(donald duck / 3. february 2018)
people have started making pornos at home
concocting way more sense and meaning
than they’re getting paid for
i don’t want to hear giant rattan furniture
creak like freeze-dried polystyrene skeletons i don’t want to see
a wall of empty darkly lacquered bookcases devouring
all the light in a room just to display
a single flowerless vase with gilded fluting i don’t want to see
the soft corner of a cot in the left edge of some snapshot i don’t want to see
a brown-edged palm cowering like a hostage
behind a nimbus of newly bleached hair i don’t want to guess
the story behind the grease print on the window or help
to carry the garden furniture out or sort the piles of laundry
because i have played human for so long that i understand
that i’m the closest these girls come to a father
besides i have walked around without pants
for about a hundred years and i understand that i am made
not to live but to serve as a magic mirror
at the bottom of the food chains you already see it
in the first movie where i start screaming like a boob
about a bunch of little things I was never like mickey mouse
he could hold his tongue and become a detective and stuff like that
i was stuck in low-paying jobs climbing on skyscrapers
cannon fodder for the film industry and then came the depression
bread lines job lines way-out-of-lines and then came the war
where did they come from really the other villains
dangerous dan mcboo idgit the midget scuttle emil eagle
not to mention pegleg pete the phantom blot and the beagle boys
from the oddments of surplus-europe
lithuanians who'd forgotten lithuanian
jews who didn’t know they were jewish
until reading the letters from their dead mother
albanians who called themselves mick and rick
and skinny and minny and elle and belle
the silent-type armenians from the anatolian plains
singing full-throated while drunk bulgarians who had converted
and were called pomaks but wanted to be called turks
bulgarians who spoke greek and were called karakachani
but wanted to be called greeks or simply the gagauzes
whom nobody has heard of except from her the russian poet in boston
who had been a translator for the moldovian sheepskin mafia
in the nineties when transnistria was the wild west
and all of a sudden they were at the front desk
and called johnny and bob and stopped dropping by to visit me
and each other
at the same time as i was re-cast
as indiana jones and some explorer
and a fortune hunter and the world’s first duck on the moon
i who was an animal and a clown
condemned to parody the poor and miserable
and i did that pretty well until they invented reality tv
and the poor and miserable became world champions
at parodying themselves and I was downsized
into various shit jobs and started writing poems
like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread
because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread
maybe a little too much tradition
before I surrendered to my own obstreperous diction
show me whom you laugh at and I’ll tell you what becomes of you
after the revolution i mean how can ordinary people be so dotty
about a little hyperinflation when our typical pets
dogs and cats parrots and mice must be set free
and overnight become common pests
and are resurrected as standard barbecue dishes
served at kiosks and bus stations a teeny tiny slaughter
shishkabobed with bikewheel spokes wrapped in old newspapers
served right in your hand the new gold standard
in a run on empty cupboards on empty
restaurants on the empty countryside
i feel this could be our fate me
with my cruel bow i laid full low
the harmless albatross sailing behind my dinghy me
sanitizing port-a-potties at night my bed
full of crumbs and white feathers there is nothing
so creepy as an animal coming back to haunt us
(or maybe one thing: a dead tree in bloom)
for what is there to haunt with when you have no spirit
how are you going to harrow anything when you never walked the earth
and quake quacking with every puff of wind o i really regret teasing
the three little pigs since their dad became bratwurst
since the fleas got lice since the lice got mites
since minny mouse herself is now scared of mice
(poetry festival / july 26 2016)
yeah i agree it’s lame to travel this far
to talk about yourself but sometimes
we just have to so dear poets and lovers of literature
in these plundered and neocolonized countries
these boring and hollow tax havens we write
and we write about stars and planets
titties and ass death and resurrection and we shed tears
because we say it all so well with blowdried hair waxed asscracks
designer jeans pre-paid dinners
among these hired and funereal bartenders
but tell me why are we reading poems
in the fucking smoking lounge
of the grand continental excelsior hotel
