Tityrus | by Duncan Wiese
Tityrus | by Duncan Wiese
Translated from Danish by Max Minden Ribeiro and Sam Riviere
Duncan Wiese updates the pastoral for the 21st century. In Tityrus, the countryside offers a less than ideal lifestyle for a young shepherd
The ideals of simple country living have captivated poets for a crow’s age. But in the countryside that Tityrus knows, the beech trees tower like skyscrapers, mice wrestle each other, and the nearby island is infected by swarms of gulls. The forest is a source of energy, but also the home of a behemoth transformer substation and where a little boy has drowned. The shepherds are prescribed Ritalin, slip in the mud, cry without knowing why, and sustain themselves on mini pizza rolls.
Wiese’s poetry is as hilarious as it is gentle, moving gracefully between the everyday and the profound. Building with the narrative quality of a novel, Tityrus is both an elegy to a natural world that has long been overindustrialised, and a love letter to all that remains.
Publication 25 May 2023
Description 185 × 120 mm, 96 pages, Softcover Original
ISBN 978-1-915267-15-3
Design Studio Ard
View AI sheet
Read excerpted poems in The Cardiff Review and Anthropocene Poetry
Listen to Liam Bishop’s interview with Duncan Wiese on the podcast Rippling Pages
DUNCAN WIESE (b. 1991) is a Danish poet and a graduate of the Danish Academy of Creative Writing, where he now teaches. He is the author of two poetry books, and his debut, Tityrus, was shortlisted for the prestigious Bodil and Jørgen Munch-Christensen Prize and the Bogforum Prize for New Writing. He lives in Funen.
MAX MINDEN RIBEIRO is a literary translator and academic philosopher. His recent publications include Pelle Hvenegaard’s Dear Zoe Ukhona and Finn Juhl: Life, Work, World by Christian Bundegaard. He lives in Copenhagen.
SAM RIVIERE is the author of three poetry books: 81 Austerities, Kim Kardashian's Marriage, and After Fame, and most recently a novel, Dead Souls (2021).
Praise for Tityrus
Duncan Wiese’s subversive pastoral Tityrus shows how fraught life has become for the Arcadian shepherds among us. Refusing to sugarcoat Tityrus’s experience of our fetid and worn-out world, Wiese uncovers the daily pathos and absurdities of contemporary life. This spare yet encompassing verse narrative, deftly translated by Max Minden Ribeiro and Sam Riviere, provides an insightful and haunting portrait of our time
– Denise Newman
I lost myself in this bittersweet sequence and it already feels like a place I’ve visited, a life I stowed-away in beyond the poems. A voice so compulsively readable, both tersely clear and compellingly mysterious that it gets into your head and starts narrating your own life
– Luke Kennard
A pastoral where the shepherd not only grazes his sheep, but also himself, the human – where human and animal overlap in a current of medicine, food, myth, alcohol – and love. So right on time is Tityrus
– Ursula Andkjær Olsen
Tityrus reduces the distance between antiquity and the present moment in a single leap across the buck enclosure, and pastoral life becomes a matter of a delicate, organic-minded consciousness, a discussion of agricultural ethics and its capitalist principles, a hope for the future and a sensitive, youthful emotional life
– ATLAS
Surprising, funny, utterly contemporary
– Politiken
Tityrus is something as unusual as pastoral poetry – a genre borrowed from the Roman poet Virgil. Not only is it paradoxical that Wiese, by so clearly following a historical literary tradition, has succeeded in creating a distinct voice entirely his own. With this double grip, he also shows that one does not arise out of nothing; one does not become something all by oneself
– Bogforum Prize for New Writing Jury