Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas

Tarjei Vesaas's fame as one of Norway's and Scandinavia's greatest fiction writers of the 20th century has often overshadowed his achievement as a poet. This revised bilingual selection presents, in finely honed translations, forty six poems that reveal the distinctive sensibility and voice of Vesaas the poet. In a groundbreaking introductory essay, Roger Greenwald explores why Vesaas's work has eluded many attempts at critical analysis and how it challenges received notions of modernism. A collage of excerpts from Vesaas's writings about himself and his work supplies helpful background and gives some sense of the man behind the work. Vesaas emerges from this volume as a lyric and meditative poet of uncommon depth, who renders states of being beyond the reach not only of discourse, but of most poetry as well

TARJEI VESAAS (1897-1970), the eldest son of a farming family in Telemark, Norway, was one of Scandinavia’s greatest fiction writers of the twentieth century. He won the Venice Prize in 1952 for a volume of stories and the Nordic Council Prize in 1963 for the novel Is-slottet (The Ice Palace). His fiction has been widely translated. But Vesaas was also one of Norway’s major modern poets. Starting in 1946, he published five volumes of poetry during his lifetime; a sixth appeared posthumously in 1970. ROGER GREENWALD attended The City College of New York and the Poetry Project workshop at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, then completed graduate degrees at the University of Toronto. He has won two CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) Literary Awards (poetry and travel literature) and has published two books of poems: Connecting Flight and Slow Mountain Train. He has won many awards for his translations of poetry from Scandinavian languages, which include North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen (University of Chicago Press) and Guarding the Air: Selected Poems of Gunnar Harding (Black Widow Press)