Inger Christensen

Butterfly Valley: A Requiem Inger Christensen

With parallel texts in Danish and English. 'Butterfly Valley' is a tour de force, exploring the major themes of life, love, death and art. The form is simple yet complex, a sequence of fifteen sonnets building to a final sonnet of extraordinary power composed of lines taken from the preceding fourteen sonnets in the sequence. Life, love, art, all are transient like the butterfly yet beautiful, even in their ephemerality. The translator Susanna Nied is a former instructor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University in California. Her translation of Inger Christensens Alphabet won the 1982 ASF/PEN Translation Prize.