[Not here]
Not hereI hear itno one hears itthe sound fordarknesscan be somany wordsopen the windoware you madeof words[Inte här]Inte härhör jag detingen hör detljudet förmörkerkan vara såmånga ordöppna fönstretär du gjordav ord
Feature Date
- August 19, 2024
Series
- Translation, What Sparks Poetry
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“[Not here]” from LONESPEECH: by Ann Jäderlund, trans. by Jöhannes Goransson.
Published by Nightboat Books on May 21, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Jöhannes Goransson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Ann Jäderlund (b. 1955) has been a leading Swedish poet since the 1980s, when her books Streamer City, Which once had been meadow and Soon Into The Summer I Will Walk Out opened up a new direction in Swedish poetry, merging elements of the baroque and the postmodern into a mysterious yet sensual poetry. Since then she has published a number of books of poetry, most recently the complete poems, Dikter 1985-2019, plays and translations, including an acclaimed selection of Emily Dickinson poems. In Lonespeech (Ensamtal, 2019), Jäderlund draws on the correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, two poets whose work her own poetry has been in dialogue with since the 1980s, to create poems that explore a poetics of Dickinsonian slantness.
Johannes Göransson (b. 1973) was born in Lund, Sweden, and lives in South Bend, Indiana. He is the author of nine previous books of poetry and criticism, including Poetry Against All, Summer and Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation, and has translated numerous poets, including Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Eva Kristina Olsson, Helena Boberg and Kim Yideum. His poems, translations and critical writings have appeared in a wide array of journals in the US and broad, including Fence, Poetry Magazine, Lana Turner, and Spoon River Review. He is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and the publisher of Action Books.
"The translator’s relationship to the text is a cognate of that between sender and receiver. Göransson is equally receptive to Jäderlund’s gnomic intensity and to her elusive tendencies. His disinterest in the false axioms of untranslatability of poetry makes for a much better book than one looking for linguistic equivalences."
-Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet Books
"One of Sweden’s most unique living poets."
-Nordic Council Literature Prize
"Jäderlund’s poem indicates the impossibility of a collective or representative body to which we might address ourselves and anchor our identifications. Yet it also holds forth the possibility of inventing new vocabularies, new ways of speaking and receiving that are founded on that very impossibility, on that absence, where everyone is strange, foreign, beginning. Can we find the words?"
-Matthew Rana, Los Angeles Review of Books
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