I am standing on a divan,
speaking a strange kind of drunken nonsense.
I insist on preaching the art
of proclamation
to an audience of beer and tobacco.
I say only one sentence.
Only the two of us understand it.
I say: Go to hell
in this blessed spring.
Ah, if you knew how good spring once was.
Chalk-white branches were long lines of verse,
chalk-white against blue.
By day and by night my mighty
heart stood, burning with joy,
its door flung wide to every
shift of light
and every small sound.
I am thoroughly drunk and understand nothing—
and yet I remember everything.
I betray a spring, for spring’s meaning
has collapsed within me.
I assert my will: This one spring must
be emptied like bottles and shattered into shards.
I deliver my mountain sermon here.
And only we two understand it.
Message of a Defeat
Morten Nielsen
translated from the Danish by Sheema Kalbasi
Morten Nielsen remains marginal within international literary scholarship despite his significance in twentieth century Danish poetry. His premature death at twenty-two, while active in the Danish resistance during the German occupation, curtailed a promising literary trajectory and left behind a single published collection, Krigere uden Vaaben (Warriors Without Weapons; Gyldendal, 1943).. The brevity of his oeuvre, coupled with the scarcity of English translations, has confined his reception largely to Danish literary discourse. Accordingly, one of the principal challenges in translating Nielsen is not solely linguistic but archival. His work remains difficult to access.
Nielsen’s poetry is marked by formal rigor, syntactic economy, and affective restraint. His thematic concerns encompass love, urban modernity, and the natural world. While biographical knowledge of his early death inevitably shapes interpretation, this translation resists reductive biographical determinism. Instead, it prioritizes close attention to the poem’s internal dynamics, particularly the tension between youthful immediacy and an implicit awareness of transience.
From a translator’s perspective, Danish presents distinct challenges. Nielsen’s diction is deceptively spare, and the affective force of his verse depends upon rhythmic precision and tonal modulation. His poetry resists ornamentation, and even minor lexical shifts can significantly recalibrate its emotional register. My approach therefore privileges semantic accuracy and tonal fidelity while allowing the English to remain idiomatic. I have avoided embellishment in order to preserve the austerity that defines Nielsen’s poetic voice.
This translation functions as an act of literary recuperation, offered in the hope of introducing Nielsen to a broader international readership and contributing to a reassessment of his place within European modernist poetics.
Nielsen’s poetry is marked by formal rigor, syntactic economy, and affective restraint. His thematic concerns encompass love, urban modernity, and the natural world. While biographical knowledge of his early death inevitably shapes interpretation, this translation resists reductive biographical determinism. Instead, it prioritizes close attention to the poem’s internal dynamics, particularly the tension between youthful immediacy and an implicit awareness of transience.
From a translator’s perspective, Danish presents distinct challenges. Nielsen’s diction is deceptively spare, and the affective force of his verse depends upon rhythmic precision and tonal modulation. His poetry resists ornamentation, and even minor lexical shifts can significantly recalibrate its emotional register. My approach therefore privileges semantic accuracy and tonal fidelity while allowing the English to remain idiomatic. I have avoided embellishment in order to preserve the austerity that defines Nielsen’s poetic voice.
This translation functions as an act of literary recuperation, offered in the hope of introducing Nielsen to a broader international readership and contributing to a reassessment of his place within European modernist poetics.
Morten Nielsen was a Danish poet born on January 3, 1922 in Aalborg (full name Karl Bent Lebrecht Morten Nielsen). He published a single poetry collection during his lifetime, Krigere uden Vaaben (Warriors Without Weapons; Gyldendal, 1943), a formally refined work that explores love, urban life, nature, and an ominous preoccupation with early death. Nielsen was active in the Danish resistance movement during the German occupation of Denmark in World War II. He died in Copenhagen on August 29, 1944 at the age of twenty-two, reportedly in a firearm accident. His poems have been published posthumously in expanding selections over the decades, first edited by Paul la Cour in 1945 and most recently by Thomas Bredsdorff in Samlede Digte (Collected Poems; Gyldendal, 2002).
Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian-Danish-American poet, writer, and humanitarian. She is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet, a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation nominee, a recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, and a grantee of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her books include Echoes in Exile (PRA Publishing, 2006), Seven Valleys of Love (PRA Publishing, 2008), The Poetry of Iranian Women (Reel Content, 2008), Spoon and Shrapnel (Daraja Press, 2024), and Jahan Malek Khatun: The Princess Poet of Fourteenth-Century Persia (Daraja Press, 2026). Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, PEN America, Writer’s Digest, PBS, and NPR. Her poems have been adapted into music, film, and visual art, and have been performed internationally, including at the Smithsonian National Museum, the Tribute World Trade Center, the United Nations World Food Programme, and the Canadian Parliament.
