HAUS FÜR POESIE

Fredrik Hagen’s fifth poetry collection, La det bli / En ensom tid (published by Cappelen Damm in 2024), appeared last year in a German translation by Katrin Pitz under the title lass es sein / eine einsame zeit (from gutleut verlag). The book tells an inverted creation story in which everything that has ever existed ceases to be — beginning with calm, which disappears first, and ending with light, after which “everything that exists will be infinite darkness, and no one will be able to try to understand it anymore.” Yet Hagen’s poetic miniatures do not read as a scenario of terror, but rather as a consoling cosmos in which passing away and coming into being constantly interweave, and life begins again and again. His own mortality and the grief over his mother’s death thus also find their way into an existential genealogy in which life and death are always already embedded in those who came before us and those who will come after.

Helene Imislund’s short-story collection Aller Dinge Kern (published by Trottoir Noir) appeared last year in a German translation by Nora Pröfrock. For this evening, poems from her two poetry collections will be translated into German for the first time: Spredte døtre (published by Cappelen Damm in 2018, “Scattered Daughters”) and Rommenes bok (Cappelen Damm 2023, “The Book of Rooms”). The three voices in Spredte døtre confront death: a terminally ill “I” with either three months or three years left to live; an “I” burying a relative; and an aging “I” moving from its own home into a care facility, into a “waiting room,” waiting for visitors, for lunch, and for the next resident — like a halted hourglass that has stopped caring about time. The “I” in Rommenes bok recalls all the rooms it has moved through, real and imagined, some only fragmentarily remembered spaces: the childhood bedroom whose window frames the same trees every day, or the neonatal ward where its own child lies many years later — a place the child will not be able to remember. Even the speaker’s name becomes a room it enters, “and everyone I know calls me the same.”

The event will be interpreted Norwegian–German, with the kind support of ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.

With kind support by NORLA

In reading & conversation Fredrik Hagen, Helene Imislund, Katrin Pitz
Moderation Alexander Kappe