Lonespeech - by Ann Jäderlund (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An elemental, uncanny collection of poems translated from one of Sweden's most influential and beloved poets.

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."

Review Quotes

"One of Sweden's most unique living poets."
--Nordic Council Literature Prize

"Jäderlund's poems resist digestible consumption as much as they elicit a terrific awe. . . stunningly brilliant."
--Cary Stough, Cleveland Review of Books

"Jäderlund's poem indicates the impossibility of a collective or representative body to which we might address ourselves and anchor our identifications. Yet it also holds forth the possibility of inventing new vocabularies, new ways of speaking and receiving that are founded on that very impossibility, on that absence, where everyone is strange, foreign, beginning. Can we find the words?"
--Matthew Rana, Los Angeles Review of Books

"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."
--Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet Books

"There is something compelling and fresh about the collective sweep and leaps of Jäderlund's peculiar concisions in the hands of translator Johannes Göransson."
--Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub

"[A] constellation of elemental and bodily imagery. . . haunting."
--Tracy Zeman, antiphony

"Despite the darkening gaze in Lonespeech, I never read Jäderlund as someone who only writes from the terms of death. Her books always carry with them a part of life, minutes, silences, speeds, love and light. It is not enough to describe Jäderlund's poems as craft--they are magical."
--Sara Abdullahi Lekta, translated by Johannes Göransson, Sublunary Editions

"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."
--Iloe Ariss and Venya Gushchin, Full Stop

"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."
--Barton Smock

"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

"A work that feels like the meta-biography of a relationship, a meditation on how we can know our world, others, or ourselves. . . a powerful love letter to the art of poetry."
--Matt Martinson, Heavy Feather Review

"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

"These deceptively minimalist poems fold time and space creating verbal structures that have vast interiors."
--David Leftwich

"Jäderlund twists old texts, stacks up baroque images and incomprehensible statements, naively concretises abstract entities, and combines different semantic fields: 'tins powder the heaven pink.' She creates neologisms and uses a syntax that sometimes borders on the ungrammatical."
--Lisette Keustermans, Poetry International

About the Author

Ann Jäderlund (b. 1955) is a poet as well as a translator and playwright. She is widely acknowledged as one of the leading Swedish poets over the past forty plus years. Her enigmatic second book, Which once had been meadow, set off a fierce debate in Swedish media--now known as "the Ann Jäderlund Debates--about the role of mystery, accessibility and gender in contemporary poetry. She has gone on to write eleven books of poetry, as well as children's books and plays. For her work, she has received numerous awards and honors, including the Aniara Prize, the Bellman Prize, The Nine's Big Prize and the Erik Lindegren Prize. In 2022, her collected poems were published by Bonniers. In addition to her own poems, she has published a number of books of translations, most notably Gång på gång är skogarna rosa (Frequently the Woods are Pink), her critically acclaimed selection and translation of Emily Dickinson's poems. Jäderlund lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Johannes Göransson (b 1973) is the author of eight books of poetry, including Summer and the collaborative (with Sara Tuss Efrik) The New Quarantine, a decreative translation of Göransson's first book of poetry. He has translated several poets, including Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Helena Boberg and Eva Kristina Olsson. Göransson was born in Lund, Sweden but has for many years lived in the US. He's the co-founder of Action Books and teaches at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN.