Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

POR: Na minha primeira menção (2009) da imagem Português da seria, eu sabia apenas que o título era "Alcool", e eu escrevi na época que tivessem muitos poetas que poderiam escrever um poema sobre este tema. O, com a formulação original do HTLAL" The Portuguese painting in this series is simply called "alcool" (alcohol), and with such a vague title and no idea about who wrote it it won't be easy to find the original poem through a Google search. There are probably more green men with three heads on this planet than non-alcoholic poets. Em 2012 eu fiz alguns vídeos no Youtube sobre as minhas pinturas, e, em seguida, examinei o assunto de novo e realmente encontrei um poeta verde com uma cabeça e um consumo de bebidas alcoólicas importante, o Português Mario de Sá-Carneiro, e você pode lê-lo aqui:

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IV - Álcool (da coleção "Dispersão")

Guilhotinas, pelouros e castelos
Resvalam longamente em procissão;
Volteiam-me crepúsculos amarelos,
Mordidos, doentios de roxidão.

(...)
Que droga foi a que me inoculei?
(...)
Nem ópio nem morfina. O que me ardeu,
Foi álcool mais raro e penetrante:
É só de mim que ando delirante -
Manhã tão forte que me anoiteceu

O autor vivía de 1890 a 1916 e foi "um dos grandes expoentes do modernismo em Portugal e um dos mais reputados membros da Geração d’Orpheu." Sua vida confusa e ansiedade constante "conduzi-lo ao seu suicídio prematuro, perpetrado no Hôtel de Nice, no bairro de Montmartre em Paris, com o recurso a cinco frascos de arseniato de estricnina" (Wikipedia). Não foi divertido em tudo sendo Sá Carneiro!

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EN: There is also an Occitan painting in the series, called "Estelum" - but the only starry text in Occitan I have found on the internet is "L'estelum" from "Contes de la Cigala" of Jaunet Demèsa, and I have seen a publication year of 1999 for that work - much too late (although it might only be for the version with a CD and French translation). I painted my painting in the late 70s.

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OC: Il a tanben una penhedura occitana dins la teirada, nomenat "Estelum" - mas el sol tèste estelat qieu jo ai vist en lo internet es "L'estelum" de "Contes de la Cigala" de Jaunet Demèsa, i j'ai vist l'an de publicatge 1999 por aquella òbra - molt tròp tard (tot ben que pòsca esser solament per la version amb CD e trabucada francésa). Jo pintèri ma penhedura ja a l'acabada dels 70s.

De plus, ieu devi grandmercejar lou ensier www.panoccitan.org por la ajuda consiradoira qieu mi ha prestat a l'escasença de la trabucada d'aquest tèste. Si jo aja hagut un tal diccionari ta l'ancian francés jo lo aviái aprés fa longtemps.

[Iversen]

SP: Hemos llegado a la imagen española en esta serie de idiomas, y la persona immortalizada esta vez es el poeta español Gustavo Adolfo Bequer, autor de una collección de esquicitos poemas llamada Rimas. La broma es que hay pocas rimas en estas poesías - consideremos por ejemplo rima numero LIII:

Volverán las oscuras golondrinas
en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,
y otra vez con el ala a sus cristales
jugando llamarán.

Vds. ven las golondrinas y el balcón en la pintura, y el balcón proviene de la rima no. XIII, "Tu pupila es azul".

La sección más llamativa de la pintura proviene de la rima no LII.:

Olas gigantes que os rompéis bramando
en las playas desiertas y remotas,
envuelto entre la sábana de espumas,
¡llevadme con vosotras!

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Vds. pueden leer la biografia de Bequer aqui, y la palabra clave es "pobreza". En HTLAL he escribido esto sobre el:

EN: "From Portugal we move to Spain, where the swallows are whisking around and the wawes are breaking, thanks to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. He was a meek and reticent man who didn't accomplish much (anything?) during his lifetime, - his friends had to find money to publish his collected works after his death in 1870. But at least his death was well choreographed: just when the poor dying poet was uttering his last words - "everything (is) mortal" (or "completely mortal") - a total solar eclipse passed Sevilla."

