FARMING DREAMS
By Knud Sørensen
Translated by Michael Goldman
Spuyten Duyvil
Florence resident Michael Goldman began a long-term love affair with Denmark back when he was a New Jersey high school student, traveling to the small Scandinavian country on a summer exchange program. He later taught himself the language while working on a Danish pig farm, began a romance with a young Danish woman who is now his wife, and in more recent years began translating numerous Danish writers into English.
In two new books released by New York publisher Spuyten Duyvil, Goldman has translated work by one of Denmark’s most venerable poets, Knud Sørensen, as well as that of novelist and poet Cecil Bødker, a winner of the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal for her writing for children.
Goldman says his intent is to bring literature that’s generally little known outside Denmark to a wider audience.
In “Farming Dreams,” Sørensen, who’s in his late 80s, has constructed a cycle of free verse and prose poems that examine the decline of small family farms in Denmark, and with it a loss of cultural heritage and independent spirit. Farming villages become bedroom communities for people who work elsewhere, and agribusiness firms become the main tenants of the land.
In “Danish Farm Country,” for instance, Sørensen writes of the sale of the last farm in one region, and how the new owners redo the property, turning one farm building into a guest suite, among other changes: “The yard was expanded / a little. Just like the neighbor did / and the neighbor’s neighbor / and the neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor / etc.”
In “Foreclosure,” an elderly farmer, Ole Andersen, waits alone in his house for a lawyer and the local sheriff to arrive and take inventory on his bankrupt farm. After the officials have tallied Andersen’s assets, they decline his offer of a cup of coffee and leave, having also taken the farmer’s identity and left him with a new name.
“Defaulter stands and watches them go. / Then he goes inside. / Defaulter sits down / at the kitchen table that Ole Andersen / left behind.”
STORIES ABOUT TACIT
By Cecil Bødker
Translated by Michael Goldman
Spuyten Duyvil
www.hammerandhorn.net
In her short novel “Stories About Tacit,” meanwhile, Cecil Bødker, who’s also in her late 80s, examines the life of a young boy, Tacit, who lives with his “Granny” in rural 19th-century Denmark and wonders whether he has a mother and father.
Granny and some of the neighbor ladies, though, are rather tight-lipped about Tacit’s past: Granny acknowledges that she knows Tacit’s mother, but when he asks her if she knows his father, she curtly replies “No.”
“There was something about the way she said no that made him not want to ask more,” the narrator says in the opening chapter.
Told in spare, unadorned prose, “Stories About Tacit,” originally published in 1971, is the first book in a trilogy and follows Tacit through his adolescence into early adulthood. He’s a somewhat odd duck — Granny’s acquaintances tell her she should have disciplined the boy when he was younger — who shuns farming and instead becomes an apprentice to a village blacksmith.
Tacit also makes the acquaintance of a mysterious, ornery old man who may have a connection to him — though what that is may only be revealed if Goldman translates the next two novels of Bødker’s trilogy.
Michael Goldman will read from his new literary translations Tuesday at 7 p.m. at White Square Books in Easthampton.