Celebrating Søren Kierkegaard’s birthday – 5^th of May, 1813

 

For a change I’m simply going to shoot from the hip, as that wonderful North American saying has it, and tell you some things about Denmark’s only world renowned thinker without any detailed referencing. Søren Kierkegaard preferred to be called a thinker, rather than a philosopher. One reason for that is that he described the philosophers of his age as having accomplished the perverse miracle of turning wine into water. He also suggested that when a city was getting ready for a hostile invasion, philosophers should rush up and down the street, just like Diogenes did when the ancient Greek city of Corinth prepared for siege. When Corinthians – yes they were and are a thing – asked Diogenes why he was rolling his tub up and down the street, he replied that he wanted to look busy like everybody else. With these quotes alone, we can see that Kierkegaard’s thinking and writing was not only incredibly perceptive but also very funny. Where did Kierkegaard get this rep that he was exclusively doom and gloom? He drank wine to beat the bands and was often the life and soul of the Danish coffee and pastry shop – the Konditorier  – and high society soirees to boot.

 

Of course Kierkegaard wrote about depression, and he was by his own nature depressive, but that was not his view of human nature as a whole and he described depression as a shout for freedom. And do you see this question of sin? According to some, Kierkegaard was no fun at all and ruled out all sorts of sexual fleshliness as being sinful. Quite the reverse is the case. Kierkegaard actually said that sensuality in love was vital for its full expression. The sin came in selfishness. That is, that you fell in love with someone else but failed to then embrace the world because of the joys of that love. Kierkegaard’s other main description of sin – called a category – was untruth. That is, that you were living a lie by not being your true self. You were split. We all know this to be true and we all know that it is our conscience that tells us this.

Below, I publish a poem I wrote about Kierkegaard in response to one of Ireland’s best living poets, Harry Clifton, who asks – in his train journey poem Søren Kierkegaard – what Kierkegaard would know of joy. (Night Train through the Brenner collection).

 

South With Kierkegaard

(For Harry Clifton)

 

I took you south with me Søren Kierkegaard

a two day train ride to Florence from Copenhagen

your pulp fiction parables impelling wheels, turning pages

Diary of a Seducer Don Juan –  the Either/Or twin track dialectic

hurtling through the Nordic psyche to the core of existence

 

Where did this myth arise that you are just a cold fish

Doctor Dread wallowing eternally in fear and trembling?

The Dane opposite me professes never to have read you

but describes your Diogenes rolling his tub up and down the street

in frantic efforts to look busy as Corinth prepared for war

 

We left on a day of cormorant mist, quiet ice and steaming coffee

no cardboard Danish for you – a connoisseur of Konditorier

the Fred Astaire of coffee shops, an intellectual athlete of  gustation

Pukkelrygget – hunchback , trousers too short for your palate and genius,

gifts from the gods to counterweight the callipers of your father’s curse

 

Blond men in rough clogs, red doors  in village hamlets

a heron on the wing

Scandinavia slipping intelligently by

a cornucopia of original erudition

your  passionate intuition through windows looking outwards looking in

I see that Kierkegaard must not be read but embraced

like the blue tint of low fjords emerging to frame the wanderlust sky

the Continental drift in your style

 

In the depths of Germany a flayed, ravished woman flashes by,

a nun, ghastly white and roused by loving hatred

Donna Elvira in pursuit of Don Juan

then your stoic Antigone who rejoices in being called to bear witness

your dramatis personae – stations of the cross flashing up

in a torrent of words, the train swaying again, again, again, again

 

So much of what you say has come true, Kierkegaard

the collapse of the church under the scandal of its own hubris

pre-disproving Freud by showing that spiritual angst not sex

is our zeitgeist – the desperate search for the self in a world

where nothingness is a fine art

 

When the German stations stopped  I hopped off

to hear your beloved Mozart

 

Finally in the soft heat and flowers of Florence

I recalled Regine Olsen

your whole life’s work a eulogy to a woman and the ideal of love

Not a philosopher but a Digter – Poet, Author and Thinker.

For you the mystery of the divine was either absurd or a leap of faith

refusing the host and platitudes from a starched priest’s breath

you died well and honourably

joyously writing for eternity

 

 

 

Paul Larkin

‘For, what is it to be, and to want to be, a sovereign individual?’ – Søren Kierkegaard

This is not about whether you believe in God, or are a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist or a Christian. It is primarily about thinking outside the box of human time – something we can all do instinctively. We are benders and shapers of time. In his writings, Søren Kierkegaard often described what we call heaven, or paradise, as ‘eternity’ – evighed in the Danish – and in one of his most profound and stirring passages, he painted a vision of that eternity. The place we have always imagined that is beyond time. A place where the sick are healed and all truth is astonishingly revealed as resting in the embrace of pure love. The heartbeat of all infinity. of all matter beyond time.

Say you are in a dentist’s chair and are one of those unfortunates who dreads such a scenario, or it might be that you sit in a plane and have a terrible fear of flying. Each second before the anaesthetic, sleeping pill or other tranquiliser takes effect feels like an eternity. Time stretches and the scientific fact of each exactly spaced second becomes meaningless. A second can become a century in the flux of human emotion.

Or more attractively, consider how bendy human time becomes for lovers approaching their first kiss, The pregnancy of that coming moment and the drag of anticipation makes a mockery of time. It can suddenly seem to run backwards as the moment nears, then get ahead of itself in the throes of ardour and passion. It is time as we dream it, rather than counting it.

In Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard writes brilliantly on the eternal that lies at the heart of that kiss: “eternity’s aura emblazons this moment”. Don’t bother asking the lovers at what point in time this magic occurred for they will not hear your voice … “but ask out in the wide world in what century this happened, what land, what time of day? Nobody will give an answer, because it is an eternal image.” * Time only enslaves humankind if we let it. We are makers of our own miracles if have enough astonishment left to see and feel them.

