Additional information
by Ann Jäderlund (Author), Johannes Goransson (Translator)
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."
Author Biography
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.
