In addition to winning this year’s Close Approximations contest (in poetry, judged by Michael Hofmann), Swedish poet Marie Silkeberg is the author of seven books of poetry and many other works, including essays about and translations of Inger Christensen and Rosmarie Waldrop. She also works on sound compositions and makes poetry films, often in conjunction with other artists. She was born in Denmark and teaches at the University of Southern Denmark.
I translated eight of Marie’s poems into English while she was completing a residency in Iowa City as part of the International Writing Program in the fall of 2015. The poems form a series called “Städerna” (“The Cities”), and comprise one section of the book Till Damaskus (published in Stockholm by Albert Bonniers Förlag in 2014), a collaboration between Silkeberg and Syrian-born Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun (now based in Sweden). The book explores city spaces across the world and asks questions about belonging, immigration, and identity. As we collaborated on the translations, Marie described her process and her goals for her poetry, as well as her goals for translation. In this conversation, I asked Marie to tell more about some of the initial ideas she shared with me during the translation process.
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Kelsi Vanada: The eight poems in “Städerna” are written in what you’ve called “blocks.” They are composed by many short phrases, separated by periods, which are the only kind of punctuation that mark the poems. In addition, there is no capitalization in the Swedish poems, and many of the phrases separted by periods seem to either extend the thought of the previous phrase, or bleed into the following phrase. Why the choice of this form?
Marie Silkeberg: I’d like to revise that, actually. I want to call them “squares.” They are related to the black square of Malevich. He was a Russian painter, early 20th century. He was extreme; he made black squares on white. It is the extreme part of representation that I’m interested in. Some of the first poems I wrote were in these squares, and I didn’t know what I was doing. The space of a poem is a geometric figure for me. Or the movement in a geometric figure. These squares were invaded by a circular movement; it was a feeling of a circle inside a square.
KV: How do these poems fit their form—how are these squares right for your content?
MS: I’m not sure it’s right! I mean that this square has followed me. I revolt against it, but go back to very elementary forms when I have to think. This square is a container. For these poems I was thinking about the phrase “poetry is all signal.” I wanted to make use of the noise—not be sure where signal is or where noise is. For me it’s still open in these poems. I wanted to make a moving surface of signal noise.
KV: You said that when you write, you don’t think of your poems as being “voiced.” You said, “I try to write to challenge my voice, even attack it.” Can you tell me more about what that means?
MS: I don’t think the world cannot be explained—as a poet, you just feel that a word attacks you and you are filled with this word; it’s the whole world. I know all poets are easily seduced by their own voice. For me the written poem is somehow a discipline to make my voice say something that surprises me. And I think the human voice can do almost everything—my personal voice is at risk of limiting itself. The written page tries to force me to make my voice say something different. The multi-voiced poem is so interesting to me. You cannot express everything on the written page when reading in your voice—you’ll always make something smaller. I try to read to make my voice a challenge to what I know. Really open my voice to other sound.
KV: Does working in collaboration help you to avoid that seduction of your own voice?
MS: Collaboration is always a collective process. I don’t know what it is with the voice, but it has a desire to mingle with others. Take on their colors and sounds. But also to dissolve in it. To create something that is bigger than you.
KV: Would you say that your collaborator, Ghayath Almadhoun, has a different vision for Till Damaskus than you do?
MS: Ghayath has a different vision for our project. But it’s not a question of political reality. I can have joy in dissolving in others and their voices. Our meeting point is very special because Ghayath comes from a rich poetic heritage in Arabic. It’s far-reaching in time. Swedish poetry is not. This question of modern/postmodern—it’s a time we both live in. I hope that what he gained from this confrontation with me was encouraging him to challenge the Arabic poetry. For me it was a confrontation but also a gift—entering this much longer time of poetry that he has inside him. In Till Damaskus we wrote two poems line by line by SMS. We sent lines, and it was like playing chess. The rhythm of the Arabic lines—they’re long, they stretch out. I could write in this longer line, but it was also a game. It was fun to make a hard line for him to answer. Extremely interesting, but very strange poems. We don’t even think of them as poems.
KV: How did you meet Almadhoun?
