Lonespeech

Ann Jäderlund’s words are simple and her syntax distraught. The off-kilter prepositions Johannes Göransson deploys in his translation—“I can see the word / it goes through the eye”; “The sun goes in the aorta”; “I have / been / stabbed to / the brains”—radically reorient my experience of bare phenomena. It is not that my senses receive; it is that they are poisoned and transformed. This is an elemental, autoerotic lyric whose peculiar way of clinging to the world utterly mystifies and rejuvenates me. “Little flower / you burst”—and you burst.

The syntax of Ann Jäderlund, line by torquing line, cobbles together multifangled bodies and landscapes that poison and stun—coursing toward perception along verbal tightropes whose assonance carries disturbance in the precarious shelter of near-lullabies. Johannes Göransson’s dexterously imaginative handling of a poetics that has set off debates about incomprehensibility in its “catastrophizing of cliche” renders the untranslatable apprehensible, bringing us into contact with this poetry’s raw awe: a foreclang, a river that runs lard, tears straightened up, and a speech that keeps us captive in the loneliness and communion expressed through these meticulously replaited specimens of correspondence between Bachmann and Celan.