Baku

Abstract

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 57 photo : anton martin A: I just returned to Denmark after a three-month writing exile in New York. Here I bought Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter, a translation of Sappho’s songs. These fragments are a perfect example on what short prose is able to do: to condense. My favorite poem or my favorite fragment is this; it is only one line: “as long as you want.” In this kind of sentence everything is embedded. I cried in the subway, I have read the book four times, and I am still crying when I read it now. It is a radiant sentence, it contains what was and what will come, and everything that never was, and what you thought you had forever. All in these five words. Marvelous. What more do you need? Q: What are you reading now? A: I am reading On Photography, by Susan Sontag. For inexplicable reasons I’ve never read her, but have always known that this was something I had to read at some point. I am breath-taken by her crystal-clear reflections on art and life. It’s inspiring and challenging to read her. In my books I am interested in images in general: the image as photography, the image as a painting, the picture as a reflective system, as perception—I am very interested in how these different incarnations of the image interact. Q: Did any of your longer work begin as a shortshort story, or vice versa? A: I very seldom think in genres or form—actually , all I write is the same, lyrical prose, you can read it as short stories, maybe even poems, or novels. My second novel, Hallerne, is a little different . Its structure is simpler and is more coherent than my other two novels. With Hallerne I had the sense that it could either be a short novel or an encyclopedic novel. But before I came to this realization I had already written the structure of the novel. From within. Then I kept on adding scenes and images. Like bread in the oven, the novel grew from within; like a bundle of short stories you could say. I think of my novels as independently functioning bodies, and as such you can examine every part individually; you could look at a hand, a knee, an upper lip, all independently , but of course mutually dependent on each other and totally interconnected by a circulation of blood. Baku Sylvia Petter I am an old man. I am invisible, almost as invisible as my sister. My sister lives in the house of her husband near the sea, in the house of his father and his fathers before him. My sister is young, younger than I am, but not too young to have forgotten Black January. For the sake of her daughters, she has screened it out. Her daughters, my nieces, they are our Spring. Lights flash in colours of red, white, blue, green, and her daughters sing words unknown to me: oh oh-uh-oh oh, woki po-po. . . . They sing of love and they hum. They were down by the water bathing in light streams when bulldozer men came to the house. Men with mallets did not see their mother, for, as I said, she was invisible . She did not sing. Nor did she hum. When her husband came home her daughters were still bathing in glowlights and singing strange words. In the rubble, he screamed; a young child called out, “Freedom.” The police came, took the young child away. Him, they left crumpled and broken where once stood the house, that of his father and his fathers before him. On the television, babushki, no longer invisible, sing of parties to cheering crowds. Down in the streets young people sing freedom. Policemen come, lights flash their colours; the police leave the young people alone. I think of my sister. Did they not see her because she did not sing? My nieces are beautiful in red, white, blue, green. I think of their father with no house to live in. Will the colours still flash when the singing stops? I put down the telephone, turn...