Our notion of time in other words is elastic and subjective. If this is the case, what then of the moment of human death?

Roadside warning of a wake in progress -a very common sight in Ireland

In the Irish tradition of the wake – still very strong in our country – the dead person undergoes a passage of time and is ‘waked’ or assisted and accompanied to the other side of time. The passage to the realm of beyond time.

In the Irish language (Gaeilge) one word for death often used at wakes, and in the reporting of a death, is Slí na Firinne – the path of truth. We say that the departing soul is embarked upon the path of truth, or we might say the path of revelation, or full understanding. Complete fulfilment. It is this idea of the passage from time to beyond time that Kierkegaard explores in a remarkable, yet little noted section of, as above, Stages on Life’s Way.

The context for Kierkegaard’s vision of heaven, in this instance, is the question he continually asks himself: will he once again see his beloved Regine Olsen – who married another after he jilted her – in that same beyond time? The second part of Stages on Life’s Way – Guilty Not Guilty is an extended meditation on Kierkegaard’s temporal and eternal relations with her.

Regine Olsen – Kierkegaard’s one and only love

Kierkegaard’s vision of heaven:

Where then will we meet again? In eternity. Time enough then for reconciliation …And if eternity heals all sickness, gives the deaf their hearing, the blind their vision and the lamed their bodily beauty, it will also heal me. And what is my sickness? Depression. And from where does this sickness come? My powers of imagination and the impulsion of the possible. My obsession with these also. But the eternal removes the possible. And wasn’t my depression heavy enough in human time; so much that I not only suffered desperately with it but also felt huge guilt? The lamed must only suffer the pain of being disabled; how terrible it would be if being lame also inflicted great twists of guilt upon them!

Therefore Oh God in heaven – when my time is up, let my last breath be for You and my Soul’s utter fulfilment. But the one prior to that be for her. Or let me for the first time in an age be once more united with her, but for all eternity in that final breath.*

Just like a kiss. A final breath can last for all eternity. In this lies the secret of the Resurrection.

Beannachtaí na Cásca/Easter Greetings from Ireland.

 

Paul Larkin, Carraic, Donegal

Easter 2020

 

*The translations from Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way are my own interpretations and represent, I believe, some modest pointers to a different way of translating and interpreting Kierkegaard in English.

 

 

In 1977, Padraic Fiacc – perhaps the greatest urban poet ever to come out of Belfast in our modern times, wrote a remarkable poem called ‘An attempt on his life’ *. Fiacc didn’t just write about the Irish war. For example, he was a great poet of myth, and myth busting also, but he is very much a ‘Troubles’ poet. ‘An attempt on his life’ embraces the savage irony of being a subject of close up state brutality. The almost loving attention of a torturer being preferred to the “Hidebound silences of the others/So slyly passing by with their noses/High up in the cleaner air.”

Of course, I am making no analogy between a torturer and the Irish Times, though the ridiculous ‘Property Section’ can sometimes have that momentary affect on me. Rather, I am highlighting the savage importance for artists of not being ignored. This is especially true of writers who do not mix in literary circles and – like me – literally and metaphorically live and create at the margins of Irish life. Margins, though, can be at the centre of things, or become the centre of things, and I believe that my novel ‘Éilis from the flats’ sounds the depths of the marginalised and gives them new life and hope. Places them at the centre. Or at least, some kind of point where they are anointed with dignity. The Irish Times has accepted the validity of my creation and my artistic vision by choosing to study it in depth. That is a precious gift in the process of discourse that all artists seek.

I will make no comment on the opinions expressed by the reviewer, Joanne Hayden. For that is a sacred contract between the reviewer and the readers who take ‘Éilis from the flats’ into their hands and all parties to that profound literary and social contract must make their own minds up and draw their own conclusions. I was inspired to place a group of characters and life experiences into a particular environment and range of motivations and explore where that would take me. They will take to my stage again as actors in a hexalogy of novels – six books. It is for readers themselves to judge whether I have succeeded artistically; whether I have created a valuable vision from what was not there before – the miracle of art.

For her part, the reviewer does exactly what literary critics are supposed to do. My literary approach is thoroughly assessed and pointers to an underlying style, or set of styles in my case, are analysed; is the narrator omniscient and is he or she the voice of the author; is there one central character, or more than one; are the characters and their worlds believable; can the author craft and plot this story successfully and what is the underlying ‘message’. This latter point provides the opening lines of Joanne Hayden’s review, which can be read here (subscription only I’m afraid):

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/%C3%A9ilis-from-the-flats-powerful-depictions-of-urban-poverty-1.4094254

There will be a number of launch parties Ireland for ‘Éilis from the flats’ and I will give notice of these at a later date.

 

 

 

Paul Larkin

Carraic, Dún na nGall

 

* See for ex ‘An attempt on his life’ – Semper Vacare collection, Padraic Fiacc, Lagan Press, 1999

(As we prepare to celebrate the UN’s International Translation Day on September 30^th, this article on the – still prevailing – abysmal treatment of literary translators has been sent to three national representatives at the UN: Geraldine Byrne Nason (Ireland); Martin Bille Hermann (Denmark) and Karel van Oosterom (Netherlands). All three countries are relevant to my story and that of other translators.)

How I was vanished from my own book

What I have to say below has nothing to do with my word against somebody else’s. Every important statement that I make is supported by incontrovertible evidence.

If your name is on the front of a book as an author, not only does literary and publishing convention sate that you are the author of that book, the buying public believes the same. This is so obvious that it should not need spelling out, should it?

