The Forbidden Door
The Forbidden Door: The Selected Poetry of Lasse Söderberg is compiled of imagistic and dreamlike poems that travel far from the poet’s native Sweden through Arthur Rimbaud’s France and Frederico García Lorca’s Spain, ultimately forging ties with Spanish-language poets on both sides of the Atlantic, such as César Vallejo and Octavio Paz (whom Söderberg also translated into Swedish). Co-translators Lars Gustaf Andersson and Carolyn Forché paint Söderberg as a “free spirit” who “traveled restlessly,” and point to a shift in his work in the 1950s toward “a much sparer, clearer style, while preserving the Surrealists’ interest in metaphor.” The titular “door” thus figures in these poems as both literal portal and metaphoric possibility, and while “light” is often used to indicate spirituality or holiness (“I am flesh suffused with time / on a raft of light”), Söderberg is equally enchanted by light’s heft and consumable physicality (in one poem we encounter a boat that “grazed starlight at sea,” in another we observe cattle “graze daylight from the fields”).
In Söderberg’s poetics, a mystical fixation on the observable world, where noticing “white clouds / that are hung to dry on the sky” leads to the feeling inside of “a little fist / endlessly [pounding] on the door of being,” combines with skepticism of religious hierarchy. An irreverent strain runs through The Forbidden Door, often manifest in the humorous undercurrent beneath theological musings:
To revolt against God
when there is no God is meaningful,he thought, he who fell asleep
with Freud under his pillow.Even scorpions have a love life,
he further thought.
In “Hunger,” we see through the eyes of “one who knows” that there is no afterlife and understands “oblivion as the natural condition.” Rather than being disquieting, this frees the poet to fully consume his surroundings, beholden only to the here and now:
It was like wanting to go to a cloister, but a cloister without
God,
a cloister white as an unwritten page,outside, and full of silence. There I would drink
of the light and eat of the shadow.That hunger has never left me.