MS: I heard him read at a poetry reading in Stockholm. I was making films. I asked him to write for the next film. You can always ask poets—we recognize each other! The first time we met after that, we talked for five hours. He was so angry, so new[ly immigrated to] the country. I was impressed by his force. When he left the whole apartment was shaking. So many people ask about our first meeting. It’s hard for me to explain. He was totally vulnerable at the time—he had no money, was totally new there. Our connection was somehow based on intuition. I felt something and it was important. I respected him so much.
KV: Sound is very important to these poems, and it’s one of the aspects of your work that you care most about preserving in translation. You’ve said you strive to achieve a “swirling” sound—can you talk more about that?
MS: The swirling is connected to the circle within the square. To challenge and explode the square. The swirling is connected to the spiral. The vertigo, the instability of being a person in a place. I’ve been thinking so much about this spiral/swirling in connection to subjectivity, relating to experiences not your own—past, present, memory, the unconscious. The idea of this spiral is also to incorporate things in the outer edges—really incorporate them in your texture body. What is foreign to you but around you that you have to relate to. When I began to write I didn’t know how to relate to otherness. I believe you must invest your own body in relation to otherness. You can’t choose what’s “other” to you.
KV: You’ve likened “Städerna” to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and each “square” does feel like a different cityscape to me. How is your work in dialogue with Calvino’s?
MS: Calvino tells stories to someone else who has not seen the place he describes. The stories—and my poems—come through the filter of the traveler, an outsider trying to make an alphabet of what he/she sees in the new place. Calvino and Scheherazade are both like that—telling stories until the end of the night. That has to do with the swirling. It’s many people talking to each other, not just one person.
KV: You spoke of the concept of a “second landscape” in relation to the writing of “Städerna.” Can you speak about this?
MS: It was very clear to me that I was working on a second landscape in these poems, as I was thinking about being an immigrant. The second landscape that you are when you move as an immigrant, the first experience of the place and its landscape—when you realize ‘this is my new country’—you feel it is beyond language, it’s all images. You have no words for it—it’s the temperature, the texture. When I say landscape: in Swedish poetry, nature is a trope. I’m sure that 25% of the population has this experience of a second landscape when Sweden is new to them. The strangeness. A phantom pain moving from country to city. A violent urbanization. So much nostalgia. You can stay in Swedish mentality too much. There is a meeting point between immigration and violent urbanization. There’s some kind of lost landscape—how to deal with it without becoming nostalgic. So many people have dreams of a better life. Even in success, you mourn your first landscape.
KV: You also told me that you mourn your first book.
MS: I do—my first book was a translation. But I am really against using the word translation too much, the idea that “all writing is translation.” Not everything is translation—if you are translating, you know that! I’ve met so many Danish writers, and they say, “Your poems are so Swedish.” They know I came from Denmark. I wondered, “What if my poems are pure constructions?” because Danish people love Swedish. Then I had to write in Danish—they provoked me. That was a very deep experience for me because I hadn’t been speaking Danish for many years. It was like opening a magic door. Every word had so much color, fundamental colors in this landscape. It was good for me to open this door. I wrote in childish Danish until I felt that I had touched it. There’s no word so green as when you say græs (grass) in Danish. It’s so green!
KV: So first you worked on translations, and then you wrote your own work in Danish. Is this a pattern for you that continues today, alternating between writing your own poetry and doing a translation project?
MS: Yes, for me it is a way of clearing my mind before I begin the next book.
KV: I’ve heard you speak of the importance of the timeliness of poetry—does this lead to frustration with the publishing industry for you, if poems are published long after the moment in time to which they speak?
MS: Poetry wants to be part of the times. My frustration with the publishing industry is the marginalization of poetry—every poet seems to have to write history, or write something for the library. To be a poet is to write into the present—but the industry prevents it. Maybe different times have different challenges, but our time really needs poetry to be in the present. But to try to go there will always mean a lot of conflict. People will say you’re not doing or saying the right thing. Poetry is connected to secret messages. At least I trust it; I trust that the private experience of poetry in public places is a solitary message. It is the smallest part of democracy. If there is no substantial energy in that connection, it will fall apart. I write in the trust that even if it doesn’t come back to you, you are part of creating these small, particular encounters.
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Marie’s poem-films can be viewed online at http://movingpoems.com/filmmaker/marie-silkeberg/.
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