Here is the book in question:

The above very well produced book – ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’ – containing my translations of world renowned Danish painter Asger Jorn’s essays on art and architecture was published in 2011 by ‘010, Rotterdam’. As is clear, my name and that of my co-author Ruth Baumeister are on the front of the book. The same goes for the inside cover page:

 

That red mark you see on Le Corbusier’s open hand sculpture in the two-sheet cover page is the designer’s mark up (in Dutch), in readiness for the actual printing of the book. It tells the printer that the image is to be free standing. Some readers will be aware that ‘Le Corb’ designed this hand to express: “the hand to give and the hand to take; peace and prosperity, and the unity of mankind.” It is a fitting symbol for the beginning of a book about Fraternité. The socialist Asger Jorn would have approved, despite his subsequent fall out with Le Corbusier.

The reason why I have a mark-up copy of our book is that I was the one who proofed and corrected the whole book, except for the introduction which I was never shown and never saw until I got a physical copy of the book in May 2011. We shall return to the question of the book’s ‘missing’ introduction shortly.

Thus, dear readers, it is clear that I was co-author of the book ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’ and we have seen just a small bit of the compelling evidence for my intimate involvement with it. This involvement represents the guts of five years of my life. But to remove any remaining doubt on the question of my co-authorship of ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’ let us look at the publisher’s 2010/2011 catalogue where our book features prominently, as you would expect:

It may be difficult for some readers to see, but the writing in red below the book’s title names Paul Larkin alongside Ruth Baumeister as the ‘editors’ of ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’. Let us have a look at this in close up:

 

I was perfectly happy, and am still happy, to be described as translator of the book, but my broader editorial role is clear and was important. The editorial role of translators is often ignored or misunderstood. There was also a laborious element to that editorial work because the book features scores of graphic images and captions, which I copied – one by one – from the original essays and pasted into caption documents, so as to make our translated essays as much of a mirror image of the originals as possible. Here is just one page from our book, in this case my/Jorn’s essay – ‘Yin/Yang- The dialectical materialist philosophy of life.

Snake decoration – Swedish Bronze Age rock carving

I estimate that I spent at least six months on the captions alone. Another important aspect of the above publisher’s catalogue is that it mentions a jointly written introduction by the editors.

Before we come to the huge turn in this story – which you all feel looming – let me stress that my co-author Ruth Baumeister, to whom I bear no personal ill-will and who is now an internationally known academic, also did a huge amount of work on our book and, within her own fields of expertise as an art historian and architect at least, she is extremely adept.

It’s also important to stress that I regard, and will always regard, Ruth Baumeister as the co-author of a very fine book we created together about and ‘of’ Asger Jorn.

Though she completed her 2009 PhD on Asger Jorn in the Netherlands, at Delft University, she is now a professor at Aarhus School of Architecture in Jutland, Denmark. Needless to say our book helped her career as a Jorn expert and raised her academic esteem generally. The book should also, and equally, have given your author a much higher profile in Jorn studies. But didn’t.

Professor Baumeister wrote to me on the 2nd April 2010 in order to get our lines right about our joint authorship and our joint introduction. This is what she said:

(Please bear in mind that English is not her first language)

“Since for quite some time we are talking about ‘our’ book, I was assuming that we co-author also the intro. The other day, in an e-mail, you were talking about a “short translator’s introduction”. My understanding was that in terms of translation, your part is 80% and mine is 20% and in terms of the intro, the other way around and this would finally make “our” book, please correct me if I am wrong. ……There is no immediate hurry, I just wanted to make it clear so that we do not suffer from misunderstandings as we go on the way.”

I was happy with this; not least because Ruth Baumeister wanted to make sure there would be no misunderstandings in the future about our co-authorship. In terms of our joint introduction, I simply wanted to make some references to Asger Jorn’s passionate interest in Nordic myth and identity, and also his interest in Kierkegaard and what we might call artistic spirituality. I submitted the galley proofs early in 2011 and the book was sent to the printer. I then looked forward to seeing the printed version of ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’ in early April 2011.

But I then got a mail from Ruth Baumeister on the 22^nd of February 2011 telling me that my part of our introduction had not been included in the finished book:

I just delivered the intro myself and looking back at how it went now, I must admit that it was pretty naive on my end to ask you to do this together. And yet, I did so but unfortunately did not keep my promise for this one and I want to apologise to you for it. I am sorry for this and it was certainly not the correct procedure how I did it.

Hope you will survive this mail.

Needless to say I took a deep breath. But then decided not to make a big issue about the introduction. Overall, I was still very pleased with the book, as was the Danish Arts Council, which had partially funded our book. It was, however, an omen which in hindsight I should have noted. For if a big deep breath was required by me over my precious Fraternité book in 2011, I have never recovered from what happened next, in 2016.

It wasn’t until 2016 that I learned that, in 2014, my co-author had published a commercial version of her 2009 PhD and that this contained thousands of words from my translations in our Fraternité book and thousands more again in paraphrasing. I wasn’t told about this book prior to publication and my permission was not sought for the use of my translations. Nor was I credited as co-author of ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’. Furthermore, I was not paid for the extensive use of my work. I am not even thanked in the book. I am simply vanished.

Is this really the way the publishing of University PhDs works? I asked my astounded self.

It so happened that I knew a lot about Ruth Baumeister’s 2009 PhD from Delft University, because I had happily given Prof. Baumeister, and thereby Delft University’s Urban Architecture department, free use of two of my essay translations. One from Danish and one from Swedish. These were included in full in Ruth Baumeister’s 2009 PhD.

In that same 2009 PhD, which is in German, my co-author praises me to the heavens and tells the world that we are working together on a coming anthology of Asger Jorn’s essays

“(Note 76) Letztere sind Teil der Anthologie von Jorns Texten zur Architektur in englischer Übersetzung, die ich gegenwärtig zusammen mit Paul Larkin erarbeite.”

