This was Gustaf Munch-Petersen’s first poetry collection, published in 1932 under the Danish title “nøgne menneske”.
Just twenty years old at the time it was published, Munch-Petersen had even written some of these poems while still attending high school.
The collection enjoyed moderate success although critics at the time were outraged by his complete disregard for grammar and punctuation – one might say, in hindsight, that he was simply too far ahead of his time for the literary establishment of the day.
The collection describes a young man (the author himself) who is in effect a rebel without a cause. He wants to change something but is not yet entirely
aware of what that might be. The passion, however, is undeniable.
I translated Gustaf Munch-Petersen’s collected poems back in early 2013 as a personal tribute, since his poetry has meant a lot to me, and it wasn’t available in English at the time.
The current version of the translations are from 2017, and the file is 69 pages long and contains 51 poems.