Fosse
On a visit to Lisbon in Eastertide this year, I was touched to see the poster on the right. There he was, Jon Fosse, whose voice seems to me so quintessentially Norwegian I wouldn’t know how to begin to translate him, quite as a matter of course, seemingly at ease, on a billboard in Portugal, unselfconsciously cosmopolitan. Reading the press this week, I’ve been struck by the repeated stress on the universal aspect of Fosse’s work. He is, of course, deeply rooted in a global culture. It is wonderful to have a distinguished poet who is himself a translator, used to grappling with sense, noting that his version of Kafka’s The Trial aspires to the utmost accuracy, ‘each and every word’ having been weighed, who can say about the Greek playwrights, ‘they have very distinct voices, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. It’s very easy for me to hear and to write that voice in the way I write, in my language, in this time’. The universal in the particular, the particular in the universal: a perennial give-and-take that can be a cliché, but which in cases like this Nobel Laureate’s is electrifying because the creative act of writing is such a serious, essential business for him. Wisdom is born thereby, and beauty, a song like no other song.
