The Deformation Process of Translating Aase Berg

James Pate recently spoke with Johannes Göransson about his translation of Aase Berg’s new book, Hackers (Black Ocean, 2017), after being a fan of Berg’s “unapologetically baroque and bracingly anti-humanist” work for some time now. An excerpt from their conversation follows; read it in full at 3:AM Magazine.

3:AM: One of the aspects of Berg that I’ve always found remarkable is how stylistically diverse her work is, ranging from poems that are almost cinematic in their imagery to poems that are densely language-based. And that lack of consistent style seems to go echo with the way the “human” in her work frequently morphs into the “animal” and the “machine”. In Hackers, she writes, “My name — / Deep down / a hacker is never named / the same thing / twice.” How difficult is it to translate Berg compared to other poets you’ve translated? Does the manner in which she appears to deliberately work against what is often called “voice” create challenges in the translation process?

JG: My first reaction is to say that, yes, translating Aase Berg’s poetry is very difficult — it deforms the Swedish language with puns and radical ambiguities, archaic words, contorted syntax, translations and mistranslations and dystranslations. But “difficulty” suggests to me that there could be a right answer, there could be a right translation if I studied hard enough. To me there’s much more movement in the “original” — it parasites, mimics, corrupts language and source texts. In Hackers, there’s all those poems about “hyperparasites” and Trojan horses: her “original” in many cases are perhaps a parasite on another text, or a host for another text. But I am really interested in translating her work — it demands a kind of intensity that I love in poetry. So, perhaps it’s not difficult at all, so much as intensive and immersive.

When Joyelle [McSweeney] and I wrote “the deformation zone,” about the way that translation foregrounds the way poems function like zones (circulating, deforming, morphing), we took the term from one of Aase’s poems because her aesthetics are so obviously an aesthetics of deformation. This aesthetic could be seen as “difficult” to translate, but to me it’s poetry that undoes the traditional division between a definite, complete, wellwrought original that is then necessarily corrupted by the translation. Berg’s original is already in circulation, already corrupting and corrupted. In this sense, translating her work is more like participating in a deformation process. I want to think of all translation (and writing) like that, but perhaps her work really foregrounds it.

So many discussions about translation fall back on a reductive idea of “the original reader.” That the role of the translator is to re-create some kind of ideal reader who would have read the poem “first.” But who this original reader is is very unstable – Is it a friend of the poet? The poet herself?