Obituary: Halfdan Rasmussen

Halfdan Rasmussen established open linguistic passageways to the underworld of the imagination

By : Torben Brostrøm

Near Islands Brygge in Copenhagen, there is a street called Halfdan Street. The street was given that name in 1912, a few years before Halfdan Rasmussen was born in the nearby Christianshavn district.¨It comes to mind that he has achieved a mythological status in our hearts along with the other Norse heroes, beloved by his first name, which children have learned to spell before they could read school primers or his wonderful ABCs, which have become absorbed by parents and children alike.  Without a doubt, he has a street in our mental cartography.

The fateful childhood interplay of vulnerability and longing, which brings to mind Martin Andersen Nexø’s description of Christianshavn in Pelle the Conqueror, became an artistic discipline and a vibrant form of beauty. The self-taught proletarian boy preserved his knowledge of society’s downtrodden, his experience of the misery of being without a job, his commitment to the struggle for freedom and human dignity.  Even the conflict between Soldier and Individual, which formed the title of his lyric debut in 1941. His poetry during the German occupation was a part of his (and others’) resistance.  A fire was burning in his illegal verses that was an important part of our moral fortitude at that time.   His friendship with Morten Nielsen and the circle involved with the periodical Vild Hvede was yet another apprenticeship in writing. 

The Storyteller
This voluble man was a vivacious, inexhaustible storyteller, a veritable vortex of verbal inventiveness.  Unfortunately, he thought that it took too long to put together all the words that prose requires.  So, his grotesque travel accounts – for example, his disastrous trip to the Spanish Civil War – hang in the listener’s memory like lifeless string-puppets.
These trips broadened his universe significantly.  Trips with artist friends to exposed places and realms of beauty after his solemn collections of poetry from the 1940s – which, as a well-known ironic verse puts it, he was alone in reading, while everyone else read the funny ones.  His poems on Greece, Torso, came out in 1957 and Stilheden fra Grønland (Silence From Greenland) in 1962, both illustrated by Ernst Clausen, who was also his partner in the first collections of Tosserier (Whimsies) from 1951, the breakthrough of a new view, gleaned from experience, of the general absurdity of the world.

It was here he established open linguistic passageways to the underworld of the imagination, revelations of gentle madness and generous playfulness whose everyday surrealism children and adults fell for completely.  Hardly any other Danish poet comes to people’s lips to the same degree as Halfdan, with the last name Rasmussen.

   However, the children’s books were already coming out with the same illustrator, who alternated with and was then replaced by Ib Spang Olsen, who so congenially put life into his troll children and Nanette, his calendars, Aunt Andante and Uncle Karfunkel and all the other figures from his nursery rhymes.  These two also worked together on Regnens harpe (The Rain’s Harp) based on a trip to Ireland, first published many years later in 1990. A dark book whose humour almost reluctantly emerges from the eternal downpour nearly drowning the world in evening gloom.  It describes existential solitude in a remote, random village, where ”Ivy and ferns have closed in upon the blind/inquisitive light in which everything living is clad.”  However, something else was also afoot on the Irish isle, for as anyone may cite from Halfdan’s ABC.

This obituary was first published in Information 4 March 2002

Translated by Russell Dees