Andre Bjerke's "Funny Verses" is one of Norway's most popular books of poetry and nursery rhymes for children. The book is a compilation of Bjerkes previous works For fun (1956) and More fun (1957). His poems are characterized by nonsensical playfulness, and humorous play on words.
André Bjerke, Svein Nyhus (ill.)
André Bjerke (1918-1985) was born in Oslo. He made his debut with a collection of poetry, Singing Earth. He was a versatile author, who has not let any genre escape his work. His essays and non-fiction often dealt with linguistic matters, and Bjerke had a column in the journal “Ordet” (“The Word”). Under the pseudonym Bernhard Borge, he wrote a number of crime novels, one of them Lake of the Dead from 1942 has been adapted into a movie.
Bjerke’s reinterpretations include drama (Shakespeare, Molière, Goethe, Racine), lyricism (Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allen Poe) and prose (Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Heine, Karen Blixen).