into which nobody ventures without a tie
you might think i’m cultured and genteel
because i came here on a plane you might think i understand
what the four chichi forks on the dinner table are for
or that i care about wine my granddad also picked his nose
and pissed in the sink i am not trying to hide it
but i try not to show it either
i might be what some call a fox fairly shrewd a little deceptive
and now and then i hear my own voice turn into
an entire human being i have never met this is not a skill
it is not a gift these poems simply want to come to me
when i stop bugging them with questions
i try to write authentically without becoming a wreck or a pig
i don’t always like what i say even though it sometimes comes easy
i try to not stand in the way that’s my definition
of writing i don’t mean to be coarse or iconoclastic
the few who wander in here aren’t they quite sufficiently nervous already
i want you to know that i am ashamed every time i realize too late
that i’m up here and strut like a stuffed swan
spotlit by bloodless high culture
and i’m not saying this to ruin the mood
but everytime we meet one of us has to say it
and today it was me
(empire / february 13 2015)
honored assembly thanks for letting us stay here
this beautiful country this proud people
brothers sisters i have heard that you are empire
but you don’t look like empire
in the grime between gladiators empire
in the syntax oh yeah i can see it empire drained wetlands
hydroelectric rivers broad sidewalks railways
encyclopedias in gold leaf pools of umber beer
streets of creamy gravies piles of onceterrified meat empire
prairies burning under rising blue plumes cities cinched like strands
of teeth around the necks of mountains empire
what we do to each other in hotels for money
at night over the telephone by appointment empire
windows across the river lights blinking on off on
the signals indicating the train is on its way afterall afterall
not all of us are dead afterall we are happy to see you
though we don’t dare talk to you afterall
with paprika powder i write the waste land in the language of empire
with a sooty twig i write the odyssey in the alphabet of empire
with blueberry juice i write my country anew with the lexicon of empire
my country becomes a ditch a tallow candle smears on your plate
when you hear that my country is disappearing you don’t get terrified
when i have translated this so you can understand that my country
is disappearing you don’t get terrified no
you grow furious because i am terrified
now that’s empire
(business of the dead / july 26 2016)
today i have seen a flattened snake on the road
i have startled a hare
i have seen a halfdrunk box of cola light standing alone in the forest
i have opened an empty mailbox and thought
this is just a bunch of naked events
these don’t happen to me
in order to become meaningful rather i am so empty
that in order to have meaning
they come to me
in order to happen in this way
things are begging
to be created
in the ears of the smith
the sledges keep ringing
behind the eyelids of the driver
snow keeps falling
the sound hangs in the bell
the fingers are blackened by the newspaper
and like that the dead remain here on earth
a kind of children who have disappeared
back into us
no one is as close to us
as the dead
but we try anyway
to call them back
we speak so much of them
that even the earth we throw in their faces
isn’t sufficient to hide them
we talk so much about the dead
that the kids who play on the kitchen floor
play dead to get our attention
and the dead play too
at this very moment they continue to bury each other
those massacred in schools bury under their own bodies
the naked bodies of the mass incarcerated who died in prisons
the dead murdered by the police
bury the suicide-bombed
with their own bodies
the missing dead
spread the ashes from burned discotheques
and over the wreckage of factory ceiling collapses mall bombs
turnpike pileups they eat one another’s faces
and no longer answer when we call to them
the word horse wants to run with the horse the word hare
wants to sit with the hare
the word death belongs with the living
the word loss searches for the missing
the word crazy escapes the lunatics
the word expensive is cheap
and available to all the word free is cheap
and available to all such are words cheap
available to all i am cheap and ordinary
and available to all i am cheap and ordinary
and want to be with those i love i am cheap and ordinary
and write about language that angry crackling shroud
inside which the words are hiding i put it on i look like shit
sentences pull the guts out of the carcass that is the world
slick membranes slumped on its body glossy fillets
of syntax and context hang in context and syntax
panicked i stuff the intestines back inside
and i i boil myself and the dead
