Whales in Paris

In what I hope will be a recurring feature of this blog - a series of literary presentations - I'm publishing some of my translations of poems by the contemporary Danish poet Pia Tafdrup. Her collection Dronningeporten (Queen's Gate) won the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1999, and my English translation of the book appeared from Bloodaxe Books in 2001.

Three of the poems that follow are from Pia's collection The Whales in Paris (Hvalerne i Paris, Gyldendal, 2002), and one is from an earlier collection.

______________________________________________

DOMAIN

Suddenly – as milk boils over in a lonely house
where no one is ready to take the pot off the flame,
suddenly – between what is past
and what is to pass,
when a star lights up the day,
the memory of the crematorium’s smoke,
rising from the chimney –
dimly twisted fossils of naked pillars.
A wave rises, light rushes up from the earth.
My sister and I wearing sunglasses,
because we mustn’t be seen
as the blind wheels of the hearses roll by,
but would like to say goodbye…
The grown-ups give the children salt
when they are thirsty,
only the earth is wet with dew,
and the shadow
under flowing white flowers cools the day.



INFECTION

You stiffen poisoned by sudden fear
while the day founders and changes colour
and the blood under a steadily growing pulse
sends the pain out into the most finely ramified net
where it flutters around like ash
which with a wing-beat is lifted above the embers
into the heart, that coral tree
in acute flowering stands still in spasm
almost drowning in its own blood
For who moves immune in a city
where people live separated
like shards of the same dream
Darkness’s forced entry to a stranger
-- does hatred attack you?
Like a jab of metal gnawing into your flesh
far, far from that morning where newly born
you were blessed by the first light.



CRITIQUE OF INCESTUOUS THINKING

If fish had words, they would have told about us, about a summer
when we shot through the water,
my father and I –
broke wave after wave, as they opened in cascades
of rain and fear
I lay on his back, hung on his shoulders
with my arms thrown tight around his neck.
He swam – which I hadn’t learned to do,
I followed each stroke, watched his muscles move
supply tensed under the skin.
With his speed we cleaved the waves, which were far colder
than my blood, with his speed I came to love the water,
and the warm touch of the air.
My father’s gleaming back, up and down,
forward, forward
His arms in the surface of the water in great, powerful jerks,
while I lay feverishly still, until his movements became mine…
He hurled himself forward, I closed my eyes tight shut,
he dived, and I was there, too –
pressed my arms more tightly round him, as we flew under the water,
secure against the strength of muscles, when we shot away,
popped up, rushing on towards nothing
other than the joy of the terrifying, and the horizon that curved.
It was a journey not from A to B,
but from catacomb-like dream to lightening play
through drops’ splashes of fire.
The smell of his skin blended mirages and sea-sharp salt,
like that I glided over fathomless forests of seaweed and mountains of stone,
away over a white, rippled sandy bottom, just as once
in a gaping sea he was borne
on back of his mother, with his arms around her neck,
Like that we dived again and again, like that I learned a firm grip,
but also to let go, where nothing is certain –
to dance with the words,
break sound barriers of water
and sing with whales.
Like that I passed through oceans’ ineluctable windows of pain,
learned that, though drowning, I still soared –
Like that I met the men: We would dive
down to caves in the cliffs, to hidden grottos, climb
up from the deepest sea, dream
of ebb and flow,
listen to the beat of fins,
listen to the pulse… Towards death – keep us flying in sun, salt and foam.



KNOWLEDGE

In the light of the soul’s dream the chestnut’s leaves are hammered
by the sun to gold,
the tree throws them off, but the pigeons in the elm tree
have made a mistake and have young ones now,
and you
are a tower of happiness and threatening expectation.
You illumine the strongly scented leaf,
raise me in a spiral with your gaze.
The sun behind driving rain clouds,
the sun in a semi-circle around us,
from window to window, dizzy
as the blood murmurs in the finest capillaries:
The silence sings,
but we don’t suffer from fear of heights,
we climb stiffly,
crowned by crows’ cawing,
balance and climb further in the gale,
which is mild as a springtime, as hands and lips,
but comes towards us in gust after gust,
while all around collapses – falls
to the earth, where the wet darkness grows
in yawning chaotic formations…
We shall possibly lose one another from sight again,
but like the intense colours the blind man sees in his sleep,
the skin wants to remember where it was touched,
by zigzag of flying hands, by roaming lips,
by a tongue that suddenly raises
surprisingly authentic and obscure places,
as though it wanted to know the end before the beginning.