Pia Tafdrup

The Poet of the Joy of Touch

In 2006 Pia Tafdrup received the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize known as the little Nobel Prize. This year she celebrates her 25 anniversary as a poet. We bring Horace Engdahl’s speech to her at the awarding of the Nordic Prize.

By Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academi. Translated by David McDuff
 

In her early collections of verse, and for a long time subsequently, Pia Tafdrup had a predilection for writing a poetry of short lines. A mounting, impatient rhythm, to which the language accommodates itself without resistance. Each time a new line of verse begins, the poet blows the breath back into her universe, reconnects with her invisible "you", waits a split second for its silent "yes!", and continues.

If one spends much time with her books in quiet, alone, one discovers that this elevated, hymn-like tone is only one of the many pitch-ranges of her voice, and not the primary one. But the characteristic authority is there right from the start, in that outwardly unassuming pamphlet with the fascinating title When An Angel Breaks Her Silence, published 25 years ago. Nor did it take her long to convince colleagues and critics of her stature as a lyrical poet. Only eight years after her literary debut she was elected a member of the Danish Academy.

This has given rise to an anomaly. Rule No. 1 for a modern poet is to stand outside. "To be understood is to prostitute oneself," writes Fernando Pessoa in Book of Disquiet, and the statement is to some extent a representative one. A certain brokenness is part of what is expected from a first rank talent. It was with amazement that one saw in Pia Tafdrup a young poet who seemed to be doing well, who radiated social confidence and was not ashamed to take her place on her country's Parnassus while being fully alive – a poet who confessed that even as she began her first book she thought of it as the first building block in a life's work.

She belongs to Denmark's poetry miracle, that grouping of young poets who blazed a path for themselves during the 1980s. But she soon turned from being a generational phenomenon into a universal one, more reminiscent of Rilke than of Bob Dylan. Perhaps the role of outsider is less imaginable for a talented writer in Denmark, simply because of the smallness of the country. Where is one to go? Sweden is big enough for almost all its writers to be able to stay outside.

Pia Tafdrup made no secret of the fact that what she did was Art with a capital letter, and that the literary canon was her bread and butter. In 1991, on top of everything else, she published a poetics. Its title was Walking Over The Water. She placed herself in the ranks of authoritative figures all the way from Aristotle to her direct antecedent Paul la Cour, discussing the nature of poetry, the ways in which it is written, and how it is to be understood. It's a triumphant hubris of the kind that's witnessed when Swedish golfer Annika Sörenstam insists on playing with the men.

There is only one thing one with which one can successfully compare Pia Tafdrup's writing, and that is the experience of falling in love. In her poems it's as though that experience can only really be compared with one thing – writing. What writing and falling in love have in common is that, as phenomena, they are all-consuming. They lay claim to everything and relate everything to themselves. They are rapid, cumulative events, descending like an assault. Improbably enough, they are both triggered by words.

In Pia Tafdrup's poems, words stimulate the blood. In what is one of the most realistic love poems I have read, she has the ‘I' of the poem conquer the beloved by saying his name as they both wander aimlessly across a rainy urban landscape, in a way he has never heard it said before, as though he had been given a completely new name, the one he really wants to be called, a word that unclothes him. The poet whispers him naked in his own name, naming him so that he falls completely under her power.

According to the psychologists, falling in love is a controlled psychosis. Readers who give themselves to Pia Tafdrup's texts are invited to a folie à deux for the duration of the poem. No irony that might create uncertainty about whom the poem is meant for obtrudes between the poet and her addressee. Everyone is equally worthy. There is an unfashionable generosity in this way of writing, one that seems to have conquered the public's natural mistrust of poetry and made Pia Tafdrup a poet who is widely read.

Sometimes her poems turn inward on themselves and become metaphoric fakir acts, climbing ropes of their own creation, or drinking themselves as Indian conjurers do. But seen against the background of an intellectual era which has been obsessed with the idea of language's self-reference and materiality, these games are infrequent and are not intended to sow doubt in the reality of things or in poetry's ability to talk about the world. The female body and the elements are as present in her language as the grammar. The sky menstruates in the rain, the star shines like the first white spot of the baby's head as it emerges at the moment of childbirth. The ploughed field – Pia Tafdrup is a farmer's daughter – is like the open page in a holy book, as in the poetry of Yesenin. In the water of intercourse the sperms are fish. When love is lost they are frozen into the ice.

She makes Uranus and Gaia rise again in the dream poem "Sleep Hieroglyph" in The Whales, and yet the body remains concrete and does not enter the realm of the mythical and allegorical. I am not even sure that the relation between nature and subject can be called metaphorical. It's an inflow and outflow between two basins, the ebb and flow of language, exultantly affirmed in the book of fortune, Spring Tide, which is written in the spirit of the full moon and the sacred number 7. In Pia Tafdrup's most magnificent collection of poems, Queen's Gate, this theme swells into a mighty hymn to the sea, nine pages of inspiration in the style of Walt Whitman. But that is the kind of thing that can only be done once!

The unreality of reality is the fundamental problem of modern literature, and Pia Tafdrup's writing is not, of course, free of it. In the very first poem of her first collection, a poem called "One Day" – one of the most moving in her œuvre – the poet is sitting on a bench in a park, but its planks disappear and she goes plummeting down into a childhood longing for real life where everything is in earnest. The objects in the game are dummies, which one day will be replaced by the real thing. As children we have probably all thought: one day we'll bake real bread, sail real boats, and so on. Caress and be caressed by real bodies. When we grow up. But the poet still lacks that real bench, that real time. Life never became quite as real as we planned it to be in the days when we pretended chestnut leaves were boats.