Speaking about eclipses - those who have followed my multiconfused thread at HTLAL may have wondered: where has all the science gone? And with the emphasis I have put on my 'literary' paintings in this 2. multiconfused log thread it is inevitable that literature has become more prominent in this thread than it should have been, at the expense of science. But I can promise you that this won't last forever. And I doubt that I can avoid writing about language learning techniques much longer.

And coincidentally: in my longish cassette -> WAW transfer project I'm right now listening to music by Manuel de Falla - an excellent and very fitting background to reading Spanish poetry. He has even written a cembalo concerto! Who would have thought that?

[Iversen]

EN: You may have noticed that I have added short notices in Ancient French and timeless Occitan to a couple of messages above - and in principle you could also wonder how Scots could be represented here, being a mainly passive language on my list. Or in other words: how much can you rely on external sources in order to produce such texts before it becomes cheating at the level of publishing an unedited machine translation?

From my point of view the matter is simple: I have to some extent constructed my sentences with the help of dictionaries, Google lookups and grammars or other tools, but I had an idea about what I wanted to write, and that idea was formulated in patchy, errorridden and fragmentary Ancient French, Occitan resp. Scots, but still in those languages - not in French or English. To get the 'machine' rolling in such peripheral languages I have to read some genuine stuff first, and after that it is like hacking your way through a jungle with a machete.

For Scots and Occitan I have found good two-way dictionaries on the internet, and at least for Scots I also have a couple of small paper dictionaries (although I rarely use them). In Scots I have written so much that I in principle could express myself without the dictionary, but by looking seemingly innocuous words up I learn a lot of new words and expressions so I do it more than I really needed to. In Occitan I may have seen the online dictionary of Panoccitan.org before (long ago I wrote something in Occitan at HTLAL so I must have used some kind of dictionary back then), but now I have discovered or rediscovered panoccitan, and with such an excellent resource and my background from old university courses it should in principle be possible to transform Occitan into a semi-active language like Scots. And I do feel tempted to try - but with the traditional orthography, not the one invented by Mistral (even though it probably reflects Modern Occcitan pronunciation better than the spelling inherited from the troubadours).

And what then about Old French? Well, the problem is that I don't have a decent something->Old French dictionary - those on the internet are so patchy that it hardly is worth consulting them. On the other hand I have got a fairly good dictionary from Old to Modern French, I have grammars and enough genuine texts to get into the right mood (although some more speech samples would be welcome), but if you run into problems due to lexical potholes every other moment and have to look up halfbaked guesses or faint memories all the time, just to find that your guesswork was wrong or belonged to Middle French, then you get tired and annoyed. So even though I can read Old French better than Occitan I don't feel like spending a lot of time activating it.

There actually is a decent translator for Occitan, namely the one sponsored by the Generalitat de Catalunya (to and from Catalan), but quite generally I don't trust machine translations unless I understand the target language better than the machine does. My own homebrewed text samples may actually have more errors than those of Google T or its competitors, but at least those errors are MY errors, and I learned something while I made them. Besides you don't get your brain spinning in another language if you just put some sentences in your own language into a machine and watch its faeces commin out at the other end. Machine translations are useful to help you understand barely comprehensible texts in other languages, and it is tempting to use them as 'expression wordbooks', but you can't trust anything that is made that way.

In this thread I have so far written about painting representing Old Norse (/Icelandic), Middle Danish (/Danish), Swedish, English, Scots, Middle Dutch (/Dutch), Latin, Ancient French, Modern French, Occitan, Portuguese and Spanish. I have a painting illustrating Norwegian, but p.t. I wait for the corresponding book. There are no paintings for Platt or Afrikaans (though anything with an elephant or giraffe in it could be as an excuse for a wee rant in Afrikaans). Queuing up outside the door you find Catalan, Italian, Romanian, Modern Greek and Russian - but when I painted the paintings for the last two I hardly knew anything apart from the alphabet. Now my situation is slightly better, but I'm not at the level I would have been on if I had had just a few years more with language studies in the early 80s. And there are no paintings illustrating languages like Polish, Serbian/Croatian, Esperanto or Bahasa Indonesia so I'll have to be creative to find an excuse for using them in this thread.

