![]() It’s those last two words that I find especially true of Per Aage’s poetry, and what I most hope to convey through these translations.Marines stationed at Kabul airport's Abbey Gate last year were give a description by the CIA of a suicide bomber two days before an explosion ripped through the chaotic evacuation, according to one of the troops wounded in the blast. As one critic put it, “Per Aage Brandt’s poetry is paradoxical: it is intellectual and stringent, but also playful and nutty. He writes poems about ideas, but also about the baby rabbit his cat brings into the house poems about musical composition, but also about the composer relaxing in front of his fireplace. He has lived in Denmark, but also for long stretches in the USA, Argentina, and France. He is also a concerned and at times bewildered cat owner. Professionally, he is a cognitive scientist with many books and scholarly articles to his name, and his work engages several branches of philosophy. While it wouldn’t be wrong to describe Per Aage as a philosophical poet, as the list above suggests, it would probably send the wrong message, or not enough messages not enough slightly contradicting messages. A note on the back cover of one of his most recent collections lists the subjects covered as “anxiety, consciousness, death, dreams, ecology, economics, existence, aberration, the everyday, identity, irony, intimacy, cats, catastrophes, communication, war, the body, art, love, desire, power, nature, poetry, politics, religion, the soul, writing, disturbance, surrender, spirit, and certain other matters.” There’s hardly anything in the world that fails to interest this poet, and nothing that he fails to make more interesting once he’s written about it. I think this freshness comes from his being as unbounded with the content of his work as he is bounded by its forms. After more than forty years and thirty volumes, his work maintains its original principles and continues to show inventive ness. ![]() But that just isn’t the case with Per Aage. You might expect such a rigid artistic program to become increasingly restrictive and for the poet either to move onto different forms or to run out of things to say with the old. not poems, but poetry or maybe better yet, verse, since that word originally meant “turn,” as a plow turns at the end of a furrow and as Per Aage does with great pre cision at the ends of his lines. Then there is his use of the Danish word Poesi instead of the more common Digte in the titles of his many collections of, well. The same effect occurs when he stretches or shrinks the line by uniform increments, and to preserve this important formal feature I have sometimes taken liberties, even breaking up words not broken in the Danish, in order to give the translation the same shape as its original. Or what about his close attention to the right-hand margin of his poems? In most of his poems, each line ends within a space or two of the others, giving his work a machine-like appearance. ![]() Start with the surface elements: how many poets end their poems with titles, as Per Aage often does? And even among those rare poets who employ “post-titles,” Per Aage must be considered singular because of his varied and inventive uses of it-as an aside, or an allusion, or an opportunity to switch from his native Danish into one of the many other languages he speaks, including English, French, German, and Latin. After almost ten years of translating the poetry of Per Aage Brandt, my conviction that he is unique-or at the very least, highly unusual-has only grown stronger.
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