From this point of departure, Pia Tafdrup's poems always strive essentially for the moment when there will be a real bench underneath her and everything will be here and now. The tangible sends her into euphoria. She is a poet of the joy of touch, perhaps because the tangibility of things is seldom a real obstacle. As in Peter Pan, in an unguarded moment one can always go soaring up in the air and see everything from far above.

"I speak/ and so I soar."The enjoyment of the sense of power in writing poems can sometimes make one think of Edith Södergran, and sometimes the poet is close to "Triumph of Being" – I am thinking, for example, of the introductory poem of Spring Tide, "Raised to Birth", where she calls on us to live even though the signs of the times point to destruction.

It has been said that the wounded body is the centre of Tafdrup's poetry, but I see in this view a reflection of a fashion in literary criticism which is most at home with loss, absence, cutting and silence. The wound is certainly there, but it is not a simple story of suffering. When in one of her most frequently quoted poems an angel breaks her silence, the angel being the author herself in the innocence of childhood, this destruction is the beginning of something new. It signifies the possibility of writing. When in a later poem love gives the former angel wings of stone, it is not, as I see it, in order to capture her but in order to invite her to remain on the earth, where all that she seeks exists.

As a beginner she probably saw out of the corner of her eye how busy the traffic on the Via Negativa was and was not unhappy to reject that route. Her rains are the kind that are followed by rainbows, not by Noah's Floods or stars that come loose from their moorings. Even if one shrinks from generalizing about Danish and Swedish character, it's hard not to reflect on how much less angst-ridden Oehlenschläger is than Stagnelius, how much lighter Sophus Claussen is than Fröding.

In Pia Tafdrup's world, man is not free to invent himself, he has a gender (and not only a genus), he has a body and a history which calls through him. Affirmation requires a capacity for being passive, not only active, or perhaps an ability to linger in a state where active and passive cannot be distinguished between. One of those states is love, and another is religious feeling, which expresses itself in one's relation to words: "I am a body/which language touches" (‘White Fever'). Some will perhaps be shocked when she praises the chasm of delight she experiences when the lover can do what he likes with her ("I lie down/I expose myself/I become your creature/for a moment"). But she is the girl who has learned trust in the unknown, swimming on her father's back over the forests of seaweed in order to let go at the right moment, and soar.

Her favourite pet creatures, the whales, are a metaphor for the greatest forces in life, love, art and death. Their games in the ocean bear witness to a sovereign power on which the poet can call whenever life seems too cramped. It seems to me that it's a breakout of this kind she describes in her recently published novel Surrender . The book is a daydream about losing control – the sort of daydream only intellectuals can have. Pascha, the main character, climbs over a fence and enters a strange house which belongs to a man she doesn't know. "I just have to feel that I exist," she thinks. The banality of the way events subsequently turn out is certainly a bitter lesson for this young woman, but at the same time it does not cancel the liberating giddiness caused by climbing the fence.

In Pia Tafdrup's poems this violent encroachment does not prompt a fear of being invaded; instead, it brings fascination, delight, new eyes. This is also true of her relation to poetic antecedents, which seems unusually free of anxiety. In her texts she makes Emily Dickinson appear as a queen without a throne. She unhesitatingly used erotic signal words from the Södergran repertoire. When she makes the journey into her Jewish heritage in the collection Territorial Song she takes possession of The Song of Songs and the Psalms.

One must, however, be careful not to exaggerate the homogeneity in Pia Tafdrup's writing. Her poetry has a shadow side, which one does not see at first because of all the sunlight in one's eyes. After the large-scale Queen's Gate, named after the entrance for the woman who never existed in patriarchal Jerusalem but whom the poet's imagination had to add, after the expansive orchestration of the hymns in a major key comes the unexpected contrast of Thousandborn, a collection of aphoristic four-liners written in a tone of defiance and resignation. The language which caressed is now the mouth of a pistol. Love is a long goodbye after the first sovereign soaring over the abyss. I can't resist quoting from this book in translation:

Don't look for poetry's black box,
it hasn't recorded any answers,
is merely full of the dream's counter-questions
or a silence to feel one's way into.

The virtue of a collection like this one – apart from the fact that one is allowed to consign oneself to melancholy, according to Leopold the condition in which one sees things as they are – is that it sharpens one's view of a rebellious aspect in Pia Tafdrup. One rereads the poem "Meteor" in Queen's Gate, in which the poet's I most closely resembles a life-threatening war machine. One discovers that the prevailing season in her poetry is actually winter, the harsh, windy Danish winter with its endless wet snow. One finds the terrible "Waiting Blow" in The Bridge of Moments, a poem about how the effort to reach someone who has been close to one must be given up for ever, in the same way as one accepts an incurable illness.

From Thousandborn I should also like to quote this scene, which could equally well be a portrait of poetry:

The boy up in the tree
sits there all day,
he sings loudly and refuses to come down
from his branch and be a person.

How well one understands the boy! If Pia Tafdrup's poetry is at last dominated by openness and not by a stance of aversion, it is thanks to the secret union between poetic creation and the inexorable labour of time, which turns everything into its opposite. From emptiness and torpor, a reborn I finally rises, "thousandborn", as for the Romantics of an earlier age, when the Word made the world's condition change from dead to living. "Between always and never," the final poem in The Innermost Zone, is about the incomprehensible moment of change.

Between always and never
things happen
for a breathless second
when one least expects it
the world changes

sunk upon itself
at a depth of seven hearts
is the thing one suddenly imagines
a time when the stone
begins to bleed

People who are in alliance with change are always interested in reality.
 

Translated by: David McDuff. Photo: © Jon Norddahl

Read the poems:

'Good Night' 

'Letting in a dog'