Taking Words at Their Face Value

By : Erik Skyum-Nielsen

A new book by Benny Andersen (b. 1929) can be expected to arouse overwhelming interest in advance among all Danes who read books at all. Even people who don't read poems know his, because they have become part of our modern collective culture. A few poems by Benny Andersen are sung at folk high schools and at parties, they are frequently cited in speeches at weddings, birthdays and jubilees, and when Borgen's publishing house brought out his Collected Poems in 1998, they were a notable success, with no fewer than 20 impressions and a total sale of 110,000 copies. Buying his books for presents is always a sure winner.
   After a restless youth as a peripatetic pianist Benny Andersen published his first book in 1960, a collection entitled Den musikalske ål (The musical eel) and firmly established his position with Kamera med køkkenadgang (Camera with access to kitchen) and Den indre bowlerhat (The internal bowler hat) from 1962 and 1964. The poems in these books have had a particularly wide circulation; but his popular success was equally due to the “story in song” Svantes viser (Svante's Songs) from 1972, set to music by the author and sympathetically interpreted by Denmark's hoarsest singer Poul Dissing.
   What is the reason for Benny Andersen's undiminished, in fact steadily increasing popularity through the years? The most significant clues for an explanation must surely be the following eight qualities: consciousness of the everyday and knowledge of the world: humour and humanity; responsiveness and musicality; simplicity and straightforwardness. And then the ninth: an indefinable magical ability to know precisely where the reader is.
   All these are clearly evident in his new collection, Sjælen marineret (Marinating the soul). The book consists of three sections, the middle of which, 'Drømmebilleder' (Dream pictures), is densest in content and most problematic in form, as here the poet builds on his dreams and tests out the difficult balance between the private and the personal – of which the first only has validity in art to the extent that it can be transformed into the second and perhaps thereby shows them to be mutually dependent.
   But it is in the first and third sections that we find Benny Andersen's familiar characteristics. The one, 'Before', directs the eye to the past, in particular to childhood. The other, 'Afterwards', is concerned with the present, especially the beloved. If death should ever sink its claws into her 'it will be over my dead body', as the poet strikingly puts it. For that is how he works with language: and giving new life to dead metaphors.
   In the first section of the book death is drawn into the poem 'The nameless one', where Benny Andersen is tormented by the thought of what she might have been called, that big sister who died before birth:

The first time Death came into my life
was long before my birth
That must be one of the reasons why
I still stutter now and then

My nameless older sister
came lifeless into this world
So I came to be a wished-for child
but since the miss my wished-for sister
   Finally if we move from form to content, it should also be noted how Benny Andersen carefully avoids calling his big sister's extremely present absence the only reason for his occasional speech defect. This witnesses both to self-distancing and self-awareness, two more qualities that have helped to make the poet so popular.
   When Benny Andersen is at his best, and that he often is in the new book, he writes with warm subtlety and disarming sweetness, a discreetly muted charm which suits him well. He seldom uses big words. The small ones are big enough for him.

The article was first published in Danish literary Magazine 20, autumn 2001.