Lonespeech by Ann Jäderlund, translated by Johannes Gröransson. Published by Nightboat Books. May, 2024. 96 pages. $17.95 paperback. Originally published in Swedish in 2019 as Ensamtal by publishing house Albert Bonniers Forlag.
It is befitting that as I wrote this review, autocorrect continually asked me to rewrite Lonespeech as two separate words. Ann Jäderlund’s newest collection, translated by Johannes Gröransson, asks us to consider writing across intimacy as an impossible act of translation. The poems weave together in one continuous sequence, brilliantly rendering language’s inherently unstable and lonely facets of communication, while reminding us of our endless desire for interconnection. Jäderlund resists the separation of loneliness and speech, grieving with us in the failures of language to translate what it means to exist within and across bodies. Lonespeech revels in embracing dichotomies, invents new compound words, pressurizes form, and fragments linearity through lush sonic constellations.
The collection acts as many different forms: overheard fragments, a game of poet’s telephone, a singular song, a series of letters, cut-out poems, a translation within a translation within a translation. The poems resist transparency through their assemblage-like structure. Jäderlund sets up a repeated dichotomy: we continually attempt to transmit feeling to one another despite the failings of communication. When we read letter exchanges between people we do not know, there is only an ability to go so far into understanding the language system of that singular relationship. We fill this language with the understandings we have acquired from living:
Someone appeared
to enjoy someone
enjoyed
the ears are exposed
to many
sounds I
am alone (18)
Before entering the book, two epigraphs take their spot on the cover: “probably a star still has light,” Paul Celan declares, to which Ingeborg Bachmann responds “but not tonight let us find the words.” This is further elucidated in the translator’s note at the end of the collection. Here translator Johannes Gröransson makes note of the “sampled” language in Jäderlund’s collection, language taken from correspondence between writers (and tumultuous lovers) Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan (79). Their relationship was fraught with disaster, as they attempted to write through and within the post-1945 landscape. Bachmann (who was born in Austria and was the daughter of a Nazi party member) felt a responsibility towards inventing a new kind of language; this responsibility was heightened through her relationship to Celan, a Holocaust survivor whose parents died in labour camps. Their affair ended when Bachmann proposed and Celan confessed to being engaged to another woman. Jäderlund’s poems are haunted by their devastating yet deeply passionate (Celan flooded Bachmann’s apartment with poppies within a few days of their first encounter) history. Several poems ground themselves within Germany, where the two initially met.
Gröransson’s choice of the word “sampled” brings up questions of shared and sharing language; Jäderlund does not provide the exact reference text, nor does she state which poems reference which correspondences. There are references to biography that those familiar with Bachmann and Celan will regonize: the repetition of “it burns” referring to Bachmann’s debated death (she died through complications of a fire, some claim this was a suicide) and Celan’s suicide at the site of “the river.” This is how Jäderlund achieves a kind of a double translation, she is transforming their correspondence not only into her own poetic system, but also from their original language (Bachmann and Celan mainly corresponded in German and occasionally in French) into Swedish. Gröransson’s translation into English becomes the third translation, which he manages to do so with immense sonic clarity, rendering every sparkling fragment seamlessly.
Jäderlund’s poems do not rely on this relationship, but rather conversing with them – constructing a new kind of intimacy, a singular solitary voice (much like Emily Dickinson) whose desires cannot be reciprocated in the span of the collection:
Wrote then that the water
that hears you speak
is like before
and do speak
even with the eyes
but can you
really see me (69)
This hauntingly simple confession “but can you / really see me,” exposes an impasse; the lack of a question mark gives no room for response, turning the poem into a kind of devastating anti-question. There is no room for reconciliation, for a seeing to be written out. There is delight to be found in the generative mystery of each poem, resisting closure through stark enjoyment and absent punctuation. The poem grieves through its confession that ties us to each other without a capable bridge. Though perhaps the poem reaches to me for a moment across the boundary.
Jäderlund’s poems are minimalist constructions that do in fact defy gravity. The poems hover with equal distance from the margins, never reaching the bottom threshold. Even the cover, monotone and sparse, stayed the same in its English translation (The cover of the original Swedish book is identical except for the colour – light grey to pale dandelion). On first encounter, form and syntax draw our attention; poems range from two to seventeen lines long, lack any punctuation and in a Dickinsonian manner, reject titles (Jäderlund has previously translated a selection of Emily Dickinson work). Jäderlund and Dickinson’s poems speak to each other, both working in a lyric mode often not meant for any one viewer, their addressee more to an absent longing than to a specific figure. There is no directory via a table of contents that orients for me. Yet, the lack of titles, heavy enjambment, untouched pronouns, and syntaxical play are far from disorienting – rather these formal choices produce an effect of one continuous song, or rather an opus of many movements. It is clear that Jäderlund (and Gröransson) listens to her poems, a sonic delight emerges through continual use of repetition and the potential for multiple readings:
Clang
noneabout
summer
come clang
come be
the same
noneabout
clang
the same
come come
be (37)
Here, sound becomes a driving force as well as a disruptor. The word “clang,” has a harsh bite, a brashness that interrupts while also weaving together language. The reverberation of metallic sound is paired with the invitingly soft, sensual “come be.” This coexistence of sound and sentiment echoes throughout the collection. Pleasure and torment heavily intertwine; the poems are aware that language is not absorbed in the same way, yet continue to admit desire for closeness. Language is “clearabout,” what happens in between the seemingly incompatible constructions becomes the very momentum of desire. As a native German speaker, the invented compounds anchor the poems back to the original German correspondences while achieving an additional translation. The poems are “clearabout,” language is adjacent to transparency, adjacent to certainty, adjacent to transmutability. As Göransson reflects in his note, “the language she uses is ‘clear’ but also ‘about.’ It doesn’t arrive in a straight line” (79). Here, Bachmann’s interest in creating a new kind of language comes to mind, while also serving as a reminder that we are always thinking, writing, and speaking within translation.
What is “lonespeech?” Is every attempt at speech a lone act? How do we reconcile? Are not all poems an act of translation? Is not all speech an attempt at translating feeling to another? This is what Jäderlund’s collection asks of me. We desire to be spoken to, for someone to turn towards us purely to be seen, to exchange longing; thus, we come to the page in an attempt to translate. Jäderlund asks us to recognize the inevitability of misunderstanding, of untranslatability. But in the attempt to narrow this gap intimacy constructs itself anew, declaring:
Speak
something
I beg
you speak
you too (74)
In order to read these poems, I had to let my body be. Let yourself be alone with these poems. Let yourself despair. Then return: “Shift tone / love and / be silent ” (56).
