Torgeir,
*"Antenna-forest"*: In this poem, the city has replaced the forests and
where there were trees, there are now antennas on roofs. The antennas
apparently look like crosses and at the end the poet asks "Who's resting
here / in these deep graves?" The implication being (I'm guessing) that
by replacing forests with cities, we are not only killing nature,
replacing it with unnatural structures, but by doing this we are sealing
mankind's doom. Considered from the roofs, the buildings are graves in
which people rest.
I don't agree with this very popular environmentalist position. It could
happen, but only if mankind does nothing to correct this trend. The
Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski) once infamously insisted that we return to a
pre-industrial life style and killed a few people with letter bombs to
get his manifesto read, but Kaczynski and perhaps Rolf Jacobsen take a
short view. I'm also an environmentalist, but don't believe it would be
good to abandon scientific and technological progress in favor of
Luddite existence. Jacobsen doesn't say quite what Kaczynski does and
maybe at times I've been this pessimistic but given homo sapiens /modus
operandi, /so to speak, I anticipate that we will move to the moon, then
to Mars and from their perhaps to one of Saturn's moons. In other words
we are not doomed (IMO) to die (as a species) in the sterile structures
we have replaced the forests with. At the present time we in our
Liberal Democracies still count on growing populations to finance our
entitlements, but if we can quit doing that we needn't turn the earth
into something like the planet Trantor from Isaac Asimov's /Foundation. /
*"Guardian Angel": *This poem begins a bit like a pessimistic
environmentalist poem. The Guardian Angel is the bird that knocks on
your window that you cannot know? Why can't you know it? Because you
are blind. The birds that knock at your window are "the blossoms that
light up for the blind." In the second stanza the Guardian Angel is
the "glacier's crest above the forests." There are no glacier crests
above the Californian forests, nor do we haven any cathedral towers (or
at least not many inasmuch as I've never heard of any here) so the
Guardian Angel is probably Norwegian. The Guardian Angel declares that
the (Norwegian) reader of the poem loved this angel long ago, implying
that the reader no longer loves him even though the angel walks along
side him by day and speaks to his heart even though the reader doesn't
know it. Lutheranism doesn't emphasize Guardian Angels, Roman
Catholics do, or have. This Guardian Angel sounds a bit like the Holy
Spirit. The last stanza describes the angel as a "third arm" and
"second shadow, the white one, / whom you don't have the heart for and
who cannot ever forget you." If Jacobsen intends this as a Christian
allusion it isn't quite orthodox in Protestant theology although it
might be acceptable in the Roman Catholicism sense. The Holy Spirit is
described in the /New Testament/ as providing help to all those who
belong to the Lord. However, the recipient of the Angel's poem is
described as not having the heart for this angel, and by extension the
Holy Spirit; so if this is a Protestant Christian allusion then the
theology behind it is Universalistic, i.e, all will be saved. The two
Protestant orthodox positions are (1) those whom God chooses will be
saved, and (2) those who choose God will be saved. Perhaps the recipient
is Catholic and is at least estranged from the Catholic Church. But
perhaps he belongs in some sense to the Catholic Church "who cannot ever
forget you."
*"Sand": *This strikes me as a naturalistic poem which expresses the
Second Law of Thermodynamics and is not placing the blame for this
entropy on /homo sapiens. /"The starry worlds above our heads" are
subject to this Law as well as earth. I've attempted to keep up with the
latest cosmological theories and the cosmologists are not as certain of
the position expressed in this poem as Jacobsen is.
*Note: *I didn't initially read Dag Solstad's comments but went straight
to the above three poems referenced in
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/390357.html
I read Solstad's comments afterward but they don't shed much light on
the individual poems.
Lawrence
On 8/29/2017 2:47 PM, T Fjeld wrote:
In the review "Rolf Jacobsen -- a sarcastic and bitter poet" (Klassekampen, 1979) acclaimed and still living author Dag Solstad comments on a then-recent collection of poetry by Jacobsen, _Think About Something Else_ (Tenk på noe annet).
Jacobsen was at the time recognised as one of his country's foremost voices of modernist poetry, a position he had held ever since his first ground-breaking collection appeared in the 1933. _Earth and Iron_ (Jord og jern) "brought technology into Norwegian literature," the encyclopaedia SNL comments (https://snl.no/Rolf_Jacobsen).(* <https://snl.no/Rolf_Jacobsen%29.%28*>) He had a crucial blot on his reputation, however: as a newspaper editor he had supported the German occupation, after having joined the national-socialist Quisling party National Front in 1940. For this he was sentenced to three and a half years of hard labour in 1945 and barred from membership in the Author's Guild until 1953.
In Solstad's review (don't forget that the Nazis murdered communists, and Solstad was a card-carrying member of the Maoist AKP party at this time) Jacobsen's early futurist poems, supplemented as they were by verse that hailed nature and a simple life, are contrasted with the voice of the most recent collection, thus:
"As in all his recent poetry, Rolf Jacobsen describes excessive Western society and its pursuit of the wind: Western excessive society's desire for gold and profit. The Western World is unnatural, evil, and noisy. And it is so powerful that it has subdued the earth and its nature, and destroyed it."
Jacobsen "despises" modern civilization, writes Solstad; he [Jacobsen, that is] is a "grumpy misanthropist." Finally, it is Jacobsen's lack of faith in humanity that serves as the cause of what it is that distinguishes Jacobsen's analysis of our current predicament from Solstad's:
"It is something about his _attitude_ that's unbearable; not the fact that he is disappointed, disillusioned and bitter. ... He observes our planet's life with a sarcastic, sly grin that may have as its basis a tragic attitude, but which also gives voice to a cold contempt for the tiny human creep who lives his life in stupidity, without a coherent meaning that can bring together his fragmentary existence and his bleak destiny."
So much for Solstad and his Jacobsen. What remains, as one poet observed, is the human being and what he consumes to stay alive.
(*)In Norway Jacobsen is mostly known for poetry from his oft anthologised collection _Secret Life_ (Hemmelig liv, 1954). Note, for instance, this verse from Secret Life, translated by Roger Greenwald:
“Landscape with Steam Shovels”:
/De spiser av skogene mine.
Seks gravemaskiner kom og spiste av skogene mine.
Gud hjelpe meg for en skapning på dem. Hoder
uten øyne og øynene i baken./
/They’re eating up my woods.
Six steam shovels came and started eating up my woods.
God help me! what creatures they are. Heads
without eyes and eyes in their rumps./
Three more Jacobsen poems translated by Greenwald into English here: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/390357.html
Mvh. / Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld, PhD
http://torgeirfjeld.com/
