Pia Tafdrup – författare

Poetik är konsten att tänka om poesi. Med Över vattnet går jag har den danska författaren Pia Tafdrup skrivit den första kvinnliga poetiken i nordisk litteratur. Personligt och skarpsinnigt forumlerar hon sin syn på diktkonstens vilkor och möjligheter i vår tid.

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. This new translation of her work combines two recent collections, The Migrant Bird's Compass and Salamander Sun, which comprise the third and fourth parts of a quartet written over ten years: the first two parts are The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky's Horses (published in English by Bloodaxe in 2010 as Tarkovsky's Horses and other poems). The Migrant Bird's Compass is a book of poems about the dimensions of travel, either to specific countries or as an inner journey. The route from birth to death is also portrayed. Travel demands commitment and curiosity. The only predictable thing about it is the unpredictable. Travel implies vulnerability, but also much that has happened at home while one was away. The poems are about the experience of 'resting in myself / despite the fire in the centre of the earth'. Salamander Sun presents 60 poems, one for each year, from 1952, when Pia Tafdrup was born, to 2011; from the first chaotic sensations, through the gradual discovery of the world and its diversity, and of language, its possibilities and challenges; from growing up on a farm, puberty, study, politics, love, to becoming a poet, having two sons, getting older and having old parents; to leaving one's mark and understanding one's place in the passage of time. The poems cast light backwards, but also seek a focus in the future. Together with The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky's Horses the two books form a quartet that centres on the theme of journeying and passage, its individual parts creating a field of tension. Each part portrays an element: water, earth, air and fire, each 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.

Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets. She has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, and her work has been translated into many languages. She received the 1999 Nordic Council Literature Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – for Queen’s Gate, which was published in David McDuff’s English translation by Bloodaxe in 2001. Also in 2001, she was appointed a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog, and in 2006 she received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy. The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow are the first two collections in Pia Tafdrup’s new series of books focussing on the human senses. While taste and smell dominate, the poems are equally about the way of the world and the losses that people sustain during the course of their lives – the disappearance of friends and family members, but also the erosion of control of one’s own existence. The themes of ecology, war and conflict are never far away, and there is a constant recognition of the circular nature of life, the interplay of the generations. Pia Tafdrup’s previous series of themed collections was The Salamander Quartet (2002–2012). Written over ten years, its first two parts were The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky’s Horses, translated by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe in 2010 as Tarkovsky’s Horses and other poems. This was followed in 2015 by Salamander Sun and other poems, McDuff’s translation of The Migrant Bird’s Compass and Salamander Sun, the third and fourth parts of the quartet.

Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets. She has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, including widely admired sequences of themed collections. The latest of these is a series of five books focussing on the human senses, her Senses Quintet (2014-2022), which the critic Carsten Palmer Schale has called ‘a cathedral of the soul’ and ‘the best collection of poems written in Scandinavia in the past 20 years’.Bloodaxe published David McDuff’s translation of the first two collections in the quintet, The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow, in one volume in 2021. This edition brings together his translations of the third, fourth and fifth parts, The Sight of Light, The Sound of Clouds and The Touch of Skin.All parts of life are mediated through the five senses in the five books, including the way of the world and the losses that people sustain during the course of their lives – the disappearance of friends and family members, but also the erosion of control of one’s own existence. The themes of ecology, war and conflict are never far away, and there is a constant recognition of the circular nature of life, the interplay of the generations.‘The main theme is of a deeply existential nature. How it is to be in the world. What it's like to use your five senses to perceive, and to some extent, incorporate the world. Through taste, sight, smell, sound and touch. […] It’s no coincidence that touch – the sensation of the skin being touched – is the last in the suite. In Tafdrup's universe, touch is above the other senses. The skin frames the individual and therefore sets a limit to the self from the environment. It is the human conditions of life she has immersed herself in; existence and its more or less concrete forms of appearance. Earth, beach, sea, sky, fire – and human as a function of these elements. Like body, as language, as memory. It is in the meeting, collision and interaction between nature and culture, between discipline and sexuality, between the depths and heights of sensuality and the details of the everyday world.' – Carsten Palmer Schale, Opulens magasin, 2023Pia Tafdrup’s previous series of themed collections was The Salamander Quartet (2002–2012). Written over ten years, its first two parts were The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky’s Horses, translated by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe in 2010 as Tarkovsky’s Horses and other poems. This was followed in 2015 by Salamander Sun and other poems, McDuff’s translation of The Migrant Bird’s Compass and Salamander Sun, the third and fourth parts of the quartet. Pia Tafdrup received the 1999 Nordic Council Literature Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – for Queen’s Gate, which was published in David McDuff’s English translation by Bloodaxe in 2001. Also in 2001, she was appointed a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog, and in 2006 she received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy.

Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets, the winner of the Nordic Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – for her collection Queen’s Gate, published in English by Bloodaxe in 2001. This new translation of her work combines two more recent collections, The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky’s Horses, which comprise the first and second parts of a quartet written over ten years: the third and fourth parts are The Migrant Bird’s Compass and Salamander Sun (published in English by Bloodaxe in 2015 as Salamander Sun and other poems).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. Those great forces of existence form the territory of The Whales in Paris: above all, desire and death, illuminated with motifs from childhood, the relation to parents, family, mythical figures from the Bible. Time, dreams and meditation also play their part.Pia Tafdrup writes: 'Tarkovsky’s Horses is about loss in a double sense. The themes of the poems are my father’s increasing forgetfulness, his loss of his faculties and then my loss of a father. The book is a poetic portrayal of the course of an illness for which science has few words – my father begins to suffer from dementia, and then he has to go into a nursing home, where he dies. Disintegration of identity and its inexorable progress are followed through every phase, in a concrete and naked form that makes use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The poems about a father who forgets more and more are set in a border landscape which is also not without its comical aspects. The poems narrate the drama of what it is to be a human being.'