[Iversen]

FR: "Rien encore!--Et vainement ai-je feuilleté pendant trois jours et trois
nuits, aux blafardes lueurs de la lampe, les livres hermétiques de
Raymond Lulle"

Si vous vous souvenez d'Aloysius Bertrand et de son livre Gaspard de la Nuit, sur lequel j'ai basé une peinture (page 2), vous savez que Raimundus Lullus est considéré d'aucuns comme une des grand alchimistes, et la référence chez Bertrand ci-dessus reflète cette attitude. Mais cette réputation reste sur des fausses attributions médievales, et tous les Wikipedias indiquent qu'il s'est distancé de l'alchimie – sans pourtant indiquer une source précise.

EN: The real Ramon Llull was a polyhistor and genius from Mallorca, who during his long life (1232 to 1315) delved into a vast a array of themes, including things that even today would be categorized as science. In 2001 a collection of supposedly lost writings was found, and they contain contributions to mathematics which only were rediscovered half a millenium later. He was admired by people like Leibniz for his writings about computational theory. But he was also a polyglot philosopher, author and traveller – as shown on a map in the Swedish wikipedia. Some accounts suggest that he was killed by Moslem fanaticists in North Africa, and that may be the main reason for his beatification in 1857 by Pope Pius IX – but no real basis for these claims have ever been found. However he did try to prove that Christianity was much better than Judaism and Islam, but Spain at this time was in the middle of the Reconquista so you shouldn't be surprised that even the great Lullus expressed the prevailing mindset of his epoch.

As an author he is credited for the first real literature in Catalan. The work I have painted is called "Tree of the philosophy of Love" – and in spite of the suggestions embedded in the painting it isn't a sleazy love story, it really is a philosophical treatise, although written in a legible way.

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CA: Jo he escollit el llibre "Arbre de Filosofia d’Amor" (Paris 1298), i es pot llegir aquí un breu extracte, que conté precisament el passatge que he il•lustrat en la imatge:

Esdevenc Ramon en un bell prat; en lo mig havia un gran arbre e una bella fontana. A l’ombra de l’arbre estava una bella dona molt ornadament vestida, e plorava, planyia e deïa aquestes paraules:

–¡Ah, trista dolorosa! ¡E com és molt avorrida en esta present vida! Car ciència, ta germana, ha molts servidors qui la prenen per filosofia, e tu n’has pocs, segons ta dignitat e honor.

Ramon venc a la dona, la qual humilment saludà; e la dona agradablement li reté ses saluts. Demanà Ramon a la dona com era apellada, ni per què estava en plants e en plors. –Ramon –dix la dona–, jo som apellada Filosofia d’Amor, e planc e plor per ço car he pocs amadors, e ma germana Filosofia de Saber n’ha molts més que mi.

–Filosofia d’amor –dix Ramon–, ¿què és causa que Filosofia de Saber ha més servidors que vós? ¿Ni per què vós n’havets enveja, pus que ella és vostra sor?

– Ramon –dix la dona–, l’ocasió perquè ma sor ha més servidors que mi, és car los homes, quan comencen aprendre ciències, comencen amar saber per mi, car sens mi no poden amar saber; e com saben les ciències, amen la filosofia d’aquelles, e han-ne feits molts llibres e moltes arts; (...) E per aiçò se segueix contra mi enjúria e pecat, e gran damnatge a molts amadors de saber; car aitant com mais saben sens amar mi e bontat, aitant han major manera de fer mal e d’enganar e traïr los uns los altres.

Es la senyora Saber de Amor que es veu seient, plorant tot sola, mentre que la seva Germana, senyora Filosofia de Saber ensenya tota una manada de vells teòlegs (senyora Saber es veu també amb els seus amadors acadèmics en el racó a dret). I en Ramón joga el seu llaüt per a confortar la dama desesperada, peró jo no crec que funciona. Hi ha solament un problem: he oblidat pintar la roba "molt ornadament" de la dona i dels personatges en la bombolla amb els seus pensaments secrets. L'arbre també s'ha transformat en una flor per algun procés gairebé alquímic..

