Poems

By Johannes V. Jensen

At Lunch

Blessed be the café!
Thank God for the velvet corner of the sofa.
I regard my waiter with sympathy,
I could sit cool and clean-shaven at the table,
find the rung beneath it with my feet
and stretch my nose toward the tablecloth´s chaste smell of chlorine.

Give me a beer!
I will sing the praises of the amber beer from the taps.
It´s ice-cold and effervescent.
Jesus, how my teeth yearn for it!
My throat begins drinking as soon as I spot it in the distance!
I want to bury myself in a gulp ...
I was thirsty... last night, how did it go?

Now I feel fine.
Four blossoming pieces of smorrebrod in front of me.
First I eat the one with egg and herring -
Oh, the faint hint of sulphur and of iodine from the ocean´s
seaweed forests!
Then I sink my teeth into one with young and tender roast beef,
and by my growing silent, the taste deepens.
The sausage bouquet of sheep and of oil-dripping machines,
textile looms, increases my well-being.
The cheese combines the sensation of decay and smoking love
in my heart.

But now my breast quivers toward the schnapps
which I have poured myself from the ice-cold bottle.
Look at it sparkle, laughing brightly.
I hold it up like a huge living diamond,
Corn-Akvavit, in short: Denmark!
I sit here preparing myself for the best moment.
It´s pleasant here. Hats pass by the window. A lot of people are
up and about in the street.
I´ve told myself that life and the solar system are doing very
nicely.

Skoal!

I do not lodge an angry protest against the earth´s waltz between
the constellations
because I myself am a bench-warmer;
I´d rather light joy out of my heart, gently
along with all the good-time girls and shawms.

Happiness and I didn´t understand one another;
I always spoke a dialect wherever I went.
The fact is, I lost Emma.

Why?
Wasn´t she gay?
Wasn´t she slender, with a graceful curving back,
young and pure appetite like quicklime?
Wasn´t her breast full and resilient
like a wicker basket full of fresh-cut clover,
didn´t she have slender arms and the brightest teeth,
a maelstrom of dark hair and eyes like gun muzzles?
Why then did I compose a cold lie
about a very important expedition to the Arctic Sea?
Emma, because I do not want to ask a girl
who is no concern of mine except that I happen to love her
to wash her nineteen-year-old body.
I dislike fusel oil, butyric acid and other stinging fluids.
I devour principally girls with nerves in their skin.
You turned up less tidy, although innocent, Emma.
All right, I kept quiet, but I cast you off.
How lucky that about the same time you
displayed an unconquerable distaste for me,
my indomitable head, my delighted egoism, and the entire
coarseness of my soul!
How healthy for us both that we forthwith hated each other!
Oh, how we frittered each other away. Wildly I traveled to
the Pole.
You married a violinist
whose fingers did not shun resin
and who later is said to have elicited from you the purest tones.

Well, I lost Emma.
The whole world pitied me. I think I hurt a lot of people
with the cynical lightness with which I consoled myself.
My life is one long compensation.
Who says that one should live happily?
That same spring met me frisky and healthy,
gloomy with longing for love
in the embrace of lovely Olga.

She was always washed and cool.
Maybe she was a maid at a public bath.
(Emma belonged to the more fashionable gentry).
Olga was so free and easy, the clothes whistled off her.
Oh, the soles of her feet were absolutely as fresh and cool
as water-lily leaves in Guldager Brook,
where I swam as a youth.
When Olga came to me she brought in the scent
of wide-open drawers of linen, which I love,
a weather of starch and of purified blued clothes.
Dearest Olga, it was sweet to breathe the cool air around you.
You were as fresh as a sheaf of grain,
and God knows who later garnered you.

I´ve poured myself a fresh schnapps from the ice-cold bottle.
Without hesitation, I down this one, too.
The schnapps is cold, sweet, strong, and burning…
This was a skoal to the insatiable appetite
that knocks me down and sets me on my feet again
right in the middle of full-hipped strolling miracles in human
shape.
Are you sorry that I sing so that everything blackens before me?

Ah, Emma and Olga!
Where are you now?
To old good times, then!
I feel a curative warmth, my heart leaps,
I believe I´m happy in spite of the pain.
The schnapps is cold, sweet, strong, and burning ...

Skoal!



From: Contemporary Danish Poetry – An Anthology
Gyldendal, Copenhagen, Denmark / Twayne Publishers, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A
1977

Translated by Alexander Taylor