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Denmark | ‘The Orb,’ by Klaus Rifbjerg (chapter 1)

By Thom Satterlee ⋅ October 5, 2008
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Not distracted by the start of World War II two weeks prior, patent officers in the Third Reich on 14 Sept 1939 granted their approval for a blister that could be inset near a ball’s laces to facilitate inflation. All one might need to know about the history of the football and assorted equipment is available at the “Football and Technology” section of Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt. (© DPMA)

Notes on translation

As co-editor, I had the responsibility of researching Scandinavian literature about soccer—this because I happen to speak Danish and have translated poetry from that language. One of the most fruitful sources I discovered was an anthology that had been published a couple of years before we began work on our book. Fodbold! Forfattere om Fænomenet Fodbold (Football! Writers on the Phenomenon of Football) gathers many of the “standard” pieces of soccer literature—works by Albert Camus, Günter Grass, Umberto Eco, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre and others—along with several originally written in Danish and less well-known. This included Klaus Rifbjerg’s poem “Kuglen.”

My fondness for Rifbjerg’s poem was immediate. I loved the simple language he used and the universal story he told of a group of boys kicking a ball in early spring. The speaker of the poem sounds nostalgic with, at alternate times, hints of humor and foreboding. The ball has grown comically misshaped. The boys, although they are eager to play, cannot entirely forget their place in history: “It was March and there was war.” I hoped to capture this mixture of tones in my translation.

As I remember it, the translation process went smoothly. It helped that I too have played with a ball like the one described in Rifbjerg’s poem. I could picture the stitches coming loose and the bladder beginning to show—“A blister, pink, protruded / from between the stitches”—because one winter Saturday in Canton, Georgia, I participated in a kick-around with just such a ball. Like the narrator in Rifbjerg’s poem, I recall how “… our spirits sank / Because if it burst everything was over.”

Rifbjerg

The only significant change that I made between drafts of the translation involved the title word, kuglen. In my earliest versions I used the word “sphere” to describe the misshaped ball. I later changed the title to “orb” for two reasons. First, I think “orb” has stronger connotations of lopsidedness than “sphere,” even if neither shape is perfectly round. Second, “orb” sounded funnier to my ear; I reasoned that such a word would stand a better chance of lasting as the boys’ nickname for their ball.

One of the goals that the anthology editors set for ourselves was to find less well-known works of literature from less commonly spoken languages and to present them for the first time in English translation. I am happy that Rifbjerg’s poem is now available to our readers.

Additional resources in Danish

Danish-speakers might entertain themselves with further selections from the Fodbold! anthology:

1. Per Olov Enquist, “The Two Little Players: Allan Simonsen and Diego Maradona, Mexico 1986”

Description | Enquist, a Swedish novelist, ruminates on the coincidence of these two slightly built football players both playing for the same club (Barcelona) and each being in a different place in his career: Simonsen is nearing retirement; Maradona is becoming world-famous. The tone is at times humorous, but by and large Enquist is thinking about the bigger issues involved in human frailty. What does it mean to play a physical sport and be so small? What does it mean, psychologically, to see one’s career in decline? What does it mean and what dangers come one’s way if one falls victim to pride?

Fodbold!

Sample | “And here comes little Allan Simonsen, 33 years old and one of the 22 in the Danish strip. He comes running, and you wouldn’t think he could even play football. So thin, so light. I have a daughter who plays women’s football every now and then, and if the two of them were to meet each other on the field I would insist that she not tackle Allan Simonsen too hard; it would be unfair, an assault on someone smaller.”

2. Tzvetan Todorov, “A Doubtful Career”

Description | Todorov’s brief essay reflects on the Sofia of his youth and the connection between football and politics in postwar, communist Bulgaria.

Sample | “Sport, especially football, was a springboard to a spontaneous and healthy passion for a team, a city, or a country, as over and against outsiders. And that was the trick: every patriotism, local or national, could be used by the regime. … At the stadiums on Sundays you could love and hate as much as you wanted, and you’d come home unharmed.”

3. Peter Poulsen, “The Artistic Instinct: Fragmented Memories of Pelé and Others”

Description | A Danish novelist and poet, Poulsen attended, in the 1950s, the first match between a Danish and Brazilian team in Copenhagen. Later he lived in Brazil and regularly attended Santos matches. He creates a memoir of two cultures meeting and also addresses the question of memory as a private preserve. Able to recall only particular moments from the matches, some of which were never televised, he says, “Maybe Pelé and the others have forgotten the game; I may be the only one who carries a bit of it forward in the world, just as there are others who save other moments from other games.”

Sample | Concerning a game between Santos and Palmeiras after the 1970 World Cup: “From TV I knew [Pelé] had divine powers, but here at Pacaembu [the Palmeiras stadium] where you can look across the entire field is where I first understood where his supremacy lay. The best way to describe it is as a certain balance, a movement, and an instinct that allowed him to find himself in the right place on the field at the right moment. This not-very-tall, compactly built man was always in the optimal position when he received the ball and was prepared to take his next move at just the second when his opponents were off-balance. Even though he was fast, lightning fast, his movements never seemed forced simply because he had foreseen the situation he now found himself in, what would happen moments later. He was simply a little further ahead in the game than the others on the field, including his teammates.”

4. Per Høyer Hansen, “An Epitaph for Innocence: On Violence as a Scourge and Its Effects”

Description | Hansen, a Danish journalist who died in 2001, considers the Heysel tragedy a turning point away from hooliganism.

Sample | “The stadium was Heysel, it was 7:25 p.m. on Wednesday, May 29, 1985. … The stands were full, and 50 minutes later the European Cup championship was to be played between Juventus and Liverpool. … The moral question was … could you play soccer on a cemetery?

“Along with the authorities, including the mayor of Brussels, UEFA had to weigh the two alternatives and decide which was more dangerous: to play the game with rebellious spectators behind a human wall of police, or to send 58,000 people into the city without giving them what they’d paid for at great expense. …

“In the dressing rooms the two teams sat without the desire to play. They didn’t have precise details, but of course they knew about the unrest, that something very unusual had happened. Liverpool reserve Ian Mølby later said that the players were well aware that there’d been talk of deaths, because some of the dead had been carried past the open locker room and into an empty dressing room.”

Tags: Allan Simonsen, Bulgaria, Denmark, Diego Maradona, fodbold, Frederik Stjernfelt, Heysel, Klaus Rifbjerg, Pelé, Per Høyer Hansen, Per Olov Enquist, Peter Christensen, Peter Poulsen, Scandinavia, Thom Satterlee, translation, Tzvetan Todorov