Backlist Bulletin #1: Transfer Fat by Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson

by Serena Solin

“Ecological awareness is like knowing, but more like letting-be-known. It is something like coexisting. It is like becoming accustomed to something strange, yet it is also becoming accustomed to strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation.” — Tim Morton, “What is Dark Ecology?”

Poetry in translation is a mode of expression well-suited to ecological thinking because space is always left for the unknown. In Transfer Fat, Johannes Göransson’s translation of Swedish poet Aase Berg, the molecular level is as good a place as any to begin a project of ecological awareness. The sticky problems of species, of human vs. nonhuman consciousness, do not present themselves. Fat molecules are combustible and therefore warm, edible and therefore transferable; fat is both solid and liquid. Fat is physical proof of the interconnectedness that can serve as the foundation for ecological thinking beyond nature.

Transfer Fat’s central organisms are the whale, the hare, and the Voter, the (pregnant) human — puns in Swedish, not so in English. Throughout the poems, these three beings inhabit and pass through one another: “I am still dead, I am flowing. Will follow hare through the newborn’s wild calm, go the hare’s softly rumbling sphere shape” (p. 9). The abstract and the concrete become one: “Time is shell” (p. 11). In “Power Line,” as in many of Göransson’s translations, conventional English vocabulary is not enough:

The giggly quillering in the light-capillary

the fluttering flicker against the outlet screen

In the landing pool the deep is formless

the bubbling spring is stubbornly warm (p. 35)

What is “quillering” (“kvillret”)? It brings to mind quivering, the quill, quelling, kvetching. It is an animal noise. But the poem does not necessarily exist in an animal space; electricity, the screen, and the pool are all of the manmade world. The “light-capillary” could be tubes of a television, or a nervous system. Manufactured objects are granted the same mystery as the bubbling spring. Throughout the book, the original Swedish on the left-hand side and the English translation on the right seem equally alien (at least to this English-speaking reader) but the words and letters — the constituent molecules — transfer meaning through sound, bypassing human logic: “rabies är frihet / i Harens år” or “rabies is freedom / in the Year of the Hare” (pp. 68–9). Even an English-speaking reader can feel the uncanny weight of these lines in both languages.

The history of science is a rejection of the unknown. But to reject the unknown is to control or colonize, and in an age of climate catastrophe, this way of thinking seems particularly ill-advised. In Transfer Fat, Berg does not put science aside in service of romantic naturalism, nor does she force science to serve as a way of understanding. The language of physics (the most mysterious realm of science) is no more or less tangible than the whale jaw that “bends aside space and time” (p. 33). Instead, Berg and Göransson propose “existence as an intervention in the surface tension” (p. 55).

The Backlist Bulletin is a weekly column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.