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Seattle. 1994. Fjord Press. 1st American Edition of This Translation. Previous Owner's Name Penned in Front, Otherwise Very Good in Wrappers. 0940242575. Translated from the Danish & With An Afterword by Tiina Nunnally. 157 pages. paperback. Cover painting of the author by Ernst Jospenson, 1879. keywords: Literature Translated Denmark Scandinavia. FROM THE PUBLISHER-From the Afterword by Tiina Nunnally, Seattle, January 1994-‘There are moments in my life when I believe that the study of Nature is my life's calling; but at other times it seems as if poetry should be my vocation, and this occurs precisely when some fine poem has aroused my enthusiasm or when I have been reading Nordic mythology. If I could transfer Nature's eternal laws, its delights, mysteries, and miracles into the world of poetry, then I feel that my work would become more than commonplace. '-Jens Peter Jacobsen, January 15, 1867. At the age of twenty, Jens Peter Jacobsen was torn between the two great passions of his life: science and poetry. He was an ardent botanist, and there was nothing he enjoyed more than ‘botanizing' along the shores of the Limfjord or in the marshes near his childhood home in Thisted. His first published work was a botanical essay, which appeared in 1870 in the journal Nyt dansk Maanedsskrift (New Danish Monthly), edited by Vilhelm Moller, who was to remain a lifelong friend. And for the next four years Jacobsen devoted much of his time to translating into Danish the monumental works of Darwin, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and THE DESCENT OF MAN. He also published several articles explaining Darwin's theories, and thus made the radical new ideas accessible to the general Danish public for the first time. In 1873 he won the University of Copenhagen's prestigious gold medal for his treatise on freshwater algae, and he had plans to write a doctoral thesis, as well as a book on the plant life of Denmark. But Jacobsen's scientific fervor was matched by his great love of poetry. He had written verse since the age of nine, and in 1869 he tried in vain to find a publisher for his first collections of poems. Even the critic Georg Brandes, who was the foremost spokesperson for the new, groundbreaking literary ideas of the time, failed to recognize Jacobsen's talent in these early poems. In fact, it was only with the posthumous publication of his poetry that Jacobsen's poetic genius was discovered. And so his literary debut was not as a poet, but as the author of the novella ‘Mogens. ' During the spring of 1872, Jacobsen worked on the story that he had promised for Vilhelm Moller's journal. Slowly, with long intervals between sentences, but unperturbed by his editor's impatience or his friends' teasing, Jacobsen filled odd-sized, multicolored sheets of paper that were then wrested from him, one by one, and carried off to the printer. Once the pages were sent off he made no changes, and his superb memory allowed him to submit the pages without keeping a draft while he finished the story. His slow pace was not the result of laziness, however; with his keen sense of language and profound respect for the power of words-regarding them almost as living organisms-he would meticulously search for precisely the right turn of phrase. Edvard Brandes (Georg's brother and Jacobsen's close friend) wrote years later that Jacobsen would have vehemently opposed restoring the ordinary syntax to the opening line of ‘Mogens. ' As Brandes said, all of the language, the poetry, the atmosphere, and the tone would collapse if it said ‘It was summer. ' instead of ‘Summer it was. ' Jacobsen had a penchant for reading dictionaries, and he made lists of long-forgotten words and expressions that might someday prove useful. When he was writing, he was capable of deep concentration; he took no notice of the passage of time. When ‘Mogens' appeared in Nyt dansk Maanedsskrift, the leading critics immediately acknowledged that the story, with its...