On Exile and the Nielson Poem: A Translator’s Note, and: Chalk, and: Trumpet, and: Recorder, and: Socks, and: Sardine Can

On Exile and the Nielson Poem: A Translator’s Note

I have been translating the prose poetry of Carsten René Nielsen for over twenty years. I may go five years without seeing or even talking to this man. Or, during periods of intense productivity, we may spend weeks together in the United States or Denmark or in some gray European city, drafting new versions of his encyclopedic reflections on animals (Forty One Animals, 2005), spaces (House Inspections, 2008), and things (Forty One Objects, 2017).

Our work often involves long walks down the avenues and boulevards of capital cities. We are discussing history or the light play among the linden trees. It’s chilly. We are strolling against the wind in Aarhus or Berlin. One of us points at something moving on the river—a duck? A sandwich bag? Then we continue on in silence.

We began our collaborations in late 1997, after the publication of his seminal work, Circles. As it happens with those whose work lends itself to translation—Nielsen’s casual tone and often scientific parlance do not rely on the music of words to lyrically heighten reality, but associative imagery and shocking, even comical, contrast—the poet has gained a following in the United States that may have outnumbered his readers in Denmark. It is in the United States that his spider puppet theaters and prom queens in sardine cans speak to wider audiences, those whose imaginative chops were honed on Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End or Mark Strand’s prose poetry, of James Tate’s or Russell Edson’s.

Nielsen speaks to American audiences not because the poems aim to tell on our strange realities—we can read the news as well as anyone else—but because, each like a stone-faced Buster Keaton, they take so seriously their unlikely premises.

The mathematics of a Nielsen poem go something like this: a poem whose title denotes the point of the exercise, an object, space, animal or concept to be defined. The text is one paragraph, whose language—with all its therefores and sinces—recalls the unimpeachable authority of science textbooks and World Book encyclopedias. The material soon pushes against this, what I might call, mood music; policemen soon are doing ballet on the cornices of buildings; the automat presents you with a layer cake of snow. And at the final turn of the poem an image that presses more forcibly on the edges of the possible: a trumpet sneezes; an angel holds up a mirror, giving himself a shave.

In Nielsen’s poetry there is always a possibility that the joke will turn horrific, or some staid ritual become a chaotic dance. Surrealism rose out of a Western tradition trying to transcribe the deeper music of everyday life, away from reason, itself the child of French symbolism and the adolescent rages of its luminaries. Is this where logic has led us? Trenches and mustard gas? Aerial bombardment? Nielsen, too, is writing himself out of history, digging a tunnel with a tiny spoon. Every object is an exile whose existence means nothing but in relationship to what surrounds it.

Like a David Byrne song or Paul Auster novel, the line is very thin between the downright strange and the oddly viable. Everything goes eerily still. Everywhere you look is a magic trick at the moment of the unveiling. His writing, even after twenty years of close reading, to this day frightens me the way the organ music and affected voices of old time radio can. A poem is a black cape covering some ordinary thing—a piece of chalk, a pair of socks—and when he lifts the cape, nothing is there.

Chalk

I tried to write on the blackboard, but the chalk left no trace. As if the board were made out of metal, or the chalk were a rusty nail. Not that it mattered. My students were sitting, as my students do, silently screaming with closed eyes, their hands...