Grooks by Piet Hein

FOREWORD
    I first met Piet Hein in charming Copenhagen many years ago. So it is not so surprising to me as it may be to others to find a book of short epigrams in poetic form written in English by a Dane.
    Piet Hein is a many-sided man. He began as a scientist. He has been called a poet, a city planner, a mathematician, and a philosopher. In response to a call for help from planners redesigning the central zone of Stockholm he invented a new geometric shape, the ‘super-ellipse’. As if all this were not enough he has devised some splendid table games.
    ‘Grooks’. Piet Hein told me that he invented the word. ‘Grooks’ is evidently a better name than ‘Illustrated Rhymed Epigrams’ which is what they are. I know little about drawing, and I am Inclined to suspect what is called ‘economy of line’: but I know a good deal about the writing of verse. I have even, though rarely and cautiously, attempted the rhymed epigram, which is a most hazardous enterprise. It must have wit, or wisdom—preferably both—compressed into a tiny space, yet perfectly intelligible. Your obscure ‘modern’ will write no memorable epigrams. Then it must have rhyme and it must scan. All this is formidable enough if you are writing in your own language. It is like (I imagine) being asked to do a graceful dance in corsets and a crinoline. To try it in someone else’s language you must be a hero: to bring it off you must be pretty good. Piet Hein gives himself another restriction—he avoids the long rolling line the master Belloc used:
    The accursed rule that rests on privilege
    And goes with women, champagne, and bridge:
    Broke, and Democracy resumed her reign
    Which goes with bridge, and women, and champagne.
    Hein is content with short lines:
    Who am I
    To deny
    That maybe
    God is me?
    Or—a great truth here:
    To be brave is to behave
    Bravely when your heart is faint
    So you can be really brave
    Only when you really ain’t.
    Or:
    If no thought
    your mind does visit
    make your speech
    not too explicit.
    Naturally, not every card in the pack is an ace, but there are lots of aces: and I am proud to welcome Piet Hein to this part of Anglo-Dania.
    A. P. Herbert

ATMOSPHERIC BIOGRAPHY:
    by way of an Introduction
    When we asked Piet Hein for some facts to constitute a short biography, his reply was to the effect that he didn’t believe in facts, he believed in atmosphere-that details were for people who don’t understand nuances. So we tried to put together an atmospheric biography from his many essays, and the numerous Interviews and articles that have appeared throughout the world.
    He started in the field of science, studying and working with things of his own at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. But ‘since science has to be misused for one of two things, the university career or technology’ and he felt that he was ‘more of a wild animal than a tame one’, Piet Hein entered the field of invention, based on scientific knowledge, but still writing essays, fables and poems on the side.
    For many years he was an acquaintance of Albert Einstein, who, intrigued by Piet Hein’s mathematically based but essentially simple puzzles, spread the word to universities and from there on to the general public. Norbert Wiener, the father of Cybernetics, the science behind electronic brains, wrote his last book God and Golem, Inc while staying with Piet Hein in his country house in Rungsted in Denmark, and dedicated the book to him.
    Recently Piet Hein was offered the post of general secretary to an international foundation which aimed to gather Nobel Laureates and other eminences from throughout the world and put them in close contact with each other. The post carried an annual salary (tax free) of 50,000 dollars. But Piet Hein remained unshaken-‘I am a composer; I am not a conductor’ were the words he used to get the record straight.
    When the Nazis invaded Denmark in 1940, Piet Hein, at that time president of the anti-Nazi union,