Translation:

“This latter forms part of an anthology of Jorn’s essays on architecture in English translation on which I’m presently working in collaboration with Paul Larkin.”

 

Yes we wrote a book together. That ‘anthology’, that book, is the book that came to be called ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’.

Now look at this picture of my translation of Asger Jorn’s essay ‘Dreams and Reality’ as it appears in our 2011 book ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’:

The above essay is quoted (several times) in my co-author’s 2014 book, but look at the footnote reference for the quote:

Jorn, Dreams and Reality, part 1 (1948), in Baumeister (ed). Fraternité Avant Tout.

As is immediately obvious, my name is no longer there.

It’s worth reproducing the text, my text, to which this footnote in the 2014 book refers, not just for its beauty, but precisely because your author translated it from the original Danish:

“When le Corbusier says that a machine-turned sphere is more beautiful and complete than an apple, this is due to the very fact that he does not understand that the beautiful and complete is what lives; the thing that exists as part of life. He does not understand that the very same stalk which breaks the apple’s perfect spherical shape, or geometry, is also the umbilical cord that binds it to the material world, to the universe. This same principle also applies to the door of a house, the stairs and passageways. It is this that is the most significant point. For it is this that links the house to the world around it, makes it an element of the social and urbanist whole, which in turn is nothing more than an element of the universal whole. It is precisely for this reason that the perfect and complete is to be found in the fragmentary, the open; objects that are organically linked with other living elements.”

We now also understand that whilst my name has been removed from the credit for the book from which the above text came, the text itself, my text, has been used extensively.

There was worse to come. Not only has my name as co-author and translator for the above quote been removed at this place, it has been removed hundreds of times in the 2014 book, for hundreds of quotes. In a book of, I estimate, around sixty five thousand words, the number of words used from my texts is over four thousand and that’s not counting paraphrasing. Again, it is a book in which I am not even paid or thanked for suffering the indignity of being ‘rifled’ and having my name as author removed at the same time.

If readers want to gauge my shock when I read this 2014 book for the first time, we can simply take the footnote references for the same page (page 71) as the above quote, with five of my essays quoted across pages 70 and 71, all with my name removed:

On pages 70 and 71 alone in this commercial PhD there are 424 of my words and that’s not counting the paraphrasing of my translations.

In total, right across this 2014 book by Professor Baumeister, seventeen of my finely crafted and beautifully written essays are quoted, paraphrased and cited, often at length as we have seen above and my name has been deliberately detached from all of them. Five years of my life as a translator, author and artist vanished. My essays chopped up and used in ways I would never have agreed to, if I had been given the chance to decide – as per copyright law.

Copyright law and academic practice also state that, where permission is not sought, an author may only quote a restricted amount from another person’s work and, even then, the relevant author must be credited. We have already seen the massive scale of my work used in the 2014 book and the absence of crediting.

So what exactly was this 2014 book – see picture above – that contains so much of my work without my permission? Again for the sake of clarity, it is an exquisitely produced commercial version of my co-author Ruth Baumeister’s 2009 Asger Jorn PhD from Delft University – entitled ‘L’architecture Sauvage’. The publisher was ‘Nai010’ of Rotterdam, which is a sister publisher to our original book’s publisher ‘010 Rotterdam’. What a shame I wasn’t invited to my own party, apart from a ‘fig leaf’ passing mention of my name at the head of the chapters that contain scores of my fine translations. How tacky.

According to the publisher of the 2014 book, Professor Baumeister has signed a contract with them claiming ownership of all the contents of the above book, ownership therefore of all of my essays. Ownership of me.

So by 2014, I was disappeared as author of ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’, but by September 2019 – literally just weeks ago – my co-author is to be found publicly describing our jointly written book in a quality Danish newspaper as: “the book I wrote in 2011.” I am not even history. I am not even toast. I’m just erased. As is any notion of Fraternité.

The Danish newspaper which raised my case recently is called Kristeligt Dagblad, which despite its ‘Christian’ title is seen as one of the most culturally sophisticated publications in Denmark. Kristeligt Dagblad is a really excellent non-sectarian (in the religious Irish sense) newspaper and has a broad, discerning and growing readership.

Though behind a paywall and therefore subject to copyright, the two articles in ‘KD’ can be – partially at least – read here, if you have Danish, or if you are just curious to see the headlines:

https://www.kristeligt-dagblad.dk/kultur/et-taet-intellektuelt-samarbejde-er-endt-i-trusler-om-retssag

Translation: A close intellectual collaboration on Asger Jorn has ended in threats of legal action-

https://www.kristeligt-dagblad.dk/danmark/asger-jorn-er-midtpunkt-i-juridisk-strid-om-ophavsret

Translation: Asger Jorn at the centre of a copyright dispute

The articles were published after Kristeligt Dagblad learned that I had approached a well known and highly respected Belfast human rights lawyer, Niall Murphy of KRW Law, to help me restore my artistic name and dignity.

One of the striking things about these newspaper articles, which caused quite a stir in Denmark, is that Professor Baumeister refused to respond to the points put to her by the newspaper. Only when the articles were published did she finally reply with a response that was published several days later. Rather unusually, the newspaper gives a response to Baumeister at the bottom of her letter, pointing out that she had refused to answer the specific points put to her, despite being given ample time to respond.

Professor Baumeister’s short letter is astonishing and does her no favours. She says, for example, that we have no joint copyright contract for a book.

Here is the wording of our 2009 joint copyright contract, which clearly refers to the production of a book and the shared royalties on “the public sale of the work”, though at that point our book had a different working title.

