Apart from writing, Blicher led an outdoor life—walking, shooting game, being with gypsies, farmers, and squires. This helped in forming his Jutland dialect and his observations helped in gathering source for his short stories.
His first volume of original poems appeared in 1814, and his subsequent poetry expressed both humour and a melancholy acceptance of life. In the “Prelude” to Trækfuglene (1838; “Birds of Passage”)his finest collection of poems, he presents a self-portrait of a caged bird longing for freedom. His best-known work, the novella Brudstykker af en landsbydegns dagbog (1824; trans. in The Diary of a Parish Clerk and Other Stories), is written in masterful prose and shows Blicher’s psychological insight into the Jutlanders’ characters, their life, rugged landscape and difficulties.
The Diary of a Parish Clerk and Other Stories (1996) includes seven of Blicher’s stories.
According to a literary review of the collection - We meet here, in these freshly-translated versions, the parish clerk, perhaps Blicher's most celebrated character study, whose life remorselessly unfolds from the high hopes of youth to tragic stoicism; the child Steen, learning of but not quite comprehending adult passion and sacrifice; the poetic fop boasting of Copenhagen fashions, teased and mocked by the village maiden; the wandering scholar, accidental witness to a tale of violence and derangement; the anguished judge, presiding helplessly over a mystifying miscarriage of justice; and the pastor, unable to give comfort to his closest friend.
In each story of this collection we are aware of a psychological complexity beyond the immediate grasp of those who act as recorders or participants: Blicher, with remarkable economy, suggests an unexplored hinterland of suffering and longing. His style is lucid, but his characters elude simple moral judgements.
He writes neither as sentimentalist nor as satirist. Beyond Blicher's psychological realism lies another hinterland. In the natural world which inspired both his prose and his poetry. His work is a powerful evocation of the Jutland landscape, with its bogs and brown moorland, its skylarks, its vipers, its stags, grouse and bittern, and its scattered population of peasants, farmers, poachers, gypsies, and huntsmen. A keen huntsman himself, Blicher uses many metaphors drawn from the sport, and his description of the duck-shoot in 'Alas! How Changed' is a small comic masterpiece. Writing in the Golden Age of Danish romanticism, he embodies the Romantic faith shared by his British and German contemporaries: he believed that we are formed by the landscape we inhabit.
He writes neither as sentimentalist nor as satirist. Beyond Blicher's psychological realism lies another hinterland. In the natural world which inspired both his prose and his poetry. His work is a powerful evocation of the Jutland landscape, with its bogs and brown moorland, its skylarks, its vipers, its stags, grouse and bittern, and its scattered population of peasants, farmers, poachers, gypsies, and huntsmen. A keen huntsman himself, Blicher uses many metaphors drawn from the sport, and his description of the duck-shoot in 'Alas! How Changed' is a small comic masterpiece. Writing in the Golden Age of Danish romanticism, he embodies the Romantic faith shared by his British and German contemporaries: he believed that we are formed by the landscape we inhabit.
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