Bror Rönnholm: Two Prose Poems

The Mirror

When she disappeared, she left her image behind in the mirror, where it wilfully obscured the reflection, making it impossible to see yourself, something that simply added to his sadness and despair.

His strange cousin did, however, have a solution. She placed another mirror opposite, so that the image was multiplied in the familiar manner and started to blow her didgeridoo. This combination made the mirror vibrate strongly, so that the image was broken up into small flecks, which glided around the room for a while until they came together as butterflies and flew out through the balcony door, which stood open.

But the mirror was never the same again. Nowadays, it presents a thin and worn reflection, so that you can see straight through your own face into a severe and stony landscape, beautiful and eternally frozen.

*

The Voice

When she returned, her voice had aged by forty years. This was appreciated at the clinic where girls in crisis sought solace and security in this grandmother’s voice. But when face to face with her, many would grow confused. Could they place any trust in the smooth face and the gravelly voice, the sporty life of the cheeks and the drunken nights of the voice? Her eyes gave no clue; they were constantly flickering, people couldn’t remember their colour. She herself would waver, torn between disgust and pity. No one would have been surprised had she dressed in black and masked herself with kohl. But she continued to dress in red and wind her scarves three times around her slender neck. One radio station offered her a job as jazz presenter on a night programme, but she declined the offer. Can’t stand improvisation, is what she said.

***

Another of Bror Rönnholm's prose poems from the same collection is here.

Translated from Swedish by Eric Dickens

Bror Rönnholm - From a Hollow in Summer

Bror Rönnholm (born 1949) lives in Åbo (aka Turku) in southwestern Finland and is the author of five poetry collections. His latest one Från en grop i sommaren (A Dip / Hole / Hollow / Depression in [the] Summer), Schildts, 2007, contains only prose-poetry. Prose-poetry is a genre in itself. The pieces tend to be as short as poems, but there is no typographic "shaping" of the outline of the words, and sentences run to their normal length. It appears to have arisen with Rimbaud and Mallarmé, then spread further afield. Rönnholm's first prose-poem from the collection runs like this:

The Hollow

He opened the letter and read: Am writing to you from a hollow in summer. That's putting it rather poetically, he thought, but the rest was crass and unsettling. There was no signature, and he hadn't a clue who it was. Did however think he knew which hollow was meant and drove out to the sand quarry, but nothing could be seen there beyond the stupidity of his own inkling.

Everyone knows very well that summer is a peak, not a hollow, he thought. A hill down the other side of which prams and trailers, bottles, balls and roundly generous promises roll till they are stopped by autumn storms, waterlogged ditches, unmown lawns and the laws of inertia.

He went back home, rummaged among his rubber stamps, and stamped no action to be taken on the letter. Didn't however find the right file to put it in.

You will note that in English, the word "grop" can have several different, subtly different meanings. It can even mean "dimple". This is where the translator agonises about tone and meaning. I shall be posting up more of Bror Rönnholm's prose poems in due course.