Enter the wound. We are traversing a series of five platforms. Crawling via woven sphagnum between open tomes. Each projecting a surface pockmarked with anglophonic plateaus. Ink raised above the white matter of the page.
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Scene: Four books translated from their native Swedish into English, and a fifth translated from its native English into Swedish and back again. During the month of April, Mike Corrao will cover the work of Aase Berg, Johan Jönson, Helena Boberg, Sara Tuss Efrik all filtered through the lens of Johannes Göransson.
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The role of the translator eskews the position of authorial control. For the most part we are encountering the work of these individual poets as they have intended, as it was originally written. But languages are not one-to-one. The rules, grammar, meanings of words, their context. It all varies. Of Aase Berg’s work, Göransson notes, “Berg’s poetry is impossible to make into natural-sounding English because it is not natural-sounding Swedish.”
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The text must undergo a metamorphic process. Sharing its appearance—and its essence—with the original, while also becoming something visibly distinct. Obscuring in shape. A change in lighting or camera angle. The work is inevitably mutated into an unnatural creature. But this does not grant the translator wonton control over the original author’s work. “I translate the way the book asks me to” (Göransson). An essence guides the metamorphic process. But even still. Looking at these five works (Collobert Orbital, Hackers, Dark Matter, Sense Violence, A New Quarantine) we find the opportunity to navigate a small poetic zone unified by its guide. Göransson here playing the role of our Virgil, prodding at the hadean environments constructed by Jönson, Berg, Boberg, and Efrik respectively.
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We open the gates and take our first steps into the burning landscape.
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Scene: Collobert Orbital by Johan Jönson (tr. Göransson)
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Scene: Dark Matter by Aase Berg (tr. Göransson) carries out across 150 odd pages, with the left-hand side in Swedish and the right-hand side in English.
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Scene: A brief excursion into Aase Berg’s Hackers (tr. Göransson).
Mike Corrao is the author of three novels, Man, Oh Man (Orson’s Publishing); Gut Text (11:11 Press) and Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (11:11 Press); one book of poetry, Two Novels (Orson’s Publishing); two plays, Smut-Maker (Inside the Castle) and Andromedusa (Forthcoming – Plays Inverse); and three chapbooks, Avian Funeral March (Self-Fuck); Material Catalogue (Alienist) and Spelunker (Schism – Neuronics). Along with earning multiple Best of the Net nominations, Mike’s work has been featured in publications such as 3:AM, Collagist, Always Crashing, and Denver Quarterly. His work often explores the haptic, architectural, and organismal qualities of the text-object. He lives in Minneapolis. @ShmikeShmorrao