The Genius Who Ruined Eternity: A Conversation with Harald Voetmann

A young Tycho Brahe working whilst his tutor is sleeping, engraving by Sheila Terry.

Rosie Ellison-Balaam spoke to Harald Voetmann about Sublunar, his second book in a trilogy of historical novels that give a stark and unflinching depiction of the remarkable life of pre-modern thinkers. Sublunar follows Tycho Brahe, the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer, drawing on Brahe’s own writings and also the Meteorological Diary (1582-1597), written by assistants.

What initially attracted you to Brahe’s work and how did his meteorological diary inform the structure of the novel?

A couple of friends who run a theatre company asked me if I would write a play about Tycho Brahe. At first, I said no because I thought the theme was too close to my novel Awake about Pliny the Elder – in both cases, a man who wants to know everything. But then I began reading about Brahe and reading some of his works; I was intrigued by his scientific approach, which emerged from hermetic mysticism, alchemy and astrology. And when I found the Meteorological Diary, I knew I had to write about him. It consists of meteorological notes taken by Brahe’s assistants over a span of 15 years on the island of Ven. It is mostly about the weather, but occasionally there are glimpses of life in Brahe’s castle Uraniborg. That book gave me the form. But it had to be a novel, so I never wrote the play, I just ran with the idea. I wanted to follow the year, month by month, in the style of a Renaissance almanack. These almanacks often contained illustrations, poems, and stories in between the descriptions of the months of the agricultural year, so it gave room for different narrators and styles. Using the Meteorological Diary to look at life on Tycho Brahe’s island also made sense because the novel is set in the middle of the Little Ice Age, so it would also be a book about extreme weather. Though probably less extreme than what we are experiencing now.

Brahe has a duality in his approach to his study, on one hand he has a curiosity and desire to discover, while there is also an aggressive, masculine drive to conquer – while nature and the moon are continually referred to as female. Would you be able to discuss this drive that Brahe has?

He wrote a poem about taking the heavenly Muse, Urania, down from the sky and building the castle Uraniborg on his island for her to live in. The idea of nature and the heavenly bodies as goddesses was, of course, standard poetic imagery but it does express his quest for knowledge in a language that alludes to masculine sexual conquest and dominance. Brahe was a brilliant mind, one of the founders of modern science, but also a ruthless tyrant when it came to his assistants and serfs. Obsession mixed with power becomes despotism, and he is clearly obsessed. The peasants of Ven had been free before the king donated the island to Brahe, and Brahe made them work extremely hard as serfs, building his castle and paper mill and working his fields. I have heard that there are old families on Ven that still resent him. And it was his disregard for anything else but his work that finally drove him into exile, as he was too busy with scientific observations to honour his obligations to the new king, Christian IV.

The novel opens with a passage by Brahe to his twin brother who died at birth, it introduces his fascination with the eternal and its relationship to the physical. Could you discuss this focus on the eternal?

Yes, the opening text is my translation of his Latin elegy from 1572, the first text he published. The poem is written from his dead twin brother’s perspective and it describes how the brother now lives in Heaven among eternal gods, while Tycho must endure the painful life on Earth. It is the classic worldview that above the lunar sphere everything is eternal, unchanging and in perfect harmony, while under the Moon all is subject to change and decay. Tycho’s poem is full of longing for the unchanging, eternal Heavens, and this is what drives him to the study of the heavenly bodies. But that same year he observed the appearance of the Nova Stella, a supernova in the constellation of Cassiopeia, and he was the first to provide definite proof that this new light appeared beyond the lunar sphere.

If a new star can appear and then disappear in what is supposed to be the eternal regions, then the very idea of Eternity crashes. He was not keen to come to that conclusion, though, just like he struggled against the Heliocentric worldview that his own observations helped to establish. In my view, Brahe becomes a kind of tragic hero. He wants to uphold the old ideas from both Aristotle and the Bible, but everything he touches falls apart. Both the notion of unchanging Eternity and the notion of the Earth as the centre of the Universe is doomed because of his work.

The Planisphere of Tycho Brahe, engraving by Andreas Cellarius.

In opposition to this adoration of the eternal, is the body. You stated in an interview with Louisiana a few years ago:‘We squelch in these strange containers, and have to go with the needs that arise out of that’. There is a constant maintenance to the body, and particularly to Brahe’s nose (which he lost in a duel); could you speak about how you worked with perceptions of the body in Sublunar?

That is the other side of classical cosmology: beneath the moon, everything is changing, mortal and sinful. Brahe felt stuck in a world of dirt and I wanted to express that. I know it is a cliché to focus on all the grime and muck when trying to describe other times, but since the book is very much about his longing to rise above the earthly decay, I felt it needed to be there. For many readers, this seems to be the most noticeable aspect of the book, although there are a lot more descriptions of weather and landscape than of bodies and bodily functions. It only takes completely over in the chaotic final chapter. I felt I had to control myself a lot more to write this book than to write Awake because I wanted it to be atmospheric and lyrical and slow, and that did not come naturally for me.

Awake is also a lot louder than Sublunar, I think. I had to learn how to stop screaming all the time. But in the process, I decided that if I could maintain a more controlled tone throughout the main part of the book, I would allow myself to end it in a frenzy in the very last chapter. Which makes a peculiar composition, but it seemed necessary.

Sublunar is the second book of the trilogy. The first, Awake, explores the life of Pliny the Elder, while the final book, Visions and Temptations [forthcoming from Lolli Editions in 2024] introduces the eleventh-century German mystic Othlo of St. Emmeram.There is a similarity in each of these figures, as they share an inhuman will to conquer nature, to know everything. Yet Brahe offers a point of difference, as his discoveries changed the course of scientific thinking. Why did you choose to place these three characters together, and how does Brahe’s work fit with the others?

Yes, he is very different from Pliny and Othlo. Pliny was a wonderful writer but not a great thinker. Othlo’s autobiographical writings are interesting and occasionally heart-breaking, but Othlo spent his time worrying, hoping and imagining, burdened by mediaeval Christianity – not thinking or observing. Tycho mapped out a path for Johannes Kepler and others to follow that led to a completely new understanding of the Universe, but he also wanted to stay back in the old world, longing for Eternity. He was also very different from his contemporaries.

Sublunar deals with two other Danish noblemen as well, two of Tycho’s close friends, historical figures, that also experimented with alchemy and mysticism. In Sublunar they play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to his Hamlet. On the back cover of the Danish versions, it says: “The book is about three Danish noblemen from the 16th century, who wanted to solve the riddles of the Universe. Two of them were misguided, the third was Tycho Brahe.”

How do you describe someone who really was a genius – aside from the fact that he was tyrannical and brutal? I try to do it in several different ways in the book, but the funniest way was this indirect one, by describing his two unlucky friends who shared all his interests and all his mystical inclinations but lost all they had and never accomplished anything. They were more typical of their age than he was; compared to him they were failures who wrecked their own lives. But he was the genius who ruined Eternity.

Sublunar by Harald Voetmann, translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen, was published on 2 November 2023. Purchase your copy here.

For an interview about Awake, check out Translating Turned Into Writing: A Conversation with Harald Voetmann.

HARALD VOETMANN (b. 1978) was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize and has written novels, short stories, poetry, and a monograph on the Roman poet Sulpicia. He also translates classical Latin literature, notably Petronius and Juvenal. Awake is the first in his series of three historical novels: the second centres on the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, and the final book introduces the eleventh-century German mystic Othlo of St. Emmeram.

JOHANNE SORGENFRI OTTOSEN is a Danish translator. She currently lives in Copenhagen where she also works as an illustrator and literary editor.