Category: Selected

Danish. I was asked to review a new Danish translation of Seneca’s De Consolatione ad Helviam matrem. I read Seneca’s attempt to suppress grief with philosophical arguments up against the German police’s violent attempts to suppress vigils for Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli bombardment in the weeks following Oct. 7. How can we understand these two very different silencings of sorrow in light of each other? The editors opted not to run the piece, which is published here instead.

“Sorgens forstummelse” (“The silencing of grief”), sophushelle.com (30 October 2023).

Danish. I begin my review of Harald Voetmann’s new translation of Catullus with a close reading of poem no. 16: a rape joke that deconstructs itself to establish the difference between fictional persona and real author, combining a sophisticated literary self-reference with a genuinely shocking vulgarity. That’s Catullus in a nutshell, as I explain in this review, which draws on Danish pop music and the TV series Gossip Girl to explore his poetic self-contradictions: his earnestness and artificiality, his obsessive explorations of the self and the deeply social nature of his poems.

“Popdrengen vender tilbage” (“The pop boy returns”), Weekendavisen (26 May 2023). Link.

Danish. The article traces the forgotten origins of crime fiction in medieval Persia. Crime fiction as we know it today consists of two fused elements: crimes and clues, typically in the form of a murder and a series of material remains whose meaning is revealed by a hyper-intelligent detective. It is the latter’s history that I follow in this article, using the surprising etymology of the word “serendipity” as my own clue and tracing a journey from England through France, Italy, Armenia, Iran, and India to a surprising destination. The article was written in response to my mother’s essay about Agatha Christie.

“På sporet af krimien” (“In search of lost crime”), Weekendavisen (23 December 2022). Link.

Danish. Reflecting on my childhood crush on Lord Asriel from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, I discuss what a crush is in general: a kind of infatuation that is not, cannot be, or should not be reciprocated (e.g. because its object is a fictional character), and so acquires a strange intensity and violence. Asriel is Pullman’s reimagining of the character of Satan from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and to a prepubescent bisexual reader like myself, he was the perfect amalgamation of the youthful rebel and the authoritative father. He came to represent for me a fiery, ruthless form of desire, which shaped my relation to desire as such.

“Lucifers lækkerhed” (“Satan’s sex appeal”), Weekendavisen (15 July 2022). Link.

Danish. In a review of the third Danish translation of Sappho to appear in ten months (!), I argue that one of the distinguishing features of Sappho’s poetry is their ability to create what I call moving images, in a nod to the oxymoronic force that this phrase once carried: the poems present pictures that are perfectly still, yet infused with motion. Nothing ever happens in the now of Sappho’s poems, but her words still shimmer with memories of the past and expectations for the future.

“Digter i måneskin” (“Writing in the moonlight”), Weekendavisen (21 August 2021). Link.