The Death of the Metaphor
The Poet
By : Frederik Stjernfelt
It can be asked exactly what it is that guarantees the readerīs poetical grasp of Nordbrandtīs highly complex and hermetic metaphorical poetry. Why do readers have such an appreciation of this by no means simple art, that Nordbrandt is unobtainable in secondhand bookshops? Every metaphor - as deconstructionists well know - is susceptible to more than one interpretation. If I call my girl a rose I can be thinking either of her noble beauty or her thorny disposition, and only a pragmatic context makes possible a reasonably unambiguous understanding of the deluge of metaphor in the language of everyday life. In poetry, the text is isolated from such practical settings, and for that reason a profusion of potential meanings is opened up, and there are grounds on which it could be argued that in individual instances they are in principle indeterminate. So what is it in the text that makes possible - not a standardisation of, but a framework for these rhetorical structures that enables one to make a reading at all? It is the narration, the story - however rudimentary it might be - which is encapsulated in the poems, indicating a fictitious, pragmatic situation peopled by actants who make possible the reduction of meaning - and thereby opening the way to both an unambiguous connotation and a pointed ambiguity in the metaphorical paraphernalia. In HNīs case, this narration is inscribed in a tradition with roots stretching at least as far back as the Romantic era, a tradition that is so persistent that it is often not far from being identified with poetry as such, a tradition according to which poems are "monologues of desire". In reflective terms, a strolling poet tells a - usually absent - second person about his immediate emotions. The poet moves this way and that in an attempt to find expression for an indeterminate longing and reflects on this in an apostrophe usually addressed to that other person - who in some ill-defined way is concerned in the longing. A completely random example of the setting for this poetical first person: "Between us two, my love, there is more/ than the mere dust blowing over the cement" from 1969 (Syvs. 35) - or perhaps: "Instead I sit here now/ hungry and poor, beneath the merciless sun/ on the corner of one of its squares/ crying "combs", "love potion", "amulets"" from the latest volume (UM, 49). This kind of scenario, in which most of the poems can be read as lines in a dialogue, is directly dualistic (the immediate lack versus distant fulfilment, Schein/Sein) and has - as a type - a clear tendency to the high-flown and banal because the speaking figureīs awareness of the lack and the actual situation in which the poetical communication takes place makes the reader suspect that: he only wants to persuade me to realise that I should feel sorry for him - to put it bluntly - and thatīs his problem. When, in addition, HNīs vocabulary has often been drawn from the romantic/ symbolist traditions combined with his Near-Eastern exoticism, one is confronted with a pretty cloying image: a self-pitying fool singing of his own misfortune in terms of roses, jars, white walls and blue mountains, rain and sunshine, twilight and night, Arabian texts and women departing.
Fredrik Stjernfelt in Iben Holk (ed.): Isle. A book on Henrik Nordbrandt, Århus University Press 1986
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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