Olivia Cronk on Johannes Göransson's Translations of Ann Jäderlund at The Critical Flame

The new issue of the Critical Flame is out, and among much else worth your critical eyes is a piece by Olivia Cronk on Johannes Göransson’s translations of contemporary Swedish poet and playwright Ann Jäderlund. "Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney and Sophie Collins and Action Books and Asymptote and Two Lines Press (and others I’m missing here, certainly and accidentally) have made me aware of the urgent, perhaps moral need to stop erasing the translator," writes Cronk. To continue:

Ann Jäderlund’s Which once had been a meadow (Black Square Editions, 2017), translated by Göransson, is poetry as invitation: to gaze at settings rendered miniature by the act of writing them, to move through arterial space (the literal and metaphoric human “heart” and leaves/pages), to see the meanwhile/previously/usually hidden (to unseal the hermetic/to use luminol to see traces of blood, maybe), to don a “you”-costume and play at “you” on a stage/in a meadow, to look under a scab and find “you” in a mirror, to trace a finger’s path across skin/page. It is poetry as longing. It’s a Julee Cruise song. It’s interiority and sadness and delight and threat. Stages. Vision as palimpsest. Palimpsest as longing. Playing.

I know, though, as I now write out the things that occurred to me while reading, that I am misrepresenting the text. And not.

This text is particularly plastic; I mean: it’s so very available for mingling with/into one’s self-muck. Is this Göransson’s style or Jäderlund’s or both? I suspect both. And it is mine, too.

The veil does not conceal me now
The monologue does not conceal me
One should close the gates
The material does not conceal it
A cutting contrast

The cloud cannot conceal me
It does not glide away
There is slumber
There are shadows in the kingdom

Exquisite fruits
Slate leaves
Dim anemones
You cannot conceal me

This is poetry as the terrorizing thrill of exposure in play! Until this book forced me into thinking it, it had not occurred to me that one of the central themes of my experience of the world is to have my alone-ness interrupted, a force at once exhilarating and violently dominating, rupturing my play/stage/diorama...

Please find the full review at the Critical Flame.