Inger Christensen, Poet, Is Dead at 73

January 12, 2009
Inger Christensen, Scandinavian Poet, Is Dead at 73
By MARGALIT FOX
Inger Christensen, a distinguished Danish poet whose work — lyrical, philosophical, self-referential and exquisitely mathematical — was a cornerstone of modern Scandinavian poetry, died on Jan. 2 in Copenhagen. She was 73 and lived in Copenhagen.
She died after a short illness, said Susanna Nied, the American translator of her poetry.
Widely regarded as Denmark’s most eminent poet, Ms. Christensen was routinely mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though her work was a critical and popular success in Denmark and other European countries, it remains far less well known in the United States.
Concerned with large questions of love, decay, death and mankind’s relationship to the natural world, Ms. Christensen’s poetry also pays rigorous attention to form. The poetic tradition in which she worked — sometimes called systematic poetry in Denmark — is an offshoot of the concrete-poetry movement in the United States. In concrete poetry, the poet wields words as elements of pure, dimensional substance, much as a painter deploys line and color.
Ms. Christensen’s poems are known in particular for being organized along carefully worked-out geometrical lines. Often constructed to contain ever-smaller replicas of their own form, many of them have the elegant, self-mirroring quality of fractals.
Three volumes of Ms. Christensen’s poetry, “it,” “alphabet” and “Butterfly Valley: A Requiem,” have been published in the United States in recent years by New Directions, in English translations by Ms. Nied.
“it,” a book-length work of social criticism in verse that appeared in Denmark in 1969, is organized as an elaborately nested series of smaller poetic sections. A seminal work of Scandinavian modernism, “it” quickly became an enduring part of Danish popular culture.
“Lines from ‘it’ were picked up and quoted by the most wildly disparate groups,” Ms. Nied said in a telephone interview on Tuesday from her home in San Diego. “Politicians seeking office would use lines from it, and revolutionaries seeking to bring down the government would use lines from it too.”
“alphabet” is a 1981 poem about the fragility of nature in the shadow of the cold war. It takes its structure from the Fibonacci numbers, a sequence of integers that runs 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 ... n, where n is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The Fibonacci sequence resonates throughout the natural world, informing, among other things, the arrangement of scales on a pine cone.
In Ms. Christensen’s poem the sequence governs the number of lines of each stanza; the stanzas, in turn, are arranged alphabetically. The poem opens with just a single line:
apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist
It continues:
bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;
bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen
Then:
cicadas exist; chicory, chromium,
citrus tress; cicadas exist;
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum
And so on. (Ms. Christensen, attuned to the risks of unwieldiness, stopped the volume at “n,” with 610 lines.)
“Butterfly Valley,” about evanescence and mortality, includes a chain of 14 sonnets, with the last line of each reappearing as the first line of the next. In conclusion, a 15th sonnet comprises the first lines of the previous 14.
Despite the rigorous structure that undergirded her work — or, more likely, because of it — Ms. Christensen’s style was lyrical, even playful. Like a Baroque composer writing a fugue, she was beholden to a set of formal strictures, but they had a certain elasticity, which could be tested again and again.
“She was always fascinated by structures, and she invented her own very creative ones,” Ms. Nied said. “Often, to interviewers who asked, ‘You’ve made this complicated structure — isn’t that incredibly confining?’ she said: ‘No, it’s just the opposite. Once I’ve set the structure, I’m free within it.’ ”
Inger Christensen was born on Jan. 16, 1935, in Vejle, in the Jutland region of Denmark. Her father was a tailor; her mother, a former domestic, later worked in a meat-packing plant. Planning to become a doctor, Ms. Christensen enrolled in medical school in Copenhagen but later withdrew for financial reasons. She trained as a schoolteacher instead, earning a degree, with a concentration in German and mathematics, from the Aarhus College of Education.
Ms. Christensen taught school for a few years before beginning her literary career with two collections of poems, “Light” and “Grass,” published in Denmark in the early 1960s. She also wrote essays, short stories, novels, children’s books and stage and radio plays.
“The Painted Room,” a novel by Ms. Christensen set in Renaissance Italy, was published in Britain by Harvill Press in a translation by Denise Newman. In July, New Directions will release “Azorno,” a 1967 novel by Ms. Christensen, translated by Ms. Newman.
Ms. Christensen’s marriage to the Danish poet and critic Poul Borum ended in divorce. She is survived by a son, Peter Borum of Copenhagen, and a grandchild.
She was the recipient of many international awards, among them, in 1994, the Nordic Authors’ Prize, bestowed by the Swedish Academy and known familiarly as the “Little Nobel.”
Perhaps the most striking testament to the power of Ms. Christensen’s work could be found in Copenhagen itself. There, in 1969, someone painted these lines from “it” on the gable of a building in a down-at-the-heels part of the city:
A society can be so stone-hard
That it fuses into a block
A people can be so bone-hard
That life goes into shock
The lines stayed there, Ms. Nied said, until last year.