in my empty eyesockets the steam is coming out my ears
i am the needle the syntax the thread
stitching together loosely the language carcass that is begging me
to pull the silk-thin language over the body
and i do it
the carcass says look
the silk shroud of language takes its shape
from the face of the body beneath it
and i do it i put it on look
it’s not a human being any longer it is a shroud
now i’d like you to sew a human being from it
and i do it it looks like a ghoul
are you a ghost no
i’m just like you
why have you made me like this
i don’t want to be like this
Four Poems
Gunnar Wærness
translated from the Norwegian by Gabriel Gudding
Read the original in Norwegian
Listen to the original read by the poet:
I spent a year translating Gunnar Wærness’s 20,000 word tour de force Venn med alle (Friends with Everyone). My recent acquaintance with Norwegian presented an obvious and cardinal difficulty, having begun its study in 2018, despite my hearing vestiges of the language daily while growing up in a heavily Scandinavian part of Minnesota. So, though all four of my grandparents spoke Norwegian, and though my eight-six year old mother still swears (sorry, Mom) in the language, it took me some time to draw myself toward Norwegian poetry. And for my introduction to it—my homecoming of sorts—I thank the poets Gunnar Wærness, Maiken Horn Bolset, and Pedro Carmona-Alvarez for standing with open arms on the expansive welcome mat of their exquisite language.
Beyond the sizeable problem of my recent rank unfamiliarity with the language, a not insubstantial secondary difficulty is that Wærness’s Norwegian isn’t simply, as one could expect from one of the foremost writers in today’s Norway, virtuosic—it can at times border on the baroque. Wærness’s bokmål is also heavily influenced by his native dialect, a vernacular mode known as trøndersk, which a prominent Norwegian linguist once deemed un-Norwegian, all of which makes Wærness’s poetry uncommonly lexically diverse.
Moreover, many of Wærness’s pieces are beautifully, hauntingly, and sometimes dizzyingly polyvocal: voices interrupting other voices mid-stanza and sometimes mid-sentence without paratextual markers. His poems are also ecstatic admixtures of registers, combining concerns unabashedly spiritual and political with madcap irony and deeply affecting lyricism. And, to add to this, his use of caesuras allows Wærness to push his often periodic sentences, with sometimes klezmer-like syncopation, to their grammatical and semantic limits.
Finally, in translating Norwegian I sometimes wrestle with what appears to be a markedly different paradigm of causality. The way causality is lexicalized in Norwegian is more surprising to me than the way it is lexicalized in, for instance, Spanish and English. The Norwegian imaginary appears to be filled with a physics of causation that can sometimes leave me, as translator, hanging in a foggy void. Partly I think this is because English makes, according to translation scholar Sonia Vandepitte, a very clear and basic distinction between “physical and motivational causal relation[s],” by which she means that English distinguishes crisply between causes that are (a) natural phenomena lying outside human control and (b) reasons for causation involving human agency. The result is that someone used to the literatures of English and Spanish could, in encountering a world with more causal possibilities, experience more prosopopoeia on the one hand and what might seem at times like a vitalistic or panpsychistic causation on the other. See in particular the causality deployed in Wærness’s poem “the business of the dead.” This tricky issue of causality proved to be a strange sticking point in my translation of Waerness’s poetry.
Beyond the sizeable problem of my recent rank unfamiliarity with the language, a not insubstantial secondary difficulty is that Wærness’s Norwegian isn’t simply, as one could expect from one of the foremost writers in today’s Norway, virtuosic—it can at times border on the baroque. Wærness’s bokmål is also heavily influenced by his native dialect, a vernacular mode known as trøndersk, which a prominent Norwegian linguist once deemed un-Norwegian, all of which makes Wærness’s poetry uncommonly lexically diverse.
Moreover, many of Wærness’s pieces are beautifully, hauntingly, and sometimes dizzyingly polyvocal: voices interrupting other voices mid-stanza and sometimes mid-sentence without paratextual markers. His poems are also ecstatic admixtures of registers, combining concerns unabashedly spiritual and political with madcap irony and deeply affecting lyricism. And, to add to this, his use of caesuras allows Wærness to push his often periodic sentences, with sometimes klezmer-like syncopation, to their grammatical and semantic limits.
