Alphabet

By Inger Christensen

Book Overview

Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally on Fibonacci's sequence (a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers), in combination with the alphabet. The gorgeous poetry herein reflects a complex philosophical background, yet has a visionary quality, discovering the metaphysical in the simple stuff of everyday life. In alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm-like forms that unfold like expanding universes, while crystallizing both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our times.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081121477X
• ISBN13: 9780811214773
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

breathing numbers

This book found me while I was beginning a series of works on Jutland, the Danish poet Inger Christensen's birthplace. It is an astonishing work, everfresh, original, and deeply, integrally beautiful. The poem is built upon the Fibonacci sequence of Leonardo of Pisa and Christensen, early trained as a mathematician, has used this cumulative sequence to create an organic, engaged, poetic masterpiece. This is breathing with numbers.

Classical form and contemporary images

Inger Christensen's Alphabet is a modern marvel: within the imposed form of the order of the alphabet, she constructs widely varying images, everyday-ish, fanciful, delicate, startling. "Constructs" may be the wrong verb because the language and the images appear effortlessly produced, as if they were simply evoked, although the most cursory look at the the collection shows the poet's painstaking attention to form and structure. The same quality of effortlessness, naturalness, obviousness, is exhibited by Susanne Nied's superb translation --indeed the kind of translation Gogol termed 'a transparent glass'. The personality, culture and idiosyncracies of the translator are nowhere in evidence. Subtly, skillfully, and imaginatively the Danish is transposed into English without the loss of a breath. Inger Christensen is a well-known poet in Denmark, indeed in Europe. Thanks to Susanna Nied she has been introduced to the American public, and may now at long last receive the recognition she deserves also in the US. It is a pleasure to see such lovingly crafted literature, and all involved in bringing it to the American public are to be congratulated: translator, publisher, distributor.