Nothing is Impossible

By : Carsten Jensen

Published both in Denmark and Peru, the latest collection of poems by the Danish expatriate poet Thomas Boberg embraces two continents, two cultures and two eras.

In the spring an unusual event took place in Lima, the capital of Peru. A literary symposium was held, where well-known Peruvian critics talked about the Danish poets Paul la Cour, Sophus Claussen and Ole Sarvig. None of them, of course, is living now, let alone translated into Spanish or published in Peru, and none of them was the key figure at the symposium. This was a shy man, sitting at the edge of the platform, visibly uncomfortable with all the homage, and unaccustomed to the white shirt and accompanying jacket which he had felt obliged to wear for the occasion.
    The man was the poet Thomas Boberg, and the reason for the symposium was the translation and the publication of his poetry collection, Vandbærere (The Water Carriers), which came out in Danish in 1993 and less than one year later had leaped across the Atlantic, a fate not enjoyed by any of his poet predecessors.
    Thomas Boberg has been living in Lima since 1991 and is married to a Peruvian. This, of course, to be prosaic, is part of the explanation. Another, and equally important explanation lies in the quality of his poetry. The cover of the Danish edition of Vandbærere is a picture of the Geoglyph from Paracas peninsula in Peru, known as "The Chandelier". It stands there as witness to the inspiration which the years spent in another culture have been to Thomas Boberg. His Peruvian publisher, Nido de Cuervos, has now chosen a completely different subject for the cover of the translation, Portadoras de agua (1994) in a section of a frieze from the Acropolis. The Peruvians found Europe in a poetry collection, whose author found Peru himself. Nothing could serve more vividly than the different choice of motifs for the same book to express the universality of Thomas Boberg´s poetry, and the power with which he succeeds in embracing two continents, two cultures and two eras.

Untranslatable poetry
It is usually said of poetry that what is universal in its content is often untranslatable, owing to its form and a play of words based on national language. For most present day Danish poetry one could add that it is untranslatable for another reason as well. It is simply too local to be of an interest, a self-regarding academic product, fatally narrow in its horizons, because its environment is so narrow, despite the claims of its many enterprising ambassadors.
    One cannot say that Danish critical opinion has treated Thomas Boberg badly. It has simply failed to understand his poetry. When in the '80 he could still be described as belonging to a generation, a new trend, or something else that was manageable and clearcut, the critics' sun shone on him as well. Since then he has followed his own, original way, and this has long passed beyond the horizons of a criticism, which cannot deal with anything but formalistic classifications. Thomas Boberg´s extraordinarily, purposeful and artistically superior use of modernist traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, together with the pain, the intense suffering, and something that can best be characterized as intellectual savagery, have made him into a loner. Almost every second collection, of the eight published up to now, marks a painful break and further, exhausting self-examination. But also, every time, openings, discoveries and the involvement of new worlds, new fuel for poetic adaptation.

Imperative development
There is something imperative about Thomas Boberg´s development. His poems swing feverishly and yet with unfailing artistic authority between almost crippling doubt about his own right to exist as a human being, and renewed, always transitory affirmation. What is unique is that the outside world is always included in his thinking and his poetry. His inspiration always also carries a moral shock. He does not seek out the world. Its intensity is simply too great for him to reject.
    The very first page of the collection attacks the theme, the inner tension and challenge "between dissolution on the one hand / and growth on the other/as sober as salt crystals in a wound". The water carrier motif seems to contain the same duality. At the same time the water carriers represent the tradition which passes from century to century and on into the poet´s mouth; they are not simply a movement in time, but also in space, the imperative reality: "Real are they on the earth/real the empty grin of impotence/the pain magnets of the systems/and the season´s wheel of triumphs". The water carrier stands for both inspiration and confrontation driving beyond tradition, out into the unknown, which for Thomas Boberg, typically enough, is a movement downwards, to the depths, threatening to vanish into the abyss, which is also the poetic challenge.
    There is an uneasy and remarkable poem in the middle of the book, Dødstræet (The Tree of Death). Here the growing life is seen instead as a tree of death, because life is, after all, carried on in the shadow of death, its existence as allovershadowing as the tree´s great crown, both judgment, conclusion and answer. And this is where the poet´s revolt begins. With his axe he hacks off the tree´s branches and then sets about its roots. This is a double image, filled with fear of death and the paradoxical victory over death by identification with it: the poet is the destroyer, using his weapon against destruction.
    And then, at the other and of the collection, the image is turned round again. The Bible and Jesus' judgment on the barren fig tree are echoed here in Boberg´s own tortured fear of barrenness and the final judgment: "When a tree no longer has strength for/ summer/no more winter to gather darkness/enough for sap/ ... /it is not true that/ then it must wither". There is weight here, and an existential gravity in the self-examination, which is quite extraordinary in Danish poetry. A Danish poet once said that writing is for holding judgment day on oneself. Nowhere is this illustrated more truly and at greater cost than by Thomas Boberg.

Words above the world
But there is hope there too, even if it has perhaps to be based on the play of chance. Awareness of the divided world, where the powerless and the powerful stand face to face, is stronger than ever before in Boberg´s poetry. But paradoxically enough that is also where he gets his strength and belief in the fruitfulness of words, when they succeed "in flying above the world". There is release and the possibility of life through confrontation with reality, even where it is at its worst and hardest, perhaps that is just where language can escape getting stuck and running along the same groove.
    But Boberg is driven forward all the time without respite. The urge to formulate is both a curse and a hope, the eternal paradox and torment of his poetry, leaving it without relative points, but filled on the other hand with unforeseeable high points, for his perplexity is admitted and confessed in an open clash with any kind of easy or saving worship of form. The global and the personal wretchedness do not reflect each other narcissistically and disproportionately, but flow together in creative vitality.
    "Nothing is possible here where I am/but nothing is impossible either". Let Thomas Boberg´s words stand as the conclusion to this presentation of a poet who has the rare ability to burst apart the provincialism of Danish poetry and the straddle the continents.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine no. 7, 1994.

Translated by Patricia Crampton