Grook

Last updated

A grook (Danish : gruk) is a form of short aphoristic poem or rhyming aphorism created by the Danish poet, designer, inventor, and scientist Piet Hein. He wrote over 7,000 of them from 1939 until his death in 1996, mostly in Danish [2] . The grooks are multi-faceted and characterized by irony, paradox, brevity, precise use of language, rhythm and rhyme, and an often satiric nature. Many of the grooks have an accompanying line drawing, which provides additional meaning. This webpage [3] contains many volumes of gruks in Danish. There is also a CD, in which Piet Hein reads some gruks.

Contents

Some say that the name "gruk" is short for "grin & suk" (lit. 'laugh & sigh'), but Piet Hein said he felt that the word had come out of thin air. The contemporary "Hunden Grog" ("Grog the Dog") stories by fellow cartoonist Storm P. have, in public opinion, been regarded as an inspiration.

A Grook as passive resistance

Piet Hein was president of the Anti-Nazi Union when the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940. [5] He became an underground passive resister. He found a way to encourage resistance through the use of poems, which he called "gruks" ("grooks" in English), and began publishing them in the daily newspaper " Politiken " under the pseudonym "Kumbel Kumbell" [7] . His most famous one, Consolation Grook [9] , appears to the right in both Danish and English. The Germans, censoring everything that was published, did not understand the grook and let it be published. But the Danes understood its meaning, and it began appearing as graffiti throughout Denmark, for it gave the Danes courage.

To understand the grook, consider as the two gloves your freedom and your patriotism. The Nazi invasion took away the first glove. Don't throw away the other by collaborating with the Germans because that betrayal will be very painful when you get back your freedom someday.

Grooks in English

Beginning in the 1960s, seven volumes of English translations of 53 grooks each were published and became popular in the U.S. counterculture of the time: Grooks (1966), [10] Grooks 2 (1968), [11] Grooks 3 (1970), [12] Grooks 4 (1972), [13] Grooks 5 (1973), [14] Grooks VI (1978), [15] and Grooks VII (1984). [16]

The following books of grooks are available on this subpage [17] of the website "Peit Hein".
Collected Grooks I [8]
Collected Grooks II [18]
Runaway Runes: Short Grooks I [19]
Viking Vistas: Short Grooks II [20]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isaac Asimov</span> American writer and biochemist (1920–1992)

Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Piet Hein (scientist)</span> Danish polymath (1905–1996)

Piet Hein was a Danish polymath, often writing under the Old Norse pseudonym Kumbel, meaning "tombstone". His short poems, known as gruks or grooks, first started to appear in the daily newspaper Politiken shortly after the German occupation of Denmark in April 1940 under the pseudonym "Kumbel Kumbell". He also invented the Soma cube and the board game Hex.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jens Peter Jacobsen</span> Danish writer

Jens Peter Jacobsen was a Danish novelist, poet, and scientist, in Denmark often just written as "J. P. Jacobsen". He began the naturalist movement in Danish literature and was a part of the Modern Breakthrough.

Jotun John Piet Hein is Professor of Bioinformatics at the Department of Statistics of the University of Oxford and a professorial fellow of University College, Oxford. Hein was previously Director of the Bioinformatics Research Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Lucien Stryk was an American poet, translator of Buddhist literature and Zen poetry, and former English professor at Northern Illinois University (NIU).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ove Arup</span> English engineer (1895–1988)

Sir Ove Nyquist Arup, CBE, MICE, MIStructE, FCIOB was an English engineer who founded Arup Group Limited, a multinational corporation that offers engineering, design, planning, project management, and consulting services for building systems. Ove Arup is considered to be among the foremost architectural structural engineers of his time.

Descriptions of the <i>Jyllands-Posten</i> Muhammad cartoons

Descriptions of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons include explanations for Danish cultural references as well as English translations of Danish and Persian captions; these cartoons became the center of widespread controversy upon their publication in September 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Superegg</span> Special type of superellipsoid

In geometry, a superegg is a solid of revolution obtained by rotating an elongated superellipse with exponent greater than 2 around its longest axis. It is a special case of superellipsoid.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jens Arup Seip</span> Norwegian historian

Jens Lauritz Arup Seip was a Norwegian historian originally trained as a medieval historian, but stood out as the strongest of his time in interpreting Norwegian political history in the 1800s, particularly known for having created the term "embedsmannsstaten". He was a professor at the University of Oslo from 1952 to 1975, he specialized in political history and the history of ideas. He was married to fellow historian Anne-Lise Seip. Seip's use of the Norwegian language and his writing style which numerous historians have described as brilliant, and often tried emulating. Seip was included among the 16 authors of " The Norwegian literary canon" from 1900 to 1960 and 2nd among 20 authors in a ranking of nonfiction writers conducted by Dagbladet in 2008. Seip received an honorary doctorate at the University of Bergen from 1975.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jens Albinus</span> Danish actor and director

Jens Albinus is a Danish actor and director.

This is a list of works by the science fiction author Frank Herbert.

Christian Kølle was a Norwegian educator and theologian known for his at-the-time innovative views on written Norwegian that preceded many of the later language reforms.

Events from the year 1996 in Denmark.

