Lifting the Nordic Curtain

The historic Cooper Union in New York (where Abraham Lincoln gave one of the most crucial speeches of his political career) was the venue last Halloween weekend for another historic event: The Nordic Poetry Festival, organized by two twenty-somethings from the Finnish Consulate in New York, Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten, who flew 50 poets from the Scandinavian North (and not just from the Nordic Big Four—there were amazing muses from Aland, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Samiland).

The poets were put up in the sleekly rehabbed Paramount Hotel on 46th Street and given Friday on the town to sample the museums, try the restaurants, and do what most New Yorkers relish most—hang out and walk around. For most of the visitors, it was a first visit, and the euphoria was palpable. Grime and crime notwithstanding, New York still packs a visceral wallop that eclipses Dr. Johnson’s famous encomium on London.

But beneath their playful demeanor, the Nordic poets were dead serious. A handsome festival anthology of the poets’ works was selling briskly for $10, along a row of tables set up by literary bookstores and small press publishers (such as White Pine Press of Buffalo, New York which for 20 years has specialized in small editions of underknown international Third World writers).

A gratis “Meet Your Nordic Neighbors”, an 88-page brochure produced by the Nordic Council of Ministers, makes the point: “The winds of change that have swept through Europe, marking the end of an era in which two major powers and several blocks of countries were locked in wasteful and potentially disastrous military and ideological confrontation, have heralded the dawning of a new age—the age of co-operation.”

And the Nordics believe that they are the cooperators par excellence among the 19 EC and EFTA nations. Yet until they lift the Nordic Curtain of small audiences speaking and writing their diverse indigenous languages by breaking out into the English language corridor, their capacity to lead cooperatively means limited.

They want to become the equal opportunity kibitzers for landmark historic events like the quiet brokering by the Norwegian foreign minister of an entente between Israel’s Rabin and the PLO’s Arafat. When I told Swedish Academician Kjell Espemark—chairman of the Nobel Literature Prize committee—that I thought the Norwegian Foreign Minister deserved the Peace Prize next year, he smiled cagily. “Impossible: the Norwegians award the Peace Prize.”

Espemark is a good case in point for lifting the Nordic Curtain. The 63-year-old Swede, professor of comparative literature at the University of Stockholm, who was elected to the Nobel Committee at 58, is a prolific poet and novelist as well as an internationally renowned literary historian and critic. But his cycle of seven novels (four of which are already written) remain locked in Swedish.

A Shrewsbury, England translator, Joan Tate, has Englished three of the novels already, but publishers are wary of the risk of bringing out an “unknown” author. Forest Books has just published his poems.

If such a paragon has difficulty garnering a world (or at least Europe-wide) audience, how can his lessers hope for better support? The short answer is the Nordic Poetry Festival. Throwing two dozen American poets into amiable contact with their Nordic counterparts may ultimately be the most direct kind of indirection. Friendships, personal and intellectual, lead to sharing of publishing strategies. The pleasures of discovery motivate Americans to share their newly found wealth.

But the Nords are no nerds. They are leaving nothing to chance. “Nordisk Litteratur 1993” is a canny 80 page experiment: a new magazine about books from all the Nordic countries. Non-fiction and fiction; interviews and excerpts; long, short, and ultra-short presentations of more than a hundred books published in all the Nordic countries in 1992, presented in Nordic languages—and in English. The Finns gave out copies of a 435-page anthology—A Way to Measure Time: Contemporary Finnish Literature. The Danes countered with a 32-page tabloid Danish Literary Magazine.

A huge delegation from Lund was there to give moral support to “their poets.” Their presence triggered a trivia crisis over where the final sequence of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries took place—in Upsala or Lund. The Lundites have promised to silence the Uppity Upsalas by getting no less than Ingmar himself to settle this dispute.

There were over 30 Scandinavian journalists. If there was one disappointment to the organizers, it was the meager showing of American journalists. Lowly subeditors from Time and the New Yorker. No names. The poet critic John Ashberry was there—but as a poetic peer of Norwegian poet Torgeir Schjerven, not as a journalist.

The American poets were learning things about how generously the Scandinavians support their geniuses. Take 51-year-old Helsinki poet Pentt Saaritsa, Finland’s premier translator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He gets a monthly government stipend of 5500 Finnish Marks—about $1000 US—to honor his achievements as a translator.

Easily the most beguiling muse of those moments was the 63-year-old Aland fisherman poet, Karl Erik Bergman. Bedecked with a Viking-like beard and a face mellowed by decades of hauling up Baltic herring, Bergman claims he now only fishes in good weather. But his poems work under all meteorological conditions:

Slow Learners
Aland is the country we came to.
We were bred and born in open boats
and on barren shores
by men and women in seal skins
and with the light of false fires in their eyes.
But even as the islands rose up,
and grew out of the sea,
we became compliant,
building stone churches on the shore hills.
Finally
we got to be folks.
But doffing our caps
and bowing deep
is something
many of us
haven’t learned yet.
(Translated from the Swedish by Verne Moberg, Nordic Festival Anthology.)

Hazard At Large, Welcomat, December 29, 1993