Inger Christensen Biography
Inger Christensen (1935–2009) was a Danish poet, novelist, essayist and editor. She is considered the foremost Danish poetic experimentalist of her generation. Her works include poetry, fiction, drama, and essays.
Christensen was born in the town of Vejle, on the eastern Jutland coast of Denmark. Her father was a tailor and her mother a cook before her marriage. She attended and graduated from Vejle Gymnasium, then moved to Copenhagen and, later, to Århus, studying at the Teachers’ College there.
During that same period, Christensen began publishing poems in the journal Hvedekorn, and was guided by the noted Danish poet and critic Poul Borum (1934–1995), whom she married in 1959 and divorced in 1976.
Inger Christensen PhotoThe talented poet taught at the College for Arts in Holbæk from 1963 to 1964, after which she turned to writing full-time, producing two of her major early collections, Lys (Light, 1962) and Græs (Grass, 1963), both examining the limits of self-knowledge and the role of language in perception.
Christensen also published two novels, Evighedsmaskinen (1964) and Azorno (1967), as well as a shorter fiction on the Italian Renaissance painter Mantegna, presented from the viewpoint of various narrators (Mantegna’s secretary Marsilio, the Turkish princess Farfalla, and Mantagena’s young son), Det malede Værelse (1976, translated into English as The Painted Room by Harvill Press in 2000).
Inger Christensen Poems
- from Letter in April: IV
- from Letter in April: VII
- from Light: Blue Poles
- from Light: “I always thought reality”
- from Light: “If I stand”
- from Light: “It’s very strange”
- from Light: Men’s Voices
- from Light: Winter
- I, Up they soar
- Alphabet (An Excerpt)
Inger Christensen Alphabet
Alphabet is one of the most well-known poems of Inger Christensen, who was broadly considered to be Denmark’s most prominent poet. The poem was originally published in 1981 in Danish as alfabet.
alphabet [excerpt]
3
cicadas exist; chicory, chromium
citrus trees; cicadas exist;
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cere-
bellum
4
doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death
Inger Christensen it
It is a 1969 book of poetry by the Danish writer Inger Christensen. The book focuses on social criticism, and lines from it have frequently been quoted in the Danish political discourse.
Originally published: 1969
Page count: 239
Genre: Poetry
Publisher: Gyldendal
Awards: De Gyldne Laurbær
Inger Christensen Butterfly Valley
Butterfly Valley: A Requiem is a 1991 book of poetry by the Danish writer Inger Christensen. It consists of 15 sonnets and is a so-called sonnet redoublé.
Originally published: 1991
Genre: Poetry
Page count: 35
Translator: Susanna Nied
Published in english: 2001
Inger Christensen Quotes
“Happiness is the change that comes over me
when I describe the world
It comes over the world
Happiness is the change that comes over me
when I’m afraid
It comes over the world
For instance I can be afraid of and for the world
afraid because the world consists among other things
of me so swiftly dying”
― Inger Christensen, it
“doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death”
― Inger Christensen, alphabet
“There’s something specific
about the doves’ way
of living my life
as a natural result
of today since it’s raining”
― Inger Christensen, alphabet
“abrikostræerne findes, abrikostræerne findes”
― Inger Christensen
“early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future”
― Inger Christensen, alphabet
Inger Christensen Obituary
Updated: 19th February 2009
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/feb/19/inger-christensen-obituary
Inger Christensen, who has died aged 73, was one of the most significant European poets of the 20th century. She was Danish, and it is a misfortune for any great writer to be confined to a language with few readers, but her work, like that of her compatriots Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard, may be destined to find admirers in many languages.
Regarded as the foremost poet in her native country since the 1960s, Christensen’s translated poetry was enthusiastically adopted by German readers. Even more in Germany than in her native country, her name was mentioned as a Nobel prize candidate. Though this eluded her, she was awarded most of the important literary awards in Scandinavia and Germany.
Her reputation rests on just five volumes of poetry. Three of them were published in the 1960s, including the most famous, det (it) (1969), which was followed by alfabet in 1981 and then Sommerfugledalen: et requiem in 1991.
The first of her works to be translated into English was alfabet. The translator was the American poet Susanna Nied, who has campaigned for 30 years to bring Christensen to English readers. Nied’s 1982 translation won a Pen award, but despite this, and the support of the eminent translator and critic of European poetry Michael Hamburger, the work had to wait almost 20 years to find a publisher, Bloodaxe, in 2000. Sommerfugledalen: et requiem was published by Daedalus Press in 2001 in a bilingual version, as Butterfly Valley: a requiem, a small set of 15 sonnets, again translated by Nied. Her translation of det eventually appeared, from Carcanet, in 2007.
Behind this slim output lay prodigious labour and an austere dedication. Born in Vejle, Jutland, Christensen was the daughter of a tailor and a cook and was educated at Vejle gymnasium. She moved to Copenhagen to study medicine but took a diploma in teacher training college in 1958 and became a schoolteacher. She also began writing poetry for Hvedekorn magazine, edited by the influential critic and poet Poul Borum, whom she married in 1959. They divorced in 1976.
In 1964 she devoted herself to full-time writing. Much of her work is in the form of novels, essays and books for children. One of the novels, The Painted Room, appeared in English in 2000. The translation of Azorno (1967) is to be published this summer.
As a poet, Christensen’s practice was deeply inflected by mathematics and a sense of the world as ordered otherwise than by language. The “systemic poetry” that she cultivated was designed to distort language so as to allow the disclosure and display of other patterns and other principles of order. The poems of alfabet are based on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers: the first poem has one line, the second poem two, the third three, the fourth five, each number in the sequence being the sum of the previous two (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34). The work stops with the letter n, itself a mathematical symbol, which, as the 14th letter of the alphabet, generates a poem of 610 lines. In this modelling of words, Christensen’s work can be compared with that of The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, and to the works by the French writers associated with Oulipo, notably Georges Perec.
That her last book was a sequence of sonnets might seem surprising in such an experimental writer, but of course the sonnet is deeply mathematical in its structure, the division of its 14 lines having been recognised in the Renaissance as akin to “the golden ratio”. A degree of mathematical obsession was hardly unknown to Dante, Petrarch or Spenser. Christensen’s verse is also insistently typographical, in this respect following the example of Ezra Pound. In alfabet, the number of lines is to be reckoned. In one section of it, the number of characters in each line must be counted if one is to unfold a numerical pattern. In det, the printed page keeps the look of a typewritten one (though not, alas, in the English translation). This means that, unlike on a printed page, a space is of consistent length, and can carry value. The white spaces on her pages can achieve purposes similar to those of Edwin Morgan’s concrete poems.
To describe Christensen’s work is almost inevitably to present something dry, theoretical, abstract and unappealing to lovers of poetry. What is remarkable (and what makes her a poet) is the lyric voice that sounds through all the schemes and systems. A reading by Christensen was an extraordinary event. “Her voice was low and intense,” the Norwegian poet Paal-Helge Haugen recalled. “When the text passed through her voice it was as if it became shared by all.” Christensen will take her place among the great poets of the European tradition.
She is survived by her son, Peter, and a grandchild.
• Inger Christensen, poet, born 16 January 1935; died 2 January 2009
Inger Christensen sommerfugledalen-Video
About InformationCradle Editorial Staff
This Article is produced by InformationCradle Editorial Staff which is a team of expert writers and editors led by Josphat Gachie and trusted by millions of readers worldwide.
We endeavor to keep our content True, Accurate, Correct, Original and Up to Date. For complain, correction or an update, please send us an email to informationcradle@gmail.com. We promise to take corrective measures to the best of our abilities.