”Jeg kunde for Længsel ej sove” Holger Drachmann og den erotiske rejse

Inspired by the spatial turn in literary criticism, this article seeks to combine a traditional biographical approach of the versatile oeuvre of the late 19th Century Danish poet, painter and bon vivant Holger Drachmann (1846-1908), with a space- oriented perspective. One of the key concepts of the Scandinavian literature of the latter half of the 19th Century, the era of the so-called Modern Breakthrough, was to promote a literature that dealt with contemporary social issues; at the same time, many of the artists who adhered to this program turned their backs on everyday routine, by frequently travelling and living abroad for long periods. Especially Southern Europe, and in particular Italy was a favorite destination. In Drachmann’s oeuvre too, the lure of the South is omnipresent, but his initial infatuation with Italy shifts radically between his first (1867) and second (1876) journey to the country, from an Orientalist notion of Italy as an eroticised Nirvana, to a horrendously degenerate country. This case study proposes a spatial reading of one of Drachmann’s still well-known romantic poems, ‘Sakuntala’ (1879), where the lure of travel, exoticism and erotic enticement are brought together in a poem, in which travel is a mere metaphor for the state of mind in which exotic landscapes morph into erotic spaces, while eroticist desire remains forever unfulfilled.