Professor Baumeister’s letter to Kristeligt Dagblad also states that she alone is the author of ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’. That she still felt able, considering the irrefutable evidence above, to make this statement after reading the newspaper articles is some feat. Not least because one of the articles also makes clear that the Jorn Museum’s own website describes me as the co-author of ‘Fraternité Avant Tout’, along with Professor Baumeister and Asger Jorn as the originator:

https://www.museumjorn.dk/en/visit/webshop/product-presentation/?AjrDcmntId=1172

Moreover, the newspaper revealed that it was none other than Professor Baumeister herself who had confirmed our co-authorship to that very same Jorn Museum back in 2010. Here is her email to me in May 2010 confirming. not only that everybody at the Jorn Museum, and certain Jorn experts, were delighted with my translations but also that we are co-authors of our book:

4^th of May, 2010

“… (they said) you really succeeded in bringing over Jorn’s irony and translating the special character and sometimes twisted character of his writings … I made it very clear that we are both authoring this book.”

So, just as with Professor Baumeister’s confirmation of our co-authorship – “our book” -n April 2010, which we have seen earlier when discussing our joint introduction, the very next month Professor Baumeister is found to be again making clear that I was the co-author of the book which bears my name on its cover. In fact in 2011, on the eve of ‘010 Rotterdam’ publishing our book, Baumeister made clear that we are the contracted authors and that we – both of us – licensed Fraternité Avant Tout to the publishers.

8th February 2011

“As we have described in our contract, we have the copyrights on the translations, which is the normal situation at 010 as with any other serious publisher. At the same time, now that the book will be published with 010, we give them the license to publish the material. This license will expire 2 years after the book is sold out and 010 has, on written request by us, no intention to publish a next edition.”

No joint copyright contract? No co-authorship? Deary me. The facts and Professor Baumeister’s own copious testimony speak for themselves.

But let us be clear about the literary and social dynamics that are at play here. My co-author badly needed something she didn’t have – without my permission – which was a set of priceless, never before translated, essays that unravel and illustrate Asger Jorn’s most complex and profound thoughts, and rather than admitting my expertise and the need of my help, she simply took them and used them to help fill up her book. The word for that in English is plagiarism. She has been able to get away with this behaviour because she is fully aware that I am not a man of means and that the Universities to which she is attached in the Netherlands and Denmark – which both have grand mission statements about ‘reaching out’ and the sacredness of learning – say it’s nothing to do with them.

At all times through this nightmare, I have simply asked for an apology, an admission that a ‘mistake’ was made, and a correction of the crediting error. A thank you note and the gracious gesture of a payment for the use of my work might also help. Translators being respected, credited and paid properly for their work? Whatever next?

Yet a high profile academic can simply ignore my – three year long – reasonable attempts at coming to a settlement; something she also freely admits in the letter referred to above, in which she accuses me of harassment for having the temerity to raise these issues. How very dare I? She has also ignored solicitor Niall Murphy’s attempts at correspondence, but responded to a newspaper immediately once this scandal went public.

Would she have ignored such missives from a famous, celebrity academic? Would she even have contemplated using a celebrity’s work without permission? Would such industrial scale purloinment of another artist’s finely wrought works of art have happened to a well connected middle class author/academic/celebrity with influence and friends in high places across the literary and university spectrum? Not a chance.

So there we have it on this day for translators – ‘ITD’ (International Translation Day). A day devised by the UN to celebrate the vital cultural mediation and exchange role of translators. Or as UNESCO has put it: “… ITD highlights the role of translation in promoting an understanding of the intangible cultural heritage of others in order to encourage mutual respect in our changing world.”

Mutual respect? In all of the above, there has been zero respect shown to translators.

Weyland the blacksmith – fire walk with me …

Though you wouldn’t know it from studying most Jorn books, Asger Jorn had an abiding interest in the peasant legend of Weyland the blacksmith. Weyland, or Vølund in the Danish, was so good at his craft that the elite of bygone days cut his leg tendons so as to hobble him for life and curtail his flight. To vanish him if you like. Weyland is of course also Hephaestus or Vulcanus. He is even Oedipus – the deliberately crippled Οἰδίπους (Swollen Foot).

Jorn loved the Weyland legend, not just because – like the original Danish ‘Amled’ (Hamlet) story – it depicts the brilliant artistry of the common man (and woman), it also speaks of a peasant belief that though the elite may hobble you, a natural justice will always prevail in the end.

My interests in Asger Jorn explore his own deep engagement with questions of spirituality, Kierkegaard, Danish and Nordic identity and artistic materialism. How that individual artistic freedom can be married to social concerns also. A perfect alternative look at the current ‘hygge’ zeitgeist and comfy coffee table books, one would have thought.

As Jorn things stand, I don’t even have a name, let alone an identity.

 

But, with the help of good, ‘common’ people, that will change.

 

 

Paul Larkin

 

Carraic, Derrybeg, County Donegal

Kierkegaard taking his daily menneskebad – a people bath *

If you were there, or saw the above scene at a gallery or in a movie, you might not remember the date, time or even exact place, but you will forever recollect the scene. Bring it to life again and again as it returns to you.

—

Do you ‘remember’, or do you ‘recollect’ something? Actually all human beings do both. Unless of course they fall victim to bouts of amnesia or aggressive forms of senility. Our profound ability to remember and recollect vast amounts of information is one of the precious gifts that all humans have. But equally profound is the difference between re-membering and re-collecting something. Don’t try and think about this difference too hard. Just feel it. Yes, you re-member a certain date for a particular reason, or the name of a distant aunt, but you re-collect (gather up again) a scene on that date, or scenes in which your aunt featured.

