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© Cappelen Verlag
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Paal-Helge Haugen
Norway
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Paal-Helge Haugen was born in Valle in southern Norway in 1945, and emerged as a man of letters while studying Medicine in Oslo. A volume of translations of Japanese haikus, published in 1965, marked the beginning of his extensive output. It was shortly followed by adaptations of Chinese poems and his first collection of original poetry, »På botnen av ein mørk sommar« (1967; t: On the base of a dark summer), and his only novel, »Anne« (1968), which introduced the new genre of »punktroman« to Norwegian literature. Studies in Film and Literature took him to the USA in 1971 and from 1973-1978 he taught Creative Writing in Norway. Since then Haugen has worked as a freelance writer.
»There is no doubt,« Haugen has said in an interview, »that I would have developed in a completely different direction in my own writing had I not discovered haiku poetry so early on. The relationship to the concrete world, the attempt to treat language as a piece of concrete material, was decisive.« The succinct, precise diction of the Japanese short form and the direct superimposition of images have also left significant traces in his texts to such an extent that Haugen, with hindsight, even refers to the novel »Anne« as »a kind of haiku novel«. »Anne«, set in rural Norway around 1900, tells the story of a young woman who eventually dies of tuberculosis. However, the novel is not »told« in the traditional sense, but rather the biography builds up through short, unconnected fragments of text. What is fascinating here is the simultaneity of documentary precision and dark, suggestive power that emerges from the alternation between text and empty places.
The mark of Haugen's poetry is also its clarity of language, at once precise and acutely sensuous, which often came about through working with visual artists and musicians. Considering how central the metaphorical field of »Light/Darkness« is for Haugen – many titles of his poetry collections point to this – it is not surprising that when he came across the French Baroque painter Georges de la Tour in 1979 he had the feeling that he had »always known« this artist. La Tour’s paintings, known for their haunting use of light, initially served as a model for a series of pictorial descriptions which became increasingly distanced from the pictorial over the course of many years. The »Meditasjonar over Georges de la Tour« (1990) finally became a lyrical commentary, fully autonomous as an appropriation and a version of de la Tour's visual strength. In these poems Haugen's ability to turn existential conditions into concrete linguistic form, using visual impressions as the initial stimulus, reaches a high point.
Alongside numerous volumes of poems Haugen's œuvre encompasses children's books, short stories, essays, plays, libretti and oratoria as well as translations from English and German (of writers such as Pinter and Brecht). Paal-Helge Haugen has been awarded numerous prizes, among them the Nordic Council's Literature Prize, the Richard Wilbur Prize and the Norwegian Critics Prize. The author lives in Greipstad, southern Norway.
© internationales literaturfestival berlin
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
På botnen av ein mørk sommar
Det Norske samlaget
Oslo, 1967
Das überwinterte Licht
Kleinheinrich
Münster, 1988
[T: Siegfried Weibel]
[Images: Jan Groth]
Anne
Kleinheinrich
Münster, 1989
[T: Siegfried Weibel]
Meditationen über Georges de La Tour
Kleinheinrich
Münster, 1990
[T: Siegfried Weibel]
[Images: Olav Christopher Jenssen]
Sone o
Cappelen
Oslo, 1992
Ei natt på jorda
Cappelen
Oslo, 1993
Hertervig
Cappelen
Oslo, 1995
Sangbok: nye tekster 1969
Aschehoug
Oslo, 1998 |
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