The Roads Have Come to an End Now: Selected and Last Poems of Rolf Jacobsen

Rolf Jacobsen, Robert Bly, Roger Greenwald, Robert Hedin, trans.

Rolf Jacobsen was one of Europe’s most prominent poets. This bilingual collection spans his entire career and includes, for the first time in English, his final poems. An early champion of modernism to Norwegian poetry, Jacobsen writes of smokestacks, billboards, and telephone wires alongside his beloved praises of nature and its small, forgotten things.

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ISBN: 9781556591655

Format: Paperback

Odda

The smoke rises from the earth
and climbs with its ropes into the sky
and hangs them there like antennae
that signal day and night:

We greet you, all volcanoes on earth:
Vesuvius, Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Essen.
The fire that feeds on the shadows,
that spreads through the dark from land to land,
sends its smoke into the sky
here and there:
Vesuvius, Pittsburgh, Essen.
—Let us stand
as columns of clouds in the day,
at night as fiery pillars
over Israel.

About the Author

Rolf Jacobsen (1907–1994) grew up near Oslo, Norway, where he worked as a journalist and newspaper editor. His poetry has been translated into nearly thirty languages. A member of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature, he received the Norwegian Critics Prize, the Grand Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy, and the Aschehoug Prize.

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About the Translator

Robert Bly was born in Madison, Minnesota, and educated at St. Olaf College, Harvard, and the University of Iowa. One of the most influential poets, translators, editors, and publishers of his generation, he is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Light Around the Body, Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems, and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. He has also published three books of commentary on cultural …

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About the Translator

Roger Greenwald grew up in New York, where he attended the City College and the St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery Poetry Project workshop. With Robert Bly and Robert Hedin, he co-translated The Roads Have Come to an End Now: Selected and Last Poems of Rolf Jacobsen. He has published two books of poetry, Connecting Flight and Slow Mountain Train, and has won two CBC Literary Prizes and the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize. He has also published many award-winning books of poetry in …

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About the Translator

Robert Hedin was born in 1949 in Minnesota. He is the author, translator, and editor of nearly two dozen books of poetry and prose, including At the Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations. Awards for his work include three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, and a McKnight Artist Fellowship. He has taught at Sheldon Jackson College, the Anchorage and Fairbanks campuses of the University of Alaska, the University of Minnesota, …

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