Thus, once you move beyond remembering the fact that your far flung aunt was called Matilda, you begin to re-collect Matilda. Even if you never met her, you will make efforts to conjure a scene about her; piece together things that people told you so as to conjure a Matilda Movie or maybe a Matilda soundscape. Or both. You are in fact being the artist you innately are. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do art. Humans recollect: create scenarios and populate them all the time. And this means you innately understand and can recall moods, atmospheres, colours, smells, emotions, things or people and their features and characteristics. No human is without this gift. It is this gift that leads us to dream.

Your powers of recollection are infallible proof that you are an artist. But don’t just take my word for that, listen to the beautiful words of my guiding light and great mentor Søren Kierkegaard:

Hukommelsen er umiddelbar og kommes umiddelbart tilhjælp, Erindringen kun reflecteret. Derfor er det en Kunst at erindre.

Remembering something is immediate and is there to help in an instant. Recollection is utter reflection. Thus to recollect is an art form.

(The author’s own translation and interpretation)

Stadier på livets vej – Stages on life’s way **

 

I don’t know where Kierkegaard gets this reputation of being perennially doom and gloom. For in his book Stages on life’s way (Stadier på livets vej in the original Danish), he writes some of the most inspiring, heartening and ‘loving-of-people’ words I have ever read. I suppose it’s because in this tabloid, quick-fix age, there is the problem that he has to be read deeply and several times over. The culture now seems to be – read a book and then never go near it again. Great thinker-writers like George Steiner and Michael Ondaatje have championed the cause of deep reading and the re-reading of the same book to discover its true beauty and significance. Deep reading of books also requires silence or relative quiet, which is hard to come by these days.

I also wonder whether Kierkegaard is being translated into English correctly. Or rather, I think he has often been translated correctly but not so as to reflect the underlying meaning in what he says and impart that to a modern age. I am personally, I admit, a champion of rewriting a book in its new language. The success of my A Fortunate Man (Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lykke Per) shows why, I think.

A facsimile of the original text of Stages on life’s way, showing the start proper – In Vino Veritas – Pre-recollection. The first paragraph contains the lines: “forgetting is the curtain that is closed; recollection the Vestal Virgin that delves behind that curtain.”

Stages on life’s way is a continuation of Either/Or. But with Kierkegaard this time trying, in my view, to work out how he will ever get his beloved Regine back now that she’s rejected a lifelong platonic relationship with him and gone and married another man. Part of his answer lies in recollection – or recall if you like – and what’s fascinating for me is that Kierkegaard says that recollection is only present if it’s a happy recall. Once we begin recalling nasty events, we zoom in on the horrible details and are back in the realm of immediate memory – remembering.

Take homesickness, as Kierkegaard does. A negative thing when you concentrate on the detail. But when you are back home and conjure that feeling of longing for home, which you felt whilst away, you not only conjure an illusion, you artistically create that illusion as a scene and all their emotions and placements until they feel right. It is a sublime feeling. To envisage homesickness once you are back home is art creation. You have created an ideal and it took quite a bit of effort. And as a work of art, it is always there. We are in the realm of the immortal and spiritual. There is nothing physical about it until it’s brought from behind the curtain again. As Kierkegaard says, try and throw away a recollection and, like Thor’s hammer, it will just come back at you – eventually.

It is for this reason that we venerate old people. Old people lose the memory of detail – it becomes shaky – but their recall of scenes in their lives is vivid and those scenes carried the scent of the humanly experienced before they were preserved and corked in the memory. The old amongst us sound the well of eternity as they delve to recollect and they are known as wise and possessing this eternal gift. The child on the other hand carries eternity within it but, as yet, has no real recollection.

A Catholic procession near my old school in Salford – we are all artists and art is everywhere.

Growing up in a poverty stricken part of Manchester – actually Salford to which Manchester is near – with many of us of Irish immigrant stock, there was little talk of innate artistic propensities. The fact of us as human artists. Quite the reverse. But Kierkegaard told every one of us many many years ago in his beautiful text, Stages on life’s’ way, that we are all great artists. All we need do is re-collect all those scenes and moments as the artistic beings we are. We are the soul’s movie makers.

 

 

 

Paul Larkin

Gaoth Dobhair

Mí Bealtaine 2019

 

* I was unable to find the source of this image, so if any readers are aware of it, please let me know so that I can credit the creator.

** Cover of my Kierkegaard colleague Niels Cappelørn’s edition of ‘Stadier pa livets vej’ – Stages on life’s’ way (Niels’ book is in Danish only as far as I know).

The Danish Tolstoy

 

 

Henrik Pontoppidan rules over the province of Danish letters with a grey-bearded authority akin to Leo Tolstoy’s or Henry James’s. The author of three sweeping epics,Det Fortjættede Land (The Promised Land, 1891–1895), Lykke-Per (A Fortunate Man, 1898–1904), and De Dødes Rige (The Kingdom of the Dead, 1912­–1916), he was awarded the 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature, an honor he shared with his exact contemporary, the now little-read Karl Gjellerup. Ernst Bloch admired him, and Georg Lukács likened his novelistic achievement to Flaubert’s. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1927, Pontoppidan was lauded by Thomas Mann in an open letter to the Danish newspaper Politiken, describing him as “a full-blooded storyteller who scrutinizes our lives and society so intensely that he ranks within the highest class of European writers.” In August, a cinematic adaption of Lykke-Per by the Academy-Award winning director Billie August opened in Danish theaters.

