Grooks
Piet Hein
With the assistance of Jens Arup
© 1966 Piet Hein
Table of Contents
Foreword
Atmospheric Biography
Ars Brevis
Problems
The Eternal Twins
Consolation Grook
T. T. T.
Omniscience
Simply Assisting God
Hint and Suggestion
Mankind
Naive—
The Miracle of Spring
Dream Interpretation
Prayer
Circumscripture
Social Mechanism
A Toast
On Problems
An Ethical Grook
Lilac Time
The Double-Door Effect
Foretaste With Aftertaste
Majority Rule
Experts
Atomyriades
Road Sense
Our Noblest Achievement
The True Defence
Past Pluperfect
My Faith in Doctors
Defence Wanted
Getting Down to Fundamentals
Grook to Stimulate Gratitude
Missing Link
The Road to Wisdom
That Is the Question
Bridge or Tunnel?
Losing Face
A Psychological Tip
More Haste
A Word to the Wise
Meeting the Eye
If You Know What I Mean
The Case for Obscurity
Lest Fools Should Fail
Grook on Long-Winded Authors
Out of Time
An Ode to Modesty
The Cure for Exhaustion
I’d Like—
A Maxim for Vikings
Making Sense
A Moment’s Thought
Living Is—
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
FOREWORD
I first met Piet Hein in charming Copenhagen many years ago. So it is not so surprising to me as it may be to others to find a book of short epigrams in poetic form written in English by a Dane.
Piet Hein is a many-sided man. He began as a scientist. He has been called a poet, a city planner, a mathematician, and a philosopher. In response to a call for help from planners redesigning the central zone of Stockholm he invented a new geometric shape, the ‘super-ellipse’. As if all this were not enough he has devised some splendid table games.
‘Grooks’. Piet Hein told me that he invented the word. ‘Grooks’ is evidently a better name than ‘Illustrated Rhymed Epigrams’ which is what they are. I know little about drawing, and I am Inclined to suspect what is called ‘economy of line’: but I know a good deal about the writing of verse. I have even, though rarely and cautiously, attempted the rhymed epigram, which is a most hazardous enterprise. It must have wit, or wisdom—preferably both—compressed into a tiny space, yet perfectly intelligible. Your obscure ‘modern’ will write no memorable epigrams. Then it must have rhyme and it must scan. All this is formidable enough if you are writing in your own language. It is like (I imagine) being asked to do a graceful dance in corsets and a crinoline. To try it in someone else’s language you must be a hero: to bring it off you must be pretty good. Piet Hein gives himself another restriction—he avoids the long rolling line the master Belloc used:
The accursed rule that rests on privilege
And goes with women, champagne, and bridge:
Broke, and Democracy resumed her reign
Which goes with bridge, and women, and champagne.
Hein is content with short lines:
Who am I
To deny
That maybe
God is me?
Or—a great truth here:
To be brave is to behave
Bravely when your heart is faint
So you can be really brave
Only when you really ain’t.
Or:
If no thought
your mind does visit
make your speech
not too explicit.
Naturally, not every card in the pack is an ace, but there are lots of aces: and I am proud to welcome Piet Hein to this part of Anglo-Dania.
A. P. Herbert
ATMOSPHERIC BIOGRAPHY:
by way of an Introduction
When we asked Piet Hein for some facts to constitute a short biography, his reply was to the effect that he didn’t believe in facts, he believed in atmosphere-that details were for people who don’t understand nuances. So we tried to put together an atmospheric biography from his many essays, and the numerous Interviews and articles that have appeared throughout the world.
He started in the field of science, studying and working with things of his own at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. But ‘since science has to be misused for one of two things, the university career or technology’ and he felt that he was ‘more of a wild animal than a tame one’, Piet Hein entered the field of invention, based on scientific knowledge, but still writing essays, fables and poems on the side.
For many years he was an acquaintance of Albert Einstein, who, intrigued by Piet Hein’s mathematically based but essentially simple puzzles, spread the word to universities and from there on to the general public. Norbert Wiener, the father of Cybernetics, the science behind electronic brains, wrote his last book God and Golem, Inc while staying with Piet Hein in his country house in Rungsted in Denmark, and dedicated the book to him.
Recently Piet Hein was offered the post of general secretary to an international foundation which aimed to gather Nobel Laureates and other eminences from throughout the world and put them in close contact with each other. The post carried an annual salary (tax free) of 50,000 dollars. But Piet Hein remained unshaken-‘I am a composer; I am not a conductor’ were the words he used to get the record straight.
When the Nazis invaded Denmark in 1940, Piet Hein, at that time president of the anti-Nazi union, went underground and Invented the short aphoristic poem, the grook. With its double-edged meanings and its pithy charm, the grook seemed a fine way—possibly the only way—to say the sort of humanistic and democratic things that needed to be said. He was immediately claimed ‘a born classic’, a descendant from the writers of the Old Nordic Havamal poems. He has written over seven thousand of these to date, and has sold half a million copies of his grooks books in Denmark alone, a country with a population of less than 5 million people. Look at this in terms of the English-speaking world and you have a sale that is the equivalent of over 30 million copies.
According to Swedish and Norwegian reviews he is ‘the most quoted Scandinavian’, a kind of unofficial (the institution doesn’t exist) Scandinavian Poet Laureate, and has often been proposed for the Nobel Prize. When Grooks finally came to be published in America they became immensely popular and were hailed in collected form as being ‘a runaway bestseller’ by the New York Times. One of the many people who reacted with great appreciation to the grooks was Charles Chaplin, with whom Piet Hein developed a close understanding.
Piet Hein regards himself as ‘a characteristic specialist’ because he feels he applies the same kind of creative imagination to all the types of work he tackles, thus helping to bridge the artificial chasm between the humanities and the sciences.
