Trivial Everyday Things: Selected Poems by Jorgen Leth, translated by Martin Aitken

Jørgen Leth was one of Denmark’s foremost modern poets and a leading international filmmaker. As a poet, he consistently employed unostentatious, matter-of-fact language and exhibits strong filmic qualities, often in the form of notes and stage directions. Poems and films: two sides of his extensive ouevre, intricately interwoven. Watch the poem. Read the film. Leth was doing intertextuality almost before they called it anything. Trivial Everyday Things is a collection of Leth’s poems spanning some forty years, selected and translated with exquisite restraint by Martin Aitken. It is, astonishingly, the first book-length collection of Leth’s poetry to have appeared in English.

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JØRGEN LETH (born 1937) was a Danish poet and film director who was considered a leading figure in experimental documentary filmmaking. He is known for films like the documentary A Sunday in Hell (1977) and the short film The Perfect Human (1968), which was later revived by Leth and Lars von Trier in the The Five Obstructions (2003). Leth wrote many volumes of poetry and nonfiction books. Trivial Everyday Things, translated by Martin Aitken, was his first book to appear in English. Leth was a longtime resident of Haiti. He died at the age of 88 on September 29, 2025, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

MARTIN AITKEN (born 1961) has translated the work of contemporary Scandinavian writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He was a finalist at the US National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love. His translation of Olga Ravn’s The Employees was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Aitken lives in Denmark.