And yet, Pontoppidan’s writing has remained almost entirely unavailable to English-language readers. He has occasionally been invoked as proof of the Swedish Academy’s penchant for giving Nobel Prizes to seemingly obscure minor writers (Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, once asked: “Who wouldn’t rather be in the company of Proust, Auden, and Nabokov than of Erik Axel Karlfeldt and Henrik Pontoppidan?”), though it’s probably safe to assume that such judgments are not based on any great familiarity with Pontoppidan’s writing. Lykke-Per, his masterpiece, was not published in English until 2010 (in a translation by Naomi Liebowitz titled Lucky-Per), and only then in an academic edition costing a little over $80. At long last, an affordable new translation by the Irish writer and filmmaker Paul Larkin, published by the Danish Museum Tusculanum Press and bearing the more English-friendly title A Fortunate Man, is now available. Though I do not always agree with Larkin’s choices (in particular, regional dialects and Danish colloquialisms are often rendered in a rustic, sometimes archaic English, like something out of Thomas Hardy), it is on the whole an impressive, fluent achievement. It presents the first real opportunity for English-language readers to encounter what the scholar Flemming Behrendt, in his afterword, calls one of the most re-read and talked about novels in Danish literary history.

Published serially between 1898 and 1904, A Fortunate Man offers a vast, fictional panorama of Danish society in an age of social and industrial change and cultural renewal. It is set against the backdrop of a Copenhagen that, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, was transformed into a battleground of struggles between conservatives and progressives, Christians and atheists, the old and the new. The influential critic Georg Brandes gave a series of lectures on modern European literature, championing French naturalism and Darwinian freethinking, that inaugurated the prolific cultural and intellectual flowering known throughout Scandinavia as the Modern Breakthrough, encouraging writers like Ibsen, Strindberg, Hamsun, and Jacobsen. (Brandes appears in A Fortunate Man under the guise of the aesthetician Dr. Nathan.) And while Denmark’s defeat by Bismarck’s Prussian troops in the war of 1864 had instilled a pervasive sense of national humiliation, the feeling that a new and better age was dawning was shared by many. The expansion of the railways, the building of new industries, and the city’s growing working-class neighborhoods led Copenhagen’s population to more than double between 1864 and 1896.

A Fortunate Man tells the story of Per Sidenius, the descendant of a long line of austere clergymen, who revolts against the dogmatic piety of his family home and embarks on the young man’s familiar march on the metropolis, where he intends to seek fame and fortune as an engineer. His great ambition is to build a massive harbor project on Denmark’s west coast that will, he fervently believes, “transform Denmark into an industrial manufacturing power of the first order.” Neglecting his studies at the College of Engineering, Per spends his days and nights in his poky abode, reading up on hydraulics and turbines and making elaborate and detailed drawings.

But even stronger than his belief in the soundness of this project is Per’s belief in his own purpose. Strong and handsome, ambitious and self-absorbed, Per ruthlessly schemes and plots to overcome his poor, provincial origins and conquer the city’s elites: “He knew that his destiny lay far beyond the realm of everyday concerns and mediocrity. He felt the blood of one who was born to rule coursing through his veins and nothing but a place at life’s top table, in the company of the world’s highest freeborn men, was good enough for him.”

A Fortunate Man breathes the excited, tempestuous air of its time, but it often feels strikingly modern. What is Per if not an ancestor of the Silicon Valley positivists of our time? His zealous belief in man’s ability to master nature is hardly distinct from the conviction, common enough among tech gurus today, that mortality is a disease with a cure like any other. And just as our contemporary tech-utopianism is a kind of ersatz religion, so Per’s ambitions are often couched in a language with a distinct theological hangover. Walking through Copenhagen’s streets early one morning, for instance, Per hears the factory horns blowing and stops to listen to them “with the air of a worshipper being called to prayer”:

At first there was just a couple of blasts coming from the direction of Nørrebro, then one started in the docks at Christianshavn; eventually the sound was coming from everywhere—a cock crowing with a thousand voices, an Evangelium for a new age, which one day would drive away all the dark forces of spookery and superstition—never to return!

Per Sidenius’s engineering ambitions are inextricable from his desire to rid himself of the poison of his religious past, and he can sometimes resemble Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who said that “man is something that must be overcome.” (Indeed, Per’s youthful battle cry is, “I will! Therefore it is done.”) Believing man to be “the master of the earth and absolute ruler,” he views Christianity as an unnatural inversion: “a grotesque kingdom of humpbacked underground trolls who shunned the bright light of life, where the poor were counted as blessed, the meek exalted and death was the only glorious salvation—an upside down land where small things were deemed to be big and the crooked declared to be straight.” For Per, the Christian concepts of guilt, pity, and compassion are little more than a hoax designed to prevent man from reaching his full potential.

Like Jens Peter Jacobsen’s influential novel Niels Lyhne (1880), which Pontoppidan would have read, A Fortunate Man is often intensely atheistic, and testifies to the oppressive influence of Christian fundamentalism on Danish society. Pontoppidan read Nietzsche while at work on the novel and was surely inspired by the German philosopher’s assault both on Christianity and the cult of rationalism. One of the novel’s more memorable characters is the heretical pastor Fjaltring, whose medieval contempt for the liberalizing movement within Christianity is articulated in wonderful, rather belligerent monologues. Like Nietzsche, Fjaltring finds it difficult to reconcile the Old and the New Testaments, and even suggests that one is the travesty of the other. And like that other great religious scold, Søren Kierkegaard, he warns of the difficult passion true faith requires: “But if the man called Jesus was not the son of God, who then can guarantee that Our Lord did not in fact place him amongst us, and allow him to be tortured and suffer an ignominious death, so as to serve as a terrifying example of what true faith requires?”

It is a great credit to Pontoppidan’s imaginative sympathy, though, that his depiction of religious conflict includes the Christian worldview but also that of a minority often targeted by Christians. As strange as it may sound, one of the few vibrant and complex portrayals of Jewish life in the nineteenth-century European novel happens to have been written by this son of a provincial Danish pastor.

When Per’s ambitions are obstructed by his professors and other high-ranking engineers, all of whom dismiss the harbor project as a naïve and youthful fantasy, he finds an ally and supporter in Ivan Salomon, the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant family. It is Ivan who gives Per his nickname—“Hr. Lucky Per! The Fortunate Man personified indeed”—and who grants him entry into the Salomon household and the wider world of Copenhagen’s Jewish bourgeoisie.