Finally, in translating Norwegian I sometimes wrestle with what appears to be a markedly different paradigm of causality. The way causality is lexicalized in Norwegian is more surprising to me than the way it is lexicalized in, for instance, Spanish and English. The Norwegian imaginary appears to be filled with a physics of causation that can sometimes leave me, as translator, hanging in a foggy void. Partly I think this is because English makes, according to translation scholar Sonia Vandepitte, a very clear and basic distinction between “physical and motivational causal relation[s],” by which she means that English distinguishes crisply between causes that are (a) natural phenomena lying outside human control and (b) reasons for causation involving human agency. The result is that someone used to the literatures of English and Spanish could, in encountering a world with more causal possibilities, experience more prosopopoeia on the one hand and what might seem at times like a vitalistic or panpsychistic causation on the other. See in particular the causality deployed in Wærness’s poem “the business of the dead.” This tricky issue of causality proved to be a strange sticking point in my translation of Waerness’s poetry.
Gunnar Wærness was born in 1971 in Heimdal, Norway; he lived in Bulgaria from 1997–2001 and currently resides outside of Osby, Sweden. He published his first poetry collection, kongesplint (kingsplinth / kingsplinter) in 1999, which was followed by Takk (Thanks) in 2002, Hverandres (Each Other) in 2006, and the fully illustrated book of poems bli verden (Become the World) in 2007. Later, he published Tungen og tåren (Tongue and Tear) in 2013 and Venn med alle (Friends with Everyone) in 2018. Wærness spent the better part of 2006–2010 making the anthology Verden finnes ikke på kartet (The World Isn’t on The Map), together with Pedro Carmona-Alvarez. He began translating and editing in 2005, and in 2016, he published a Norwegian translation of CAConrad’s The Book of Frank (Boka til Frank) with Audiatur. Forlaget Oktober published an anthology of Wærness’s selected poetry and artwork, Å skrive er å be om for mye: dikt og masker 1988–2020 (To Write is to Ask For Too Much: Poems and Masks 1988–2020), in September 2020. In 2021, Wærness and Gabriel Gudding will publish a bilingual Norwegian and English edition of Wærness’s adaption of the medieval hymn attributed to Arnulf of Leuven, Membra Jesu Nostri.
Since 2010, Wærness has acted as one half of the cabaret Brødet og Eselet (Bread and Donkey) with Henrik Skotte. They performed their first whole-night act Vi er motorvei (We are Highway) in 2013, published the tragic drama Griskokknetter (Porkchops) in 2014, and the novel €urodike (€urodice) in 2015 and the concept album Del likt (Share Equally) in 2017, which also is available on Spotify. Wærness is also a part of the Zimbabwean traditional ensemble Mhuri YeKwaChisava, with Tipei Marazanye, where they both play mbira, arrange workshops and run the educational project Yarira Ngoma in Mberengwa, Zimbabwe. Wærness has worked as a creative writing teacher since 2003.
Gabriel Gudding is a poet, essayist, and translator from primarily Norwegian and Spanish. He is the coordinator of creative writing at Illinois State University, and author of the books Literature for Nonhumans (Ahsahta, 2015), Rhode Island Notebook (Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), and A Defense of Poetry (Pitt, 2002), which won the Starrett Prize, as well as numerous chapbooks. His essays and poems appear in such periodicals as APR, Harper’s, The Nation, and Journal of the History of Ideas, and in such anthologies as Great American Prose Poems (Scribner), Best American Poetry (Scribner), Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan), and &Now: Best Innovative Writing. His translations from Spanish have been anthologized in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, Poems for the Millennium, and The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry. His poetry and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, Danish, Portuguese, and Vietnamese. In 2021, Wærness and Gudding will publish a bilingual Norwegian and English edition of Wærness’s adaption of the medieval hymn attributed to Arnulf of Leuven, Membra Jesu Nostri.