He interprets the enormous response to his work not as a tribute to himself so much as a highly encouraging sign that people throughout the world are wide-awake to anything that bridges the gaps in our human universe.
The Publishers.
ARS BREVIS
There is
one art,
no more,
no less:
to do
all things
&
nbsp; with art-
lessness.
PROBLEMS
Problems worthy
of attack
prove their worth
by hitting back.
THE ETERNAL TWINS
Taking fun
as simply fun
and earnestness
in earnest
shows how thoroughly
thou none
of the two
discernest.
CONSOLATION GROOK
Losing one glove
is certainly painful.
but nothing
compared to the pain
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.
T. T. T.
Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T. T. T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.
OMNISCIENCE
Know what
thou knowest not
is in a sense
omniscience.
SIMPLY ASSISTING GOD
I am a humble artist
moulding my earthly clod,
adding my labour to nature’s,
simply assisting God.
Not that my effort is needed:
yet somehow, I understand,
my maker has willed it that I too should have
unmoulded clay in my hand.
HINT AND SUGGESTION
Admonitory grook addressed to youth.
The human spirit sublimates
the impulses it thwarts;
a healthy sex life mitigates
the lust for other sports.
MANKIND
Men, said the Devil,
are good to their brothers:
they don’t want to mend
their own ways, but each other’s.
NAIVE—
Naive you are
if you believe
life favours those
who aren’t naive.
THE MIRACLE OF SPRING
We glibly talk
of nature’s laws
but do things have
a natural cause?
Black earth turned into
yellow crocus
is undiluted
hocus-pocus.
DREAM INTERPRETATION
Everything’s either
concave or -vex,
so whatever you dream
will be something with sex.
PRAYER
to the sun above the clouds.
Sun that givest all things birth,
shine on everything on earth!
If that’s too much to demand.
shine at least on this our land.
If even that’s too much for thee,
shine at any rate on me.
CIRCUMSCRIPTURE
As Pastor X steps out of bed
he slips a neat disguise on:
that halo round his priestly head
is really his horizon.
SOCIAL MECHANISM
When people always
try to take
the very smallest
piece of cake
how can it also
always be
that that’s the one
that’s left for me?”
A TOAST
The soul may be a mere pretence,
the mind makes very little sense.
So let us value the appeal
of that which we can taste and feel.
ON PROBLEMS
Our choicest plans
have fallen through.
our airiest castles
tumbled over,
because of lines
we neatly drew
and later neatly
stumbled over.
AN ETHICAL GROOK
I see
and I hear
and I speak no evil;
I carry
no malice
within my breast;
yet quite without
wishing
a man to the Devil
one may be
permitted
to hope for the best.
LILAC TIME
The lilacs are flowering, sweet and sublime,
with a perfume that goes to the head;
and lovers meander in prose and rhyme,
trying to say—
for the thousandth time—
what’s easier done than said.
THE DOUBLE-DOOR EFFECT
Double doors are justified
because they’re comfortably wide.
Therefore you only half undo’em;
and therefore nothing can get through ‘em.
FORETASTE WITH AFTERTASTE
Corinna’s scanty evening dress
reveals her charms to an excess
which makes a fellow lust for less.
MAJORITY RULE
His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers,
and there were more of them than of the others.
That is. they constituted that minority
which formed the greater part of the majority.
Within the party, he was of the faction
that was supported by the greater fraction.
And in each group. within each group, he sought
the group that could command the most support.
The final group had finally elected
a triumvirate whom they all respected,
Now of these three, two had the final word,
because the two could overrule the third.
One of these two was relatively weak,
so one alone stood at the final peak.
He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair
which formed the most part of the three that were
elected by the most of those whose boast
it was to represent the most of most
of most of most of the entire state—
He never gave himself a moment’s slumber
but sought the welfare of the greatest number,
And all the people, everywhere they went,
knew to their cost exactly what it meant
to be dictated to by the majority,
But that meant nothing,—they were the minority.
EXPERTS
Experts have
their expert fun
ex cathedra
telling one
just how nothing
can be done.
ATOMYRIADES
Nature. it seems, is the popular name
for milliards and milliards and milliards
of particles playing their infinite game
of billiards and billiards and billiards.
ROAD SENSE
God save us, now they’re murdering
another winding road,
and another lovely countryside
will take another load
of pantechnicon and car and motorbike.
They’re busy making bigger roads,
and better roads and more,
so that people can discover
even faster than before
that everything is everywhere alike.
OUR NOBLEST ACHIEVEMENT
We must expect posterity
to view with some asperity
the marvels and the wonders
we’re passing on to it;
but it should change its attitude
to one of heartfelt gratitude
when thinking of the blunders
we didn’t quite commit.
THE TRUE DEFENCE
The only defence
that is more than pretence
is to act on the fact
that there is no defence.
; PAST PLUPERFECT
The past,—well, its just like
our Great-Aunt Laura.
who cannot or will not perceive
that though she is welcome,
and though we adore her.
yet now it is time to leave.
MY FAITH IN DOCTORS
My faith in doctors
in immense
just one thing spoils it
their pretence
of authorised
omniscience.
DEFENCE WANTED
In International
Consequences
the players must reckon
to reap what they’ve sown.
We have a defence
against other defences,
but what’s to defend us
against our own?
GETTING DOWN TO FUNDAMENTALS
It will steadily shrink,
our earthly abode,
until antipode stands
upon antipode.
Then, soles together,
the planet gone,
we’ll know the ground
that we rest upon.
GROOK TO STIMULATE GRATITUDE
in sour rationalists.
As things so
very often are
intelligence
won’t get you far.
So be glad
you’ve got more sense
than you’ve got
intelligence.
MISSING LINK