Lonespeech

Ann Jäderlund’s Lonespeech, translated from Swedish by Johannes Göransson, draws on letters between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan to explore the inherent difficulty of communication:

Sounds about sounds meld
one can hear them
not at the ears
near near
then one hears another
sound word

The preposition at suggests that the ear is a location rather than a receptacle for speech; for Jäderlund, the speech encounter or epistolary exchange allows for comprehension of, at most, only an approximation of the words of another. As Göransson explains of Jäderlund’s work, “The effect is, to use a word from the book itself, ‘clearabout’: put another way, the language she uses is ‘clear’ but it’s also ‘about.’ It doesn’t arrive in a straight line.” About also carries connotations of adjacency; though Jäderlund’s words are clear, they’ll only get as far as some kind of contextual nearness.

The words are names
the words are the root of
all names
as if stealing
names are nothing

Jäderlund exposes the sender and the receiver to the missed encounter: her syntax limits each line to itself, interrupting the flow of the question. 

Where are you
where will
you be
this summer
I hear
the hands
the river

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: “We cannot ‘own’ the words, but we can bring her catastrophizing into contact with the English language.”

The voice burns
I can see the word
it goes through the eye
from hearing
it is poisonous
with clear velocity
speak you too