The Hangman's Lament

From the Canadian magazine 'The Review', September 2004

By : Carmine Starnino

Blame it on the frozen Scandinavian landscape, but few European poets have embraced the aesthetic of wild-eyed spareness as ardently as the Danes. Their entire literature seems founded on its mood, and Henrik Nordbrandt’s poems – all simplicity and surrealist shorthand – have served as an exceptionally powerful example of it.

But to date, like Danish poetry itself, Nordbrandt has made only a minor splash internationally. His presence is limited to three little-noticed books in English translation (Selected Poems, God’s House, and Armenia) published by a small American press called Curbstone; a spot in J.D. McClatchy’s popular anthology, The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry; and now the very welcome – if modest – appearance of The Hangman’s Lament, released by another small American publisher, the diligent and internationalist-minded Green Integer.

In short, unlike the much-translated superleague of Czeslaw Milosz, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Tomas Transtromer, and Zbigniew Herbert, Nordbrandt’s reputation still waits in the wings of the current English-language canon of foreign poetry, which will likely make him, for most English readers, something of a discovery.

What exactly is being “discovered” is another thing entirely. The messy state of his reputation – caused, in large part, by the scattering of English collections – is not helped by the absence of touchstone ideas about his poetry. Lack of dependable critical writing about him (or even notes at the rear of the existing books) condemn his poems to the half-lit territory of translation, with nothing to make up the deficit, though Nordbrandt’s poems are certainly fascinating enough in translation. Indeed, the versions produced by his previous translator, Alexander Taylor, are distinguished by their sustained readability, and the clarity and economy of Thom Satterlee’s work in The Hangman’s Lament is no exception. But while the music of his insights seems to survive the transfer to another language, Nordbrandt obviously enjoys a centrality in his original tongue that, however remotely sensed, is difficult to fathom from these renderings.

According to Satterlee’s introduction, Nordbrandt is much admired by his compatriots for his innovative metaphor making, but many of them in The Hangman’s Lament, while interesting, seem to have arrived with some of their innovatory force mislaid:

Do you know how your look reminds me of the steam
rising from misty ravines in autumn
of the mold on cold, blue grapes
and of the spider’s web, which on still nights
gathers dew in an outline of the Pleides

These images don’t really startle (Transtromer’s associative leaps are far more aggressive and jarring) but exist as quiet, idiosyncratic inflections of the ordinary. What comes through in Satterlee’s translation, in other words, is a sense of lightness and transparency fused with strangeness. Nothing ground-breaking, except some rather unexpected marriages of the mundane and metaphysical. It creates a poetry of hard facts (“The floorboards squeaked and startled me”; “A rusty rail car on a side track”; “The transistor radio that I placed / in the shade of an oleander bush”) where the straightforwardness drifts off into deadpan, dreamlike utterances (“I hear my screams from the shipwreck / held forever in the spray’s bright grip”; “I breathed in time with the earth, till it became all / white with flowers”). There’s always just enough oddity in Nordbrandt’s narratives to keep readers on the edge of surprise – too much, of course, and his peculiar logic would likely end up parodying itself, but Nordbrandt never makes that mistake. His eerie, icy intimacies are written in minor key, and Satterlee is always careful to choose diction that fits their modest scale:

The ground is ready.
The leaves might as well let go
it is late
and gray enough for it.

The pleasure of lines like these, lines flecked with such subtle ruefulness, lies in their ability to cleanly make their point without trapping details in a philosophizing fog. Nordbrandt’s suggestiveness can sometimes get too austere, turning poems into little exercises in obliquity, a situation often marked by an over-reliance on a narrow, elemental vocabulary (“dead,” “shadow,” “song,” “words,” “sun,” “light,” “night,” and “silence...”). It is as if the vagueness of reference (“It is dark in the world, and I wake late / bound and tied by beings I can’t see / but whose movements I can sense”) were being offered up as vivid evidence of the imagination at work, a cryptic enrichment of the perceptible world. These days you can get that sort of discount effect anywhere.

Instead, it’s the very feature distinctive enough to jump the language barrier – the sharply individual human tone married to vatic introspection (usually you get one or the other, rarely both) – that makes you realize how special Nordbrandt actually is. And so I say god speed to Satterlee’s The Hangman’s Lament, and wish it great luck raising Nordbrandt’s North American profile.

Carmine Starnino is a poet and lives in Montreal.
This article was published in The Review vol. 3, September 2004