Bloodaxe Books | Pia Tafdrup reads six poems in English and Danish @BloodaxeBooks | Uploaded January 2019 | Updated October 2024, 4 hours ago.
Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets. She has received the Nordic Literature Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize. She has published three books of poetry with Bloodaxe, all translated by David McDuff. Queen’s Gate (2001) was a translation of a single volume (Drottningporten) published in Danish in 1998. This was followed by two books each combining two parts of a quartet written over ten years that centres on the theme of journeying and passage, its individual parts creating a field of tension: The Whales in Paris (Hvalerne i Paris) and Tarkovsky’s Horses ((Tarkovskijs heste), published in English by Bloodaxe in 2010 as Tarkovsky’s Horses and other poems, and The Migrant Bird’s Compass and Salamander Sun (published in 2015 as Salamander Sun and other poems). Each part portrays an element: water, earth, air and fire, each is represented by a creature, and each part has a key figure: the beloved person, the father, the mother and the “I” that recalls its life. The quartet is an attempt to find structure in the midst of chaos.
When Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Pia Tafdrup during her visit to Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2008, only the first two parts of her quartet had been published in Danish, and David McDuff’s translations of those were still in manuscript. In the film she talks about their translation process.
Through a sequence of highly sensual poems centred on water in all its forms, Pia Tafdrup creates her own myth in Queen’s Gate (‘the woman’s way into the world’), a composite picture of the basic elements of the life-cycle of nature and man, mirrored through a conceptual world that takes the body as its axis.
The poems of The Whales in Paris span the moment of conception to eternity. Life is seen as a confrontation with what is bigger than oneself: love, desire and death, primordial forces that are present even in our very modern civilisation.
Tarkovsky’s Horses is about loss in a double sense: her father’s increasing forgetfulness, his loss of his faculties and then her loss of a father. Disintegration of identity and its inexorable progress are followed through every phase, in a concrete and naked form that draws on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
The poems she reads here, in English and Danish, or in Danish with English subtitles, are: ‘My Mother’s Hand’ (‘Min mors hand’) and ‘Whistling’ (‘Sus’) from Queen’s Gate; ‘Kernel’ (‘Kerne’) and ‘We Are Not Creatures of a Single Day’ (‘Vi er ikke endagsdyr’) from The Whales in Paris, published in Tarkovsky’s Horses and other poems; annd At Least One Wound’ (‘Mindst ét sår’) and ‘Goodnight’ (‘Godnat’) from Tarkovsky’s Horses.
Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets. She has received the Nordic Literature Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize. She has published three books of poetry with Bloodaxe, all translated by David McDuff. Queen’s Gate (2001) was a translation of a single volume (Drottningporten) published in Danish in 1998. This was followed by two books each combining two parts of a quartet written over ten years that centres on the theme of journeying and passage, its individual parts creating a field of tension: The Whales in Paris (Hvalerne i Paris) and Tarkovsky’s Horses ((Tarkovskijs heste), published in English by Bloodaxe in 2010 as Tarkovsky’s Horses and other poems, and The Migrant Bird’s Compass and Salamander Sun (published in 2015 as Salamander Sun and other poems). Each part portrays an element: water, earth, air and fire, each is represented by a creature, and each part has a key figure: the beloved person, the father, the mother and the “I” that recalls its life. The quartet is an attempt to find structure in the midst of chaos.
When Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Pia Tafdrup during her visit to Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2008, only the first two parts of her quartet had been published in Danish, and David McDuff’s translations of those were still in manuscript. In the film she talks about their translation process.
Through a sequence of highly sensual poems centred on water in all its forms, Pia Tafdrup creates her own myth in Queen’s Gate (‘the woman’s way into the world’), a composite picture of the basic elements of the life-cycle of nature and man, mirrored through a conceptual world that takes the body as its axis.
The poems of The Whales in Paris span the moment of conception to eternity. Life is seen as a confrontation with what is bigger than oneself: love, desire and death, primordial forces that are present even in our very modern civilisation.
Tarkovsky’s Horses is about loss in a double sense: her father’s increasing forgetfulness, his loss of his faculties and then her loss of a father. Disintegration of identity and its inexorable progress are followed through every phase, in a concrete and naked form that draws on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
The poems she reads here, in English and Danish, or in Danish with English subtitles, are: ‘My Mother’s Hand’ (‘Min mors hand’) and ‘Whistling’ (‘Sus’) from Queen’s Gate; ‘Kernel’ (‘Kerne’) and ‘We Are Not Creatures of a Single Day’ (‘Vi er ikke endagsdyr’) from The Whales in Paris, published in Tarkovsky’s Horses and other poems; annd At Least One Wound’ (‘Mindst ét sår’) and ‘Goodnight’ (‘Godnat’) from Tarkovsky’s Horses.
