Pia Juul

Pia Juul
By Marianne Stidsen (Marianne Stidsen)

In 1993 an unusual event occurred in Denmark, when a collection of poetry became an item on television news. The work came from the hand of Pia Juul. And the title was the slyly grotesque En død mands nys (A dead man´s sneeze). When Pia Juul published A dead man´s sneeze and gained a vastly increased audience at one jump, she already had three poetry books behind her. From her very first collection in 1985 it was clear that here was a young poet in a class of her own. Pia Juul´s poems are striking because of their tone, at once both harshly direct and yet cryptic. With a remarkable ear for the potential of language and with limited use of technical effects she can produce modes of expression completely unfamiliar to everyday speech. So that in one and the same line one seems to hear a coquettish little-girl voice and the tones of a hardened, pretty scruffy old salt.
In the first two collections: levende og lukket (living and locked), 1985, and i brand måske (on fire perhaps), 1987, this takes the form of a disturbingly dissonant play between him and her, which precisely catches the discordant transition from child to adult without presenting any moral judgement or answer. "Run me through then I´ll drown you," as she writes.
In the third collection, Forgjort (Bewitched), 1989, the action moves on to the adult relationship between a he and a she. However, it is characteristic of Pia Juul not to allow the poem´s voice to be identical with the woman´s. On the contrary, she introduces a third voice, the voice of the poem, which with slightly raised, ironical eyebrows depicts the eternal roleplay of the sexes - yet without in any way judging them. "He wants to take away/something of hers/that he has not/discovered/whether she has/She says/do you know if I have it/He says/no, but I´m taking it."
With Skaden (Magpie), 1990, Pia Juul moves over to prose. Yet the distinctive sense for retaining antithesis in an intertwined tension characterises the novel as well. Outwardly it portrays an abstract war between "the green and the grey," and on the resistance of the single individual to being integrated with the one dimensional categories of uniform colours. Inwardly - and this is the actual situation - it deals with the ever continuing existential struggles and complications between the sexes - as the days, i.e. life, pass, and the sun slowly burns out. The book is spiced with characteristic "Juulian" underplayed humour. In war this is how we kill each other "as we must."
After this prose intermezzo Pia Juul returns at full strength to poetry in 1993 with the intractably different A dead man´s sneeze. The collection is the most sustained attempt yet by the poet to create the sound of opposed and differing tones simultaneously uttered by one and the same voice. On the one hand is sexuality, metaphorically figured in the brothel, on the other, death, in the graveyard. The persona of the poet stands, so to speak, opening and closing the curtain between the two stages, so that now we see the wild passions of love, now look straight down into a cold grave, now turn around between them as in a giddy lanterna magica show.
One can say that Pia Juul opens a crack in language to allow something different to peep through, which, however, does not have the character of highly praised femininity or anything else of substance. She is far too subtle for that. It has rather the character of this wonderful ability of the language to contain disparate elements without synthesising them, something that seems completely impossible in daily life. The ability, in the author´s own words, to reproduce "a dead man´s sneeze." Witch, sibyl, seaman, little girl...
Pia Juul can make all the voices ring together in her magical poetry and prose. And hereby, it can be said, she takes literature back to its origins, which were in fact those anonymous human depths from where all voices pour out, in a vast unsystemised choir.

Translated by Anne Born

FONTE: http://www.danishliterarymagazine.info/