- My TV Drama
I always wanted to write a TV drama There’ll only be two characters I can just see them
It will be a young couple sitting in front of the fire after dinner It doesn’t really matter what social group they belong to Let’s say that they’re college-educated or they could just as well work in some bank and have a weakness for Pavarotti, that’s quite all right It just has to be a fairly young couple in front of the fire They’ve rented a house in the country and there’s a fireplace and they build a fire in the fireplace They don’t have much real open old-fashioned acoustic fire in their air-conditioned home They’ve all day experienced violent natural elements like Sea and Sun so now they want to experience fire and it happens that it doesn’t ignite
And they pile up log upon log but the fire doesn’t really take hold They take turns trying new possibilities with new explanations and new methods but it just won’t work and their annoyance slowly grows Everyone hates not getting what they want They begin not necessarily to argue it doesn’t have to be like that but irritation hangs in the room and can at any time explode
And so to get the fire going he grabs a newspaper [End Page 73] he throws the paper in the flames catch it now it’s burning but it dies out quickly again so it needs another paper, quickly and another and then only one paper is left, in it goes and this one is today’s and she asks was that necessary “That was today’s.” And he only looks at the fire and the flames leaping up and it’s as though it’s not his own voice he hears when he says: “There’s never anything in the paper.” And he knows of course it was him who insisted on getting the paper this morning but suddenly he realizes he likes seeing it burn he likes to see these killings and attacks and stock quotes and bond quotations and book reviews and car ads burn just burn, very slowly It is just as though he takes righteous revenge It’s as though he grows a little younger with each bit of paper that burns up a little lighter in his body He feels like burning his business correspondence he’s taken on vacation because there’s always still work to be done and he gets it and throws it on the fire and he smiles at her and at the fire and she suddenly rises and gets the novel she’s reading and throws it on the fire She’ll never know how it ends
but she knows there’s something else that ends
And they burn things and they burn things I don’t know how much they have to burn In fact it would take at least an evening They burn their ID cards and their old letters [End Page 74] All their days are shed as though from a burnt-out life and all the while they laugh and laugh with great wonder for the first time high on the emptiness— [End Page 75]
Dan Turèll (1946–1993) was phenomenally popularly and critically acclaimed in Denmark during his lifetime, and his work has continued to be revered in the nearly twenty years since his death at the age of forty-seven. During his lifetime Turèll published more than one hundred books. His poetry, in Kennedy’s translations, has appeared or will appear in New Letters, Absinthe: New European Writing, Poetry Wales, and Epoch.
Thomas E. Kennedy’s translations of Danish poets have appeared widely in American literary journals such as American Poetry Review, the Literary Review, New Letters, Mid-American Review, and many others. His most recent publications include the novels of the Copenhagen Quartet—the first two of which are being published worldwide by Bloomsbury USA and UK in 2010...