Lonespeech
An elemental, uncanny collection of poems translated from one of Sweden’s most influential and beloved poets.
Poetry
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In Lonespeech, Ann Jäderlund rewires the correspondence between writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan into a series of stark, runic poems about the fraught act of communication and its failures. Forsaking her reputation as a baroque poet, Jäderlund uses simple words and phrases in favor of an almost childlike simplicity, giving her poems, on first glance, the appearance of parables: mountains, sunlight, rivers, aortas. Upon closer inspection, the poems glitch, bend, and torque into something else, enigmatic and forceful, lending them, as Jäderlund says, the force of “clear velocity.”
Praise
In Ann Jäderlund’s paradoxical poems, it is the crystal clear loneliness that makes an encounter possible. From the cells and the body, the words break out into the wider world where another person is formed. The language is fragile, precise and resolutely subtle, as surprising as it is mind-expanding.
-Aase Berg
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.
-Aditi Machado
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.
-Jennifer Scappettone
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Details
ISBN: 9781643622361
Paperback, 96 pages, 5 x 9 in
Publication Date: May 21, 2024
Reviews
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.
One of Sweden’s most unique living poets.
-Nordic Council Literature Prize
Ann Jäderlund’s Lonespeech lets sound do the clawing and makes of surface a thing once heard. As translated by Johannes Göransson, it is a work of remaining transmutation. . . This is an endeavor of transformative non-ness. So, escape and swallow and return.
Lonespeech is a dialogue edited down to a poem. . . Jäderlund offers a deconstructed and pieced-back-together version of a dialogue in which words, rather than people, stand together, relate, and attempt to communicate on the page.
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