,’ Vesaas maintains, and his poems probe that ‘seeing’ in lyrics quite unlike anything most readers of modern poetry are accustomed to. These poems deserve a high place in the pantheon of world poetry.” —Jay Parini Your still boat hasn’t got a name. Your still boat hasn’t got a port. Your secret boat on land. (from “The Boat on Land”) Tarjei Vesaas, one of Scandinavia’s greatest fiction writers, has been less well known as a poet. Now Roger Greenwald, an award-winning translator of Scandinavian poetry, presents forty-six poems drawn from Vesaas’s six volumes of poetry. This selection is intended to reveal the distinctive sensibility and voice of Vesaas the poet. The Norwegian texts appear facing the English versions, which won the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize. The translator’s groundbreaking introduction explores why Vesaas’s poetry has often resisted critical analysis and how it challenges received notions of modernism. Excerpts from Vesaas’s writings about himself and his work supply helpful background and give some sense of the man behind the work. Vesaas emerges as a lyric and meditative poet of uncommon depth, who renders states of being beyond the reach not only of discourse, but of most poetry as well. ‡ Roger Greenwald has published one book of poems, Connecting Flight (1993), several volumes of poetry in translation from Norwegian and Swedish, and two novels translated from Swedish. He has earned major awards for his poetry, including the CBC Radio / Saturday Night Literary Award (1994), as well as several translation prizes. Princeton: Princeton University, 2000. |
