“Resurgam in the Delta Pavonis System” by Dag T. Straumsvåg

December 5, 2022Posted by

Dag T. Straumsvåg

RESURGAM IN THE DELTA PAVONIS SYSTEM

Most inventions are inspired by things in nature. Think of the wheel. Or the computer. The computer is not unlike the human brain, complex and frail, a bearer of bad tidings: “A fatal error has been detected in Station C.” Station C is the base-camp for a group of archaeologists. For three years they have been looking for signs of intelligent life in the Mantell Sector, North Nekhebet, Resurgam in the Delta Pavonis System. A cold and relentless wind blows across the dry plains. The only things the three-day hurricane didn’t destroy were an iron shovel and the ship’s log. I’koor, the last survivor from Station C, writes: “This expedition has been a failure from day one. There wasn’t any sign of intelligent life out here until we arrived, and now I’m going to hit myself over the head with this shovel.”
 
 
Translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hedin and the author
 

—from Rattle #77, Fall 2022
Tribute to Translation

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Dag T. Straumsvåg was born in 1964 in Kristiansund, a city on the sparsely populated coastline of western Norway and raised in the nearby village of Tingvoll. He is the author and translator of seven books of poetry, and his work has appeared in a wide range of journals in Norway, Canada, and the United States. | Robert Hedin: “I have been translating the prose poems of Dag T. Straumsvåg for more than twenty years. What attracted me to his poems in the first place was their quirky, quixotic nature. As seen in ‘Resurgam in the Delta Pavonis System,’ his work is lively, idiosyncratic, and, above all, endlessly inventive—brief, jazz-like riffs that often voyage off the map into worlds where nothing is as it seems. The result is work that is filled with the playful joys of discovery, of the imagination, the immemorial spirit of the creative journey itself.” (web)

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