<i>The Oxford Ibsen</i>

The Oxford Ibsen is a book series containing the most comprehensive English translations of the noted playwright Henrik Ibsen's collected works, edited by James Walter McFarlane (1920–1999) and published between 1960 and 1977. It is an important edition as the releases of Ibsen's plays are often translated into third languages through The Oxford Ibsen, rather than from the original Norwegian or Danish source texts. It also contains some drafts and preparations, and each play has a foreword that informs about first performances on stage, interpretation and reception. The Oxford series is still missing some of Ibsen's articles, reviews, speeches, correspondence, and poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jussi Adler-Olsen</span> Danish crime fiction writer

Carl Valdemar Jussi Henry Adler-Olsen is a Danish crime fiction writer, a publisher, editor, and entrepreneur, best known for his Department Q series. He made his debut as a nonfiction writer in 1984, and as a fiction writer in 1997.

The phonology of Danish is similar to that of the other closely related Scandinavian languages, Swedish and Norwegian, but it also has distinct features setting it apart. For example, Danish has a suprasegmental feature known as stød which is a kind of laryngeal phonation that is used phonemically. It also exhibits extensive lenition of plosives, which is noticeably more common than in the neighboring languages. Because of these and a few other features, spoken Danish can be challenging for Norwegians and Swedes to understand without training, although they can easily read written Danish.

Events from the year 1876 in Denmark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janus Djurhuus</span> Faroese poet

Jens Hendrik Oliver Djurhuus, called Janus Djurhuus, was the first modern Faroese poet. He and his younger brother Hans Andreas Djurhuus, also a poet, are called the Áarstova brothers after the house where they grew up.

Piet Hein Hoebens was a Dutch journalist, skeptic, and critic of parapsychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elisabeth Reiss</span> Norwegian pianist and cabaret performer (1902–1970)

Aasta Elisabeth Reiss was a Norwegian pianist and cabaret performer. She was the daughter of the lawyer, composer, and musicologist Georg Reiss and the sister of the actor Thorleif Reiss.

References

  1. ↑ "Database of Gruks". piethein.com.
  2. ↑ This webpage [1] is a database of over 7,000 gruks by Piet Hein, in Danish. The page says (in Danish) that you can freely search it and have them emailed directly to you.
  3. ↑ "Books in Danish". piethein.com.
  4. ↑ Hicks, Jim (14 October 1966). "A Poet with a Slide Rule: Piet Hein Bestrides Art and Science". Life. 51 (16): 55–66. ISSN   0024-3019.
  5. ↑ A long article in Life Magazine [4] talks about Piet Hein's becoming a passive resister beginning on page 63. It corroborates what is said here. At the time, he thought there would be 4-5 grooks, not the ~7,000 that he later wrote. He says that the word "gruk" came to him out of empty air.
  6. ↑ piethein.com Archived 4 August 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ↑ "Here is the reason why: Piet is the Dutch form of the name Peter or Petrus, which means rock, stone, and Hein is a way of spelling 'hen', the old Danish word for a whetstone. 'Kumbel', or 'kumbl' as it strictly speaking should be written, also means stone, though more a grave monument. In other words, Piet Hein, or Stone Stone can, in a way, be translated by Kumbel Kumbel. He originally wrote the second word with two Ls, also later the signature became just Kumbel – the name he is at least as well known by as his own." [6]
  8. 1 2 Hein, Piet (January 1, 2002). Hugo Piet Hein (ed.). Collected Grooks I (2 ed.). Borgen. ISBN   87-21-01859-6.
  9. ↑ Consolation Grook is the fourth grook in Collected Grooks I. [8]
  10. ↑ Hein, Piet (November 15, 1966). Grooks. Translated by Jens Arup. The MIT Press. ISBN   978-0262580076.
  11. ↑ Hein, Piet (January 1, 1968). Grooks 2. Translated by Jens Arup. Doubleday. ISBN   978-8741810942.
  12. ↑ Hein, Piet (January 1, 1970). Grooks 3. Translated by Jens Arup. Doubleday. ISBN   978-0773610040.
  13. ↑ Hein, Piet (January 1, 1972). Grooks 4. Translated by Jens Arup. Doubleday. ISBN   978-0385006590.
  14. ↑ Hein, Piet (January 1, 1973). Grooks 5. Translated by Jens Arup. Doubleday. ISBN   9780385029681.
  15. ↑ Hein, Piet (January 1, 1978). Grooks VI. Translated by Jens Arup. Borgen's Pocketbooks. ISBN   978-8741846811.
  16. ↑ Hein, Piet (January 1, 1984). Grooks VII. Translated by Jens Arup. Borgen's Pocketbooks. ISBN   978-8741871639.
  17. ↑ "Books in other languages". piethein.com. Retrieved 2023-07-04.
  18. ↑ Hein, Piet (January 1, 2002). Hugo Piet Hein (ed.). Collected Grooks II (2 ed.). Borgen. ISBN   87-21-01861-8.
  19. ↑ Hein, Piet (January 1, 1968). Jens Arup (ed.). Runaway Runes: Short Grooks I. Borgen. ISBN   87-418-2620-5.
  20. ↑ Hein, Piet (January 1, 1968). Jens Arup (ed.). Viking Vistas: Short Grooks II. Borgen. ISBN   87-418-5639-2.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.