MEETINGS WITH THE WRITER SUZANNE BROEGGER
The meetings with the well-known Danish writer, poet, and columnist that were held in Warsaw and Lodz were connected with the promotion of her novel The Jade Cat and the artistic book Hours, designed by Barbara Domagala-Wilson, a Polish painter living in Denmark. The latter work arose from the shared inspiration of the writer's texts and the visions of the painter. A series of paintings by Barbara Domagala-Wilson with the same title is now being presented as part of the program Poles among the Danes. Presence.
The novel The Jade Cat was first published in 1997 and is now being published on the Polish market by the Jacek Santorski & Co. Publishing House. The novel poses a literary description of the history of the author's family. The Polish reader may find interesting the fact that the author's great-grandparents - the Jewish Loevin family - came from Torun.
Suzanne Broegger, writer, poet, essayist, was born in 1944 in Copenhagen. A characteristic feature of her creative work in the formal realm is its proclivity to exceed the boundaries of traditional literary genres. In terms of topic, in turn, her work exhibits a type of biographism, something the writer defines as "fictionalizing one's own life". A further element of her writing is that of sexuality and erotica. Initially Broegger wrote travelogues (i.a., from the Middle East, where she lived as a child, and from the countries of the Soviet Union) and conducted interviews. She is the author of poems and novels (some 20 positions) and is well-known and recognized as an essayist who can places a strongly individual mark on the topics she takes up, ones particularly from the realm of cultural criticism and women's issues. She debuted in 1973 with a work entitled Fri os fra kaerligheden (Free us from love), whose topic concerns the problem of liberating oneself from the "illusion of that 'one and only', for monogamy leads to the loss of respect for oneself and to the disintegration of individuality". In the 1970s Broegger's work was classified within women's literature, although it was distinctly different from the creative work of other women-writers of that genre, particularly in that its sources of inspiration were deeper than those of the struggle for gender equality, and in the fact that it displayed no interest in participation in organized social movements (ones such as Denmark's "roede stroemper"). Moreover, in time Broegger's work became ever more oriented around existential issues. Her subsequent works include the iconoclastic Cråme fraiche in 1978, the novel inspired by Henry Miller Ja (Yes) 1984, and Transparence, 1993 - these form an autobiographical trilogy. In 1997 Jadekatten (The Jade Cat) was published, a literary description of the history of her own family that is a study into the collapse of her family. The Polish reader may be interested by the fact that her great-grandparents - Jews by the name of Loevin - were from Torun. Broegger is also the author of children's books - Min verden i en noeddeskal (My world in a nut shell) 1991, Paradisets mave (In the belly of paradise) 1993 - and of plays, among them Efter orgiet (After the orgy) 1992, which was performed in the Royal Theater in Copenhagen and in the Swedish Dramaten. The play won both great acclaim as well as the criticism of progressivist circle, which accused the author of having made an about-face to traditional bourgeois morality. Suzanne Broegger's works have been translated into 20 languages. In Poland, however, they have yet to be published. One exception is After the orgy, whose translation was published in Dialog (as translated by Mariusz Kalinowski and Boguslawa Sochanska).