És interessant que encara es pot llegir fàcilment un text medieval en català - especialment si tenim en compte quant la llengua francesa s'ha canviat des dels vells textos sobre el rei Artur i els seus cavallers i les seves diverses tasques, que jo vaig il•lustrar la setmana passada. Aquests textos van ser escrits aproximadament al mateix temps que les obres de Llull.

[Iversen]

LGE: Moin! Ek höff keen Plattdüütscher Moleree moolt, so dorför kreegt ihr nu een Beetje nedderdüütsche Klönen. Ik höff in 2012 een Konversation twüschen twee Plattschnacker vun't Internet nedderloden, un heb mien ölle Uutschrift nu weer funnen en in de Bus-torüch-vun't-Arbeet leest. Vun't "Kroog un Stammdisch" spreken Wieben Klas un Isebrandt - Uschi is die Kelnerin, un 't Thema is Isebrandt sien Umwälzpump:

Isebrandt: Moin Wieben, ole Gnadderbuck! Lewen noch frisch? Jo, hier in Krog is richdi besinnlich wurrn sietdem de döhrballerte Matroos de Segels streken hett. (...)

Wieben Klas: Moin Ise! Wann he sick nu ennelk benöhm kunn, denn mienswegen. Ik hööp, dat he sick hier nich bloots wedder anködeln wull. Fierohmbtbeer, Uschi!

Isebrandt: Du, sech mol, hess Du ni ´n goden Heizungsbuur anne Hand? Swatt natürli! De Umwälzpump vunn mien Pool speelt verrückt. Lütt und Lütt!

Wieben Klas: Ik wett, Du hess de Pump düsset Johr dat eertsde Mool wedder inschalt, un de Pump mookt gohrnix miehr, brummt villich bloots noch. Hess all nohkiekt, ov de Pump överhaup Strom kriggt? Denn kunn dat sien, dat de Lagers un Dichtungen vun Looprood övern Winter fastgammelt sünd (..). Vörsöök mool, de Pump avtohschruven un dat Looprood dörch de Anslööt toh dreihn. Villich kumms ook op anner Wies an dat Looprood, ahn Avschruven.Uschi, twee Rotlicht för de tehoreetschen Hannwarkers!

Isebrandt: Heff ick all versöcht.(...) Nä, Wieben, dohr mutt ´n Fachmann ran. Runn Beer!

Wieben Klas: Wann Strom dohr is, un de Motor brummt nich, denn is de Motor woll in Mors. Kunns mit 'n Ampéremeter testen. Wann sich dat nich röhrt, denn mook Di glieks mool mit 'n Gedanken an 'ne neege Pump vörtruut. Twee Beer, Uschi!

Isebrandt: Ick warr datt as Versekerungsfall melden. Wieben, mien Jung, hol de Ohrn stief! Uschi, Affsagger hüüt op mien Deggel! ....uuuund aff!

Vun de Toon wöör 't eenfach dit Gespreeks as Dilletantkommödie einstufen, un ik mag in 'n Grundsatz keen Theater, aver 't is ook ünnerhollend und gresig groot. Wieben Klaas en Isebrandt spreken door 37 Sieden. Mitunner kommen ook önner Lüüd in't Krog vun Uschi, aver sie kann rohig ihr hele Geschäft up Ise un Wieben en sien Kumpel baseeren - sie höffen vun 2010 up P. 1 tot Hüüt up P.37 üm en düm drunken en praten.

[Iversen]

EN: I do acknowledge that you normally ought to read the books you are writing about, but I have illustrated the Italian language by the epos "Orlando Furioso" by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), and it is IMMENSE! I read it in its entirety during my study years in the 70s, but the details of the painting is not particularly closely connected to specific details, and it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack to go searching for them again. For those who are lazy bums like me there is a summarized version in English here, and you can get the original Italian version from Gutenberg here.

