Photographer: ThoughtCatalogue via Pixabay.
POETRY. Ann Jäderlund first became famous in Sweden in the late 80s and early 90s with a pair of books that blended pastoral imagery with experimental cut-up techniques: Som en gång varit äng (Which once had been meadow) and Snart går jag i sommaren ut (Soon into the summer I walk out). The heated reception of these books placed her at the centre of the so-called “Ann Jäderlund debates,” a discussion about “incomprehensibility” in contemporary poetry. Members of the critical establishment criticized Jäderlund for being inaccessible, and as such symptomatic a new aesthetic that was gaining traction in Sweden.
Although the debate is now long over – and Jäderlund has gone on to win many awards while becoming inarguably one of the most influential poets in Sweden – the debate offers a way of thinking about Jäderlund’s latest book, Ensamtal.
Ensamtal, a writing-through of the correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, undoes the dominant model of communication that undergirded the original charges against her, her “inaccessibility.” Instead of offering “clear” or “accessible” poetry, or the common alternative, the embrace of “communication failure” (as in the early language poets), Jäderlund finds a beautiful, strange alternative approach. Taking a term from Ensamtal itself, I might call this approach “omklar” (around clear or about clear). These poems are indeed utterly “clear” – the language as “simple” as the poetry her original detractors advocated— but this simple language is made volatile by the small prefix “om”. Instead of imagining “clarity” as direct access, Jäderlund’s poetry creates a different model of communication, in a language of “about”-ness.
Jäderlund’s title signals the project of the book: We might read Ensamtal as the portmanteau for “ensam” (lone, lonely) and “tal” (speech); or it could be “en” (one, though to be grammatically correct, it should be “ett”) plus “samtal” (conversation). Either way, the title gives the sense of isolation, but this isolation is not so much a failure to reach a wider audience as space where language vibrates, where words are “about clear”:
If there is a theme or motif in the Bachman/Celan correspondence, it is the constant blockage of their relationship – their inability to communicate with each other or their physical inability to meet up and rekindle the original romance that sparked the correspondence. It is a book of miscommunication and communication failure. For example, this, in Wieland Hoban’s English translation, is how Bachmann wrote to Celan on December 23, 1958:
“Paul, I am thinking about your question, and this letter cannot write down everything I am thinking, only say something starting at the end. I do not think there is any answer, for you or from you, to this report; it belongs in the bin…”
Or this letter from Celan to Bachman from December 9, 1957:
“Ingeborg, my dear Ingeborg – I cast another look out the train, you had looked around too, but it was too far away. Then it came and choked me, so wildly…”
One letter has to do with the failure of “thinking” and “writ[ing] down everything,” the other about being unable to look at the other person and getting “choked” by this failure.
This “failure” is what John Durham Peters identifies as “communication failure,” the necessary result of the impossible ideal of communication as “direct contact between interiorities,” in his book Speaking into the Air. This communication ideal strangely both depends on and excludes language since we need the medium, but the moment we use the medium, we mediate the interiority that should be beyond mediation. Language both promises communication and ruins the perceived purity of our interiority. Peters suggests that this impossible ideal is a reaction to the onset of mass communication and new technologies of communication that allows us to speak or dialogue over thousands of miles in no time. He also notes that there are historical precedents for this paradigm – in, for example, St Augustine’s belief that the body pollutes the purity of the soul, or in Socrates’s anxiety about the written word.
In Ensamtal Jäderlund finds a way out of Peters’ paradox, looking to language not as direct, clear access, but as an “omklar” (about clear), poetic language, as she translates and transforms the letters between Celan and Bachman into a series of short, evocative lyrics. Rather than failures to communicate, Jäderlund finds in these correspondences a sparse, evocative and mysterious lyric that challenges the assumption of “communication” and “accessibility” by drawing its subtle energy from small twists and turns in the language.
Jäderlund’s title signals the project of the book: We might read Ensamtal as the portmanteau for “ensam” (lone, lonely) and “tal” (speech); or it could be “en” (one, though to be grammatically correct, it should be “ett”) plus “samtal” (conversation). Either way, the title gives the sense of isolation, but this isolation is not so much a failure to reach a wider audience as space where language vibrates, where words are “about clear”:
Häpnad
den är brusten
också där
rå och
omklar
omklar
den är brusten
Which I might translate as:
Amazement
it is burst
also there
raw and
about clear
about clear
it is burst
The language is simple, but its small twists and turns corrupt the idea of easy communication – it is “about clear.” It asks us to read the wrong meaning to words or to hear the echoes of some words leak into other words.
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