Guest of the ilb 2001, 2005
Inger Christensen was born in Vejle, Denmark in
1935. She initially studied medicine but then trained to be a teacher,
and from 1963 to 1964 she worked at the College for Arts in Holbæk.
After that she opted for the life of a freelance writer. Although she
has also written a novel, short stories, essays, radio plays, a drama
and a libretto, Christensen is best known for her powerful lyric
poetry. She has also produced excellent Danish translations of the
works of authors such as Paul Celan and Max Frisch.
Christensen is considered the most important Danish poet alive. She
made her debut as an author in 1962 with her poetry volume »Lys« (t:
Light), followed a year later by »Græs« (t: Grass). The flat,
monotonous landscape of her homeland, its flora and fauna, the beach,
the sea, and the snowy winters have imbued the topography of many of
her poems. The hypothesis of language being an innate structure in
human beings, as proposed by the American linguist Noam Chomsky in the
nineteen sixties, gave Christensen another decisive impulse for her
poetic works. She attracted international attention with two long
poems: »Det« (t: It), published in 1969, and »Alfabet« (Eng.
»Alphabet«, 2000) in 1981, which were based on a mathematical system of
numbers. Her volume of poetry »Brev i April« (t: Letter in April) is
another example of »systematic poetry«.
In her poems and in her essays about poetry, Christensen
persistently questions the relationship between the world and the self.
She perceives her poetry as reflections on the universe, linguistic
approaches to the ideal harmony between the self, language, and the
cosmos. She is particularly interested in Romantic ideas of a fusion of
word and phenomenon. The opposition between legibility and
illegibility, oneself and the world, language and the individual, is
not resolved by the acquisition of a fixed perspective on the world
from outside, but rather is maintained as the productive »fever« of a
»native, who can never gain an external impression of the world in
which he or she lives«. »And my poetry has the same relationship to
outer space as the eye to its own retina, which it cannot see.«
Christensen’s poems and essays are closely related: As lyrical figures
and motives contribute to make her poems characteristically compact, so
do configurations of thoughts and concepts return in her poems, being
rather organic parts of them than foreign matter.
After the volume of essays »Hemmelighedstilstanden« (2000; t: The
state of secrecy) her radio play »Masser af sne til de traengende får«
(1971; t: Loads of snow for the starving sheep) was lately translated
into German. Her work has captured several laurels such as the Austrian
State Prize for European Literature and the Nordic Prize of the Swedish
Academy. She lives in Copenhagen.
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