"Sorrow Acre" by Isak Dinesen

Sorrow Acre

By Stephen Morrissey

Many things influence a poet's development, for instance what we read can enlarge our concept of ourselves as poets as well as our idea of what we can do in poetry. One of these influences for me occurred around 1970 when I read a short story entitled “Sorrow Acre" by the Danish author Isak Dinesen. Dinesen's story was important to me for two reasons: first, it showed me the importance of mythology and archetypes as a way to critique literature; second, it introduced me to the "Garden Myth" and this was significant for me at a personal level as well as influencing  the poetry I was writing. This myth expresses a psychological truth, it is about how we lose the unself-conscious innocence of childhood. As we get older we "fall from innocence" into the world of self-consciousness. My father's death when I was six years old introduced me to the world of grief, loss, and regret. I knew at an early age that life is finite, that death takes away from us people we love. Indeed, we all suffer loss in some form and eventually leave the idyllic world of innocence.  

The Garden Myth is a major theme found in the work of many poets and writers, it is found in the work of a poet I was reading at the same time I read Isak Dinensen's short story; this is William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Blake perceived that our life's journey includes both the fall from innocence and later the effort to find a higher innocence, a meaningful existence

Years ago, Isak Dinesen's “Sorrow Acre" was important to me. In the 1990s I wrote "The Shadow Trilogy" (The Compass, 1993; The Yoni Rocks, 1995; The Mystic Beast, 1997) which was influenced by C.G. Jung's concept of the human "shadow", that dark fallen side of our inner being that we either keep hidden or we project onto other people. However, preceding my interest in Jungian psychology was Isak Dinesen's short story.

This is where Élizabeth Robert enters this essay with her wonderful translation of The Mystic Beast as La bête mystique (Editions Tryptique, Montreal, 2004). Now Élizabeth knows something more of what was "going on in my mind" that influenced the text that she translated in the early 2000s.

23 04 2014

Note: I wrote this for a panel discussion on "Dans la Tête de L'auteur/ In the Mind of the Writer", a panel discussion presented by the ATTLC-LTAC, held on April 23, 2014 here in Montreal. I was invited by Élizabeth Robert, my friend and translator: "Three authors pen short texts, and their translators “translate” the imagined text, sight unseen. Trois auteurs écrivent un court texte. Leur traducteur respectif produisent simultanément la traduction de ce qu'ils pensent être les textes en question." This (above) was my text; unfortunately, I was ill that evening and, with regrets, missed the event.