Lonespeech

An elemental, uncanny collection of poems translated from one of Sweden’s most influential and beloved poets.

In Lonespeech, Ann Jäderlund rewires the correspondence between writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan into a series of stark, runic poems about the fraught act of communication and its failures. Forsaking her reputation as a baroque poet, Jäderlund uses simple words and phrases in favor of an almost childlike simplicity, giving her poems, on first glance, the appearance of parables: mountains, sunlight, rivers, aortas. Upon closer inspection, the poems glitch, bend, and torque into something else, enigmatic and forceful, lending them, as Jäderlund says, the force of ＂clear velocity.＂

Ann Jäderlund (b. 1955) is a poet as well as a translator and playwright. She is widely acknowledged as one of the leading Swedish poets over the past forty plus years. Her enigmatic second book, Which once had been meadow, set off a fierce debate in Swedish media--now known as ＂the Ann Jäderlund Debates--about the role of mystery, accessibility and gender in contemporary poetry. She has gone on to write eleven books of poetry, as well as children’s books and plays. For her work, she has received numerous awards and honors, including the Aniara Prize, the Bellman Prize, The Nine’s Big Prize and the Erik Lindegren Prize. In 2022, her collected poems were published by Bonniers. In addition to her own poems, she has published a number of books of translations, most notably Gång på gång är skogarna rosa (Frequently the Woods are Pink), her critically acclaimed selection and translation of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Her work Lonespeech (Ensamtal) is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Jäderlund lives in Stockholm, Sweden.