Gingerbread Monument

Here's a new book I translated. It's really a collaboration between the poet Viktor Johansson and the photograph Klara Kallstrom (and me). It's an artbook so it's kind of expensive (40 bucks).

I'm going to try to publish some of the poems from the book and some others by Viktor. He's a young guy, the editor of ett lysande namn (a Swedish journal I've been in) and part of a very promising generation of young, heterogenous Swedish poets. Viktor's poems are in some ways Romantic lyrics, but I like them a lot. In ways perhaps they are reminiscent of some of the non-jokey, more lyrical poetry published in journals like Conduit and Forklift, Ohio etc.

Though today I feel like I am next going to translate Swedish Romantic poet Stagnelius (and with Romantic here I mean 19th century Romantic). He's got this great poem called "Till Forrutelsen" (To Decomposition, but as you may be able to tell, "decomposition" in Swedish is more like "rotting" so I may translate it as "To Rot" or "To Rotting"), in which he pleads for decomposition to basically tuck him into sleep in the ground. Very nice, erotic-macabre, atmospheric, opiumish.