More importantly, it is through Ivan that Per meets Jakobe, one of the Salomon daughters, and the novel’s sometime co-protagonist. Though less conventionally attractive than her flirtatious sister Nanny, Jakobe possesses a commanding intellect: she is prodigiously well read, widely traveled, and firmly independent. She is also, from a young age, painfully conscious of the degradation and injustice that Jews encounter everywhere from their Christian neighbors across Europe. In a striking passage, she recalls seeing on a trip to Germany a group of Jewish refugees at Berlin’s main railway station, outcasts fleeing the pogroms in Russia:

All summer long, she had been reading newspaper reports about these legions of refugees and the shameful acts which the mob had visited upon them—either to the indifference of the authorities or even with their outright collusion. The newspapers described how Jewish homes had been set alight with the families still inside; Jewish families had been robbed down to the very clothes they stood in; their women had been violated and abused; old Jews and children alike had been stoned to the point where gutters ran with blood.

The experience in Berlin, and the casual bigotry she finds wherever she goes, incites Jakobe’s hatred of Christianity, which she regards as little more than “a pitiless executioner of her kinsfolk.” In a wonderfully blasphemous letter to Per, Jakobe writes that she would only ever consider a rapprochement with Christian beliefs on the condition that the Church admits its guilt: “The Church must beg forgiveness for its sins. On its knees willing to suffer for the truth—the truth it has suppressed—for injustice, which it has blinded.”

Generations of readers have celebrated Pontoppidan’s moving portrayal of Jakobe, and it is not hard to see why. (I doubt many male novelists have deigned to write about their female characters’s menstrual cycles: “Her natural functions had always been characterized by a marked irregularity.”) Jakobe is the ideal foil for Per, to whom she is eventually (but only briefly) engaged. The vicissitudes of their difficult relationship provide the novel with some of its most memorable scenes: Per showing off his physical prowess by outrunning a horse carriage at the Salomon’s country home, much to the dismay of his future in-laws; or the touchingly intimate days Jakobe and Per spend together hiking in the Alps, days that are like “a new baptism” for Per, who in his excitable, devil-may-care state fires a revolver at a wooden crucifix: “Here’s a shot to herald the dawn of a new century!”

Jakobe’s independence and quiet dignity provide a respite from Per’s coarse manners and sense of entitlement, and the suspicion sometimes arises that she is the novel’s true conscience, its better self. Even as their engagement is broken the narrative seems to expand rather than diverge; it is as if Pontoppidan was so affected by his own creation that, unlike Per, he could not bear to be without Jakobe, whom we never entirely lose sight of.

Still, it is Per Sidenius and his conflicted, beleaguered soul that Pontoppidan plumbs. A proper Bildungsroman, the novel parades its hero through a variety of conflicting influences, from his dogmatic father to the progressive Dr. Nathan, the liberal-minded Pastor Blomberg, and the Nietzschean Fjaltring. Per senses early on a division within himself, an inability, as he puts it, “to be reconciled to a specifically defined life philosophy.” He undergoes a series of moral and religious crises throughout the novel, and even at one point rekindles his interrupted faith and marries the daughter of a provincial pastor, settling down far from the crowded Copenhagen of his youth. But even this quiet life in the country cannot calm Per’s restless soul:

As sure as day followed night, and then night came again; and just as if all life on earth was born out of this dialectic between the dark and the light, so too was religious life conditioned by this inexorable paradox that, with its conflicting forces, ensured that the soul was in constant flux. A Christian faith that was not continually renewed by doubt was a lifeless thing – nothing more than a broom handle, a crutch which might help a soul to forget its lameness for a while, but could never be a life-affirming construct.

A more didactic novelist might have viewed Per’s retreat as an opportunity to condemn modern society, with its teeming masses and blind, mechanical advances. Pontoppidan was indeed ambivalent about the triumph of modernity over tradition; as a young man, he had become known for his social-realist sketches of the plight of Denmark’s rural poor. But Pontoppidan neither reproves nor moralizes; like Chekhov, he knew the novelist’s duty was not to offer solutions but simply to ask the right questions. Per’s disillusionment with modern society is thus permitted to coexist with Jakobe’s cosmopolitanism. Late in the novel, Jakobe has again traveled to Berlin to visit a childhood friend, and there feels “like someone who had come home to her own kingdom.” She entertains no illusions about the perils of the modern metropolis, the dangers and risks associated with living in such dirty, crowded spaces, and yet she finds in it a beauty also:

A huge city containing millions like this possessed something of the magic of the ocean. There was something of the siren call of the rolling waves in this murderous existence, in this wild tumult, this incessant ascending and descending, which right to the moment of extinction continued to hold out the promise of new and limitless opportunities.

Pontoppidan is always of two minds about things, and it is for this reason that A Fortunate Man, while being one of the great novels about modernity, never once buckles under the weight of the ideas and currents it depicts. Pontoppidan is repeatedly drawn out into the abundance, the noisy pluralism of life, even as his hero travels deeper and deeper into the small privacy of his own being. The narrative’s spaciousness, Pontoppidan’s humane breadth and tolerance, remains deeply affecting throughout. As Thomas Mann put it in his birthday letter:

As a genuine conservative, [Pontoppidan] maintains the novel’s grand style in a breathless age. As a genuine revolutionary, he sees in prose above all a scrutinizing power. With that charming, indeed captivating, stringency which is the secret of all art, he judges the times and then, as a true poet, points us towards a purer, more honorable way of being human.

A Fortunate Man, by Henrik Pontoppidan, translated by Paul Larkin, is published by Museum Tusculanum Press and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.