Thanatos

Svein Jarvoll's polyphonic poem "Thanatos," published in 1984, allows the deceased to express themselves across different times, epochs, and styles. In a kind of Gryphiusian German, it proclaims man's mortality; it sings Cants de Mort à la Ausiàs March; it recounts Odysseus's meeting in the underworld with his mother Antikleia; and it makes brief visits to Anacreontic and aphoristic poetry. At times songlike, at times instructive, and at times juggling melancholic-obscene vocabulary, the poem navigates the life-saturated landscape of death, which will also be the setting for Jarvoll's 1988 baroque-postmodern novel "A Journey to Australia.".