IT: Preferisco dunque solo immergere i miei piedi in un paio di passaggi nell'opera di Ariosti che illustrano il suo stile ed il tema del libro. Il lavoro è una continuazione della poesia incompiuta di Boiardo "Orlando Innamorato", e nell'inizio vi trovete una sintesi degli eventi precedenti di questa:

Orlando, che gran tempo innamorato
fu de la bella Angelica, e per lei
in India, in Media, in Tartaria lasciato
avea infiniti ed immortal trofei,
in Ponente con essa era tornato,
dove sotto i gran monti Pirenei
con la gente di Francia e de Lamagna
re Carlo era attendato alla campagna,

per far al re Marsilio e al re Agramante
battersi ancor del folle ardir la guancia,
(..)
E così Orlando arrivò quivi a punto:
ma tosto si pentò d'esservi giunto:

Che vi fu tolta la sua donna poi:
ecco il giudicio uman come spesso erra!

Il subdolo imperatore Carlo Magno sa che tanto Orlando (= Rolando dalla Canzone di Rolando) che suo cugino sono pazzi innamorati della sexy fanciulla Angelica, e li incita dunque ad un concorso per impalare quanti più mori possibile. Angelica è tuttavia più intelligente di ciascuno di essi più l'imperatore stesso e corre al galoppo via via , dopo di chè Ariosto - a quanto pare matto mattissimo da grafomania - rimpiene pagina dopo pagina colle sue tirate sterminate sul randagismo di Orlando come delirante maniaco. Orlando diventa addirittura inviato ad un viaggio alla Luna per cercare il suo proprio cervello in una bottiglia, il che è la prova finale che Ariosti non fosse di mente sano quando scrisse questo libro.

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[Iversen]

EN: The last painting in the language series that illustrates a Romance language will be the one dedicated to Romanian (no Sardic, no Romantsch), no Ladino. But before showing it I would like to tell a little bit about my relationship with this somewhat neglected language.

In essence I was studying French at the university in Århus, Denmark, when we suddenly got a native Romanian teacher at the institute thanks to some kind of cultural exchange program. From the outset five persons followed his courses - as far as I remember it was two teachers and three students, including me, but at the end of the first year I was the only one left. Then he went home, but we then got another native Romanian teacher who stayed for two years, and I had individual lessons with him for two hours each week. Because I was the only student I had a certain influence on his teaching methods, and we agreed on doing the classes exclusively in Romanian - and we even stuck to Romanian outside classes when we met in the corridors or the library.

But then I finished my studies and I could see that chances were minimal that I ever would get a permanent job at the university level (with a lot of newly appointed 68s in all the good jobs), and then I deliberately dropped all my language studies and switched to economy and - later - informatics. And down the drain went my Romanian skills. I didn't even visit Romania, which was ruled by the ghastly dictator Ceaucescu at the time, and I never heard or read any Romanian at home. At the end I only remembered one single word: "scrumieră" (ashtray) - heaven know why precisely this word stuck (I don't smoke), but it did.

I visited Romania once in the mid 70s and then didn't return before 2006, where I visited to Romania and Moldova. I decided to read up on my slumbering Romanian, using my old books and the internet, and it was during this period I hit upon HTLAL and decided to revive my old languages - although I only signed up after my return. During this voyage I had a few short conversations, but also one hour-long chat with an employee at a museum in the capital of Moldova, Chișinau. Since then I have visited Romania once (in 2009), and by then I was able to do a monolingual voyage (apart from one conversation in Italian with a hotel receptionist in Timișoara). But Romanian is not a language I ever speak at home, and even though I can speak it at a moment's notice it is fragile in the sense that I am easily distracted if I hear other languages around me, and I have a tendency to get stuck into lexical potholes.

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RO: în 2009 am scris acest lucru la HTLAL:

Nu există mult de spus despre pictura de astăzi: este numită "Den foruroligede kornmark" (cîmp îngrijit) în limba daneză, dar eu me duc aminte ca autorul să fie Tudor (?) Vrînceanu. Din păcate, eu nu am putut găsi nimic sub acest nume de pe Internet - textul este ceva ce-am citit intr-o carte bibliotechei Institutului Romanic de la Universitate de Aarhus, şi ar putea fi că nu a fost niciodată publicat pe Web.

