Original title Alfabet Publication date 1981 Pages 77 Genre Poetry Country Denmark | Language Danish Published in English 2001 Originally published 1981 Page count 77 Translator Susanna Nied | |
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Publisher Lyrikbogklubben Borgen, Gyldendal, New Directions Similar Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, It, Azorno, The Painted Room | ||
Alphabet is one of the most well-known poems of Inger Christensen, who was broadly considered to be Denmark's most prominent poet. The poem was originally published in 1981 in Danish as alfabet. An English language translation by Susanna Nied won the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize in 1982.
Contents
Structure
Alphabet is a systematic poem, in which each of the fourteen sections of the poem is tied to a letter of the alphabet and the number of lines found in each section is dictated by the Fibonacci sequence. (The first section, "A", has one line. The last section, "N", has 600.)
Themes
Alphabet deals with themes of nuclear war and ecological devastation.
As the poem progresses and each section lengthens, an increasing number of elements related to destruction, death, and ecological devastation are introduced.
Reception
The book was reviewed in Publishers Weekly in 2001: "As used here with controlled repetitions, the [Fibonacci] sequence gives the whole an almost medieval sense of restriction[.] Abstracted cold war fears and post-'70s ecological concern and alienation give way to litanies of real world outrages ... which culminate in a post-nuclear holocaust nightmare, with birds and children somehow having survived in caves. The scenario may seem dated, but the threats remain very real, and Christensen's poetic appeal for sanity and humanity remains an abstracted call to action."