A half-decade ago, I visited the Booktrader in Copenhagen’s Skindergade on
my usual route through the central city’s antiquarian bookshops, and when
I inquired about the best Turèll stock in the city [translator’s note:
Dan Turèll, 1946-93, is a vastly popular, Danish, cult, beatnik poet], I was
told that there was nothing new on the shelves since the last time I asked, but
that the impeccable gentleman standing beside me was in the process of translating
a number of Turèll’s poems to English so they could be published in various
international magazines—which they in fact had been. I sharpened my ears!
The man presented himself as Thomas E. Kennedy, an American author who lives in
Denmark and who, in addition to his work with the Turèll translations, had also
skillfully translated Henrik Nordbrandt.
The background
At that point the undertaking exclusively was to get the American incarnation of
Turèll’s poems transported to the international print media. There still
hadn’t been talk (officially at least) about Thomas E. Kennedy’s recording
the translations accompanied by Halfdan E’s now legendary music from the two
original albums which Halfdan, in the beginning of the 1990s, published with Turèll.
The two albums were Watch Out for Your Money (1993) and Happy in Happy
Hour (1996). The first came out a half-year before the poet’s death
and together the two albums sold the dizzying number of 70,000 copies—unheard
of for a Danish record of a musically accompanied poetry reading. But Turèll
had with the young Halfdan found a congenial sound architect to support his distinct
intonation. The two albums had long since written themselves into Danish folk history
and have, with their continual playing on the air and as part of the curriculum
of educational institutions, become a part of the modern folk lore. Ask the average
Dane to name a Turèll poem and chances are he will name “A Tribute to
the Everyday Things,” “Last Walk through the City,” or “I
Should Have Been a Taxi Driver”—not least because of the versions on
the records.
Thomas E. Kennedy's project
Honestly, that the form should succeed again when it involved the well-known Danish
Turèll poems in English, I was a bit skeptical. Because it seemed to me the
poems were too Danish, in spite of Turèll’s dedicated infatuation for
American things. The very popular lyrics of the Danish rock group Gasolin’
did not manage to be successfully, idiomatically transported to American, even though
the effort was allied to Leonard “Skip” Malone, an American who lived
in Denmark. Not a bad word about either him or the now defunct Gasolin’ could
ever fall from my lips—but Thomas E. Kennedy is now a little bit of a capacity
and not Mr. Whoever: he was born in Queens in 1944 (two years before Turèll);
his mother was a grammar school teacher, and his father a bank executive with a
penchant for poetry and a bit of a poetry aspirant. Kennedy’s father gave
the 15-year-old Thomas a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and it
opened the teenager’s eye for literature—he decided that he would be
a writer and dropped out of college a couple of years later (sound familiar, Mr.
Turèll?). It would take, however, a couple of decades before he, as a 37-year-old
in 1981, had his first short story published. He was living then in Denmark and
was married to a Danish physician. From that point, Kennedy began to publish hundreds
of essays, stories, poems, interviews, and translations in American and European
periodicals. That was followed by novels, inter alia the four-volume novel series
Copenhagen Quartet, each of which takes place in one of the Danish capital’s
seasons, each written in a different style, and each of which can be read independently
of one another.
In 2009 this literature devotee sent Halfdan E a letter with his idea: a new record
with the new translations set to Halfdan’s masterful music. This was sweet music in
the composer’s ears; in his time it had been a declared wish for him and Turèll
that their poetry and music should go as far beyond Denmark’s borders as possible.
The poet’s death, however, put an end to those plans.
New album
With Thomas E. Kennedy behind the microphone, the poems have to a great extent received
a new life and offer themselves vitally to the listener as if there were an old
jazz and poetry LP with Kerouac. What could be feared impossible manifests itself
to our ears. The language flows unforced and extremely successfully and sharply
cut. The music is of high quality, as all Danes have known for 20 years, but what
is so fine is that it in no way sounds as though the old recordings have been overdrawn
with any artificial English declamation upon it. It is highly tuned, the architect
Halfdan has been at work with the reboring of Turèll’s vocal to make
room for Kennedy’s. Kennedy, who shines as a surprisingly good poetry reader,
whether it involves a swinging presentation such as “I Should Have Been a
Taxi Driver” and “Total Euphoria” or a more sotto voce
masterpiece like “My TV Drama” and “Last Walk through the City.”
It sounds so playfully easy that one completely forgets how difficult it without
doubt has been to get the whole thing to work.
It is not a matter of replaying from the basis of the old music, but rather a face-lift
and “make-over” so the numbers sound fresh as dew and so they glide
around Kennedy’s unswerving poetic delivery. As Kennedy himself intones in
his taxi driver translation, “I myself chattily drive with nonchalant perfection
with one finger on the wheel”—it is exactly what he does, in the poems
and readings. It is surprisingly little that seems forced in its translation and
just as few times has a linguistic finesse been untranslatable. In the original
version of “Tribute to Everyday,” Turèll says in his final words,
“hold da helt ferie [translator’s note: untranslatable—‘hold
a whole vacation’?], how I like the everyday things,” which is deftly
deleted in “A Tribute to the Everyday Things.” But it doesn’t
matter when the music plays. “Vesterbrogade” has become “West
Bridge Street” and “Nytorv” “New Square,” but it
cannot really be otherwise.
Kennedy does not sound like Turèll. It would also be a misunderstanding to
imitate and very unnecessary when he himself is equipped with a so easily understandable
and flexible voice which skillfully fits itself to the variety of texts. A little
bonus is the accomplished cover art [by Thomas Thorhauge], where the title Dan
Turèll+Halfdan E meets Thomas E. Kennedy is reminiscent of the old jazz
covers that Turèll liked so much. It doesn’t matter that “Last Walk
through the City” is misquoted in the original language.
When Turèll’s first detective novel in 1986 was filmed and shown in the
theater, the author was so dissatisfied that he demonstratively stood up from the
first row and walked out in protest at the premiere. The same thing would scarcely
happen if Turèll had been alive to experience this album’s issue—he
would, it seems moreover, have shouted, “One more time!”
* See also Kennedy’s translation of the poem:
“Last Walk Through the City”
—CD album was issued on November 11th, 2013, on the PlantSounds label,
both as a recording and digitally.
—Review was previously published in
Ørevoks: Ord & Toner (Earwax: Words
& Toner),
11-25-2013, and is reprinted here in translation by author’s permission.
Born 1986 in Denmark. Master of Arts in Literature, but not at all academic minded. Lives
and breathes for music and poetry and writes the Danish music and literature blog,
Ørevoks: Ord & Toner (Earwax: Words & Toner).