În 2012 am avut o bună idea: stieam ca România să aibă în anul 1993 o reformă ortografică, unde printre altele "î" (în afara poziția inițială) a fost înlocuit cu litera "â". Și când am cautat pe "Vrânceanu" am găsit un scriitor român relativ bine cunoscut (în România, dar definitiv nu în țara a mea) cu numele de Dragoș Vrânceanu, iar unele dintre poeziile sale pot fi găsite pe internet. Dar o poezie cu pește, Moartea cu coasă, ochi, un tren și o holdă îngrijită, încă nu am găsit-o. Ar putea chiar fi scris de la un alt poet - memoria mea ar fi putut să-mi înșela în jurul anului 1990, când am făcut prima listă peste picturile mele..

[Iversen]

EN: For the next painting I had to do I bit of detective work. The problem was that I did know the Greek and the Russian alphabet at end of the seventies, but not much more. However I wanted to illustrated to illustrate these two language on the expectation that I would learn them properly, but I never got around to do it (at least not at the time) so I had to use a translation while peeking into the original Greek and Russian texts. I still use bilingual texts, but now with the expectation that the original text is the one to be read and the translation is reserved for short peeks.

When I first wrote about the Greek painting at HTLAL in 2009 I just knew its name, Seferis (a reference to the Greek noble prize winner Γιώργος Σεφέρης), and I had no idea which of his works I had consulted. I wrote the following analysis of the motives:

(...) an old mand who receives his final cup of poison, a swimmer crawling away from his wrecked ship (Odysseus? - Seferis allegedly had a faible for this mythical figure) and a marathon runner who is murdered most horribly in the middle of the road, - but I would like a name, not just a pool of blood.

In 2112 I tried again (as part of my studies for an aborted series of Youtube videos about my paintings), but again without result. But now I had to try again, and at long last I managed to find the source: a poem name "Shipwreck 'Thrush'" (Κίχλη in Greek), which you can read in English here. And by which chain of deductions did this happen? Well, as you can see from the quote I remembered that there was 'something' about Odysseus and Seferis, and then I found an article by Mr.Myrsiades about the Odysseus motive in Seferis' works, and there I found the title of the poem. But before arriving there I have been sitting with music by composers from Frescobaldi to Gabrieli in my ears, reading through poem after poem in Greek at the Stichoi site without finding anything that rang a bell. But everything is easy when you have got the solution.

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GR: Όπως έγραψα, η λύση είναι πάντα εύκολο - όταν την έχετε βρέθει. Ένα καράβι βουλιάζει, ένας άνθρωπος κολυμπά μακριά (θα πρέπει να είναι ο Οδυσσέας στο βρεγμένο δρόμο του για να χώρα των Φαιάκων), ένα παλιό παίρνει την τελευταία φάρμακό του σε ένα παλιό σπίτι στη θάλασσα - και το μόνο που ακόμη χρειάζεται να μάθετε είναι ποιος σκοτώθηκε στο δρόμο. Ίσως ο άνθρωπος που εφηύρε το Μαραθώνιο;

Ἄκουσα τὴ φωνὴ
καθὼς ἐκοίταζα στὴ θάλασσα νὰ ξεχωρίσω
ἕνα καράβι ποὺ τὸ βούλιαξαν ἐδῶ καὶ χρόνια-
τὄ᾿λεγαν «Κίχλη» ἕνα μικρὸ ναυάγιο- τὰ κατάρτια,
σπασμένα, κυματίζανε λοξὰ στὸ βάθος,
(...)
Κι ἦρθε ἡ φωνὴ τοῦ γέρου, αὐτὴ τὴν ἔνιωσα
πέφτοντας στὴν καρδιὰ τῆς μέρας
ἥσυχη, σὰν ἀκίνητη:
«Κι ἂ μὲ δικάσετε νὰ πιῶ τὸ φαρμάκι, εὐχαριστῶ-

