The Silence Afterwards: Selected Poems by Rolf Jacobsen (review)

170 LErrERS IN CANADA 1900 sense of 'the decline of French architecture and urban design' but also an awareness of how the failure of imagination and understanding affects more than aesthetics: we see how the lives of less privileged Parisiens have been blighted quite as much as the streetscapes. Gallant's Paris Notebooks? Nonpareil. (JANICE KULYK KEEFER) Rolf ,acobsen. The Silence Afterwards: Selected Poems. Translated and edited by Roger Greenwald Princeton University Press '985. xxx, 278. us $26.50, $9.95 paper Rolf Jacobsen 'opened a new chapter in Norwegian poetry: as Roger Greenwald writes in his Introduction to this handsome volume. Before Jacobsen, most poetry in Norway was still written in traditional meters, and most of it was rhymed. It drew its images from traditional sources - myth, nature, religion, seafaring, and warfare - and almost always, it maintained an elevated, 'poetic' tone. Jacobsen's first book broke new ground: many of the poems were in unrhymed free verse, and used diction and vocabulary close to those of speech; and many treated subjects or used images drawn from the modem industrial city. (P xv) Greenwald, SeniorTutorat Innis College in the University of Toronto and editor of WRIT magazine, has given us the first extensive selection in English of}acobsen's work: ninety-six poems drawn from eleven volumes published over the past fifty years. The'result is a beautifully produced bilingual edition, uniform with the other volumes in the distinguished series, the Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation. Since the text of the 1982 edition of Jacobsen's Collected Poems (Samlede Dikt) is unreliable typogtaphically, Greenwald fust worked closely with the poet himself to establish an authentic Norwegian text. There is a brief Foreword by the Danish poetand critic Poul Borum, who sees Jacobsen in the context of 'a consciously humanistic trend in European modernism: Greenwald's valuable critical Introduction follows. This Introduction hearkens to Jacobsen's 'distinctive sensibility and voice: For example, in treating technologies, a favourite theme, 'Jacobsen always focuses on the relation they have to what is human, or on the light their use as metaphors can cast on what is human: An example of this is the second stanza of 'Coke' (Koks): It was an Age of Steam. Under the white cherry blossoms it sent toward the sky HUMANITIES 171 and between the dark trunks of its columns of smoke, I had my childhood. In their forests I found the first cold flowers: Coke in Theatre Street. Det var i en damp-tid. Under dens hvite pinsehegger mot himlen og mellem reksaylenes me-rke stammer var jeg barn. I deres skoger fant jeg de £Iorste kalde blomster: Koks i Teatergaten. (Pp 48-9) The spectacular landscape of his native land cannot help influencing any Norwegian. Greenwald writes: 'We see thatJacobsen's surroundings are not "material" for poems, but almost internalized parts of the speaker .' Thus he speaks of a mountain in ' - More Mountains' ( - Mere [jell): So you can go over there and hold onto something hard. Some old something. Like the stars. And cool your forehead on it, and think your thoughts through. And think for yourself. SA du kan gAderbort og holde i noe hardt. Noe gammelt noe. Som s~ernene. Og kjele pannen din pAden, og tenke tanken ut. Og tenke selv. (Pp 250-') In the same way he speaks to 'You Bird -' (Du fugl- ): You bird in me - I feel your wing. I feel your beak pecking - pecking against the bars in my breast. I know you are a prisoner here. But wait a little while. Just a little while, then you'll be free, you bird in me. Du fugI imeg - jeg kjenner vingen din. '72 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 leg kjenner nebbet hakke - hakke mot sprinklene i brystet mitt.leg vet du er en fange her. Men vent en liten stund. Bare en liten stund, sA er du fri, du fugl imeg. (Pp 236-7) Greenwald continues: 'Jacobsen is a poet with profound respect both for the silence which precedes and follows his act of speech and for the silence that inheres in things: their unnamable qualities, which the writer must respect if his efforts are to yield up some sense of...