Η σημερινή ποίημα μαραθώνιο μου έχει δείξει ότι το παθητικό ελληνικά μου ήταν αρκετά καλή - δεν C1 ή C2, αλλά τουλάχιστον Β1. Δυστυχώς δεν είχα την ευκαιρία να προσπήθησα να μιλήσα, αφού έμεινα στη Φλώρινα και την Καστοριά το 2009, όταν τα ελληνικά μου ήταν ακόμα πολύ περιορισμένη. Παρεμπιπτόντως, αυτό το μέρος της Ελλάδα (κοντά στην Αλβανία) δεν είναι πολύ δημοφιλής μεταξύ των τουριστών, οι οποίοι είτε θέλουν να κολυμπήσετε στην καταγάλανη θάλασσα ή το βλέμμα σε λευκό στήλες, αλλά μπορώ να συστήσω στους ανθρώπους να το επισκεφτούν. Είναι μακράν το πιο πράσινο μέρος της Ελλάδα.

[Jar-Ptitsa]

Your painting style is recognisable, I think that if you put your painting with the others by some other painters, it wouldn't be difficult to identify which is your painting.

[Iversen]

EN: I definitely hope that it is recognizable. And I even think that the many miniature paintings of birds I made before the surrealistic ones have contributed to shaping that style - together with cartoons and the works of certain other artists who like rambling, but naturalistic motives and clearly defined lines.

I remember that you and I long ago in another place discussed whether my paintings really are surrealistic, and I still can't see what else you would call them. But I do not accept the idees in Breton's Surrealistic manifest and all that rubbish about automatic writing etc. etc. Making surrealistic paintings is at least as conscious a process as making naturalistic paintings, and definitely more than making certain kinds of 'spontaneous' abstract paintings. There can be a certain aleatoric element, as when I have included something in a painting because of a remark by somebody who spoke to me while I was working on it (I painted in 'Huset, a building in Århus with free public ateliers) - but even that was a deliberate decision. Those who believe in unconscious production and in automatisms generally produce rubbish.

One difference between my style and those of a number of other surrealist painters is that I have let myself be inspired by the styles displayed in comic strips as much as classical realistic oil painting. Luckily I didn't have to live off my paintings because in the prevailing artsy climate I wouldn't have had a chance. Those few Danish artists whom I admire (people like Frello, Bigum, Kluge) have generally NOT been through the Art Academies, which represent the mainstream of contemporary art. I'm happy that I didn't go through that kind of grinding mill, and my potential teachers should be too - I would have been a thoroughly refractary and irritating student.

Just as an afterthought: my insistance on conscious production and clear lines is reflected in the way I see language learning. I also try to make that as conscious a process as possible, and as a student I have definitely been a nuisance for some of my teachers who believed in fluffy Freudian or politic nonsense. No wonder that I specialized in grammar, which is the nearest thing to real science within the humanities.

GE: Ich sehe jetzt eine Sendung von 3SAT, in denen es durch Praha in der Straßenbahn gereist wird. Haha, ich habe das im Mai dieses Jahres auch getan, und ich kann viele Orte wiedererkennen. Ich übernachtete in einem Hotel weniger als hundert Meter von der Karlsbrücke und wanderte über sie nach Mitternacht, wo es etwas weniger Turisten darauf gab. Mann kann ernst befürchten, daß sie einen Tag unter dem Gewicht der Personen, die in der Tageszeit auf sie stehen oder wandern, zusammenbreche und in die Moldau (Vltava) stürze.

DA: I mit kassette-til-waw projekt er jeg nået til Niels W. Gade (1817-1890), der slog igennem med Ossianouverturen og den første symfoni (På Sjølands Fagre Sletter). Han rejste til Leipzig og var der på nippet til et kæmpe gennembrud - men Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's tidlige død og først de Sønderjyske krige 1848-50 og senere den tabte krig mod Preussen i 1864 afbrød denne karriere. I stedet blev han den totalt dominerende komponist i dansk musikliv indtil sin død.