Central Song

Reviewing Gösta Ågren’s new collection Centralsång, Michel Ekman writes about the “deceptive calm” of Ågren’s poetry:

Vår plikt är att minnas grymheten, men själva minnesakten kräver ett mått av ro och avskildhet... En dal i våldet hette det stora urval ur sin produktion som Gösta Ågren en gång gav ut. Spänningen mellan å ena sidan iakttagandet / formulerandet och å andra sidan det blinda och ständiga våldet som genomsyrar tillvaron går igenom hela hans författarskap.

Tua Forsström

Books from Finland magazine has published some of my translations of poems from Tua Forsström's new collection. There's also a short introductory essay by Michel Ekman, also in my translation.

The Cities Inside Hall

Michel Ekman, reviewing Johannes Anyuru's Städerna inuti Hall (The Cities Inside Hall) in Hbl (excerpt, my tr.):

...The Cities Inside Hall is a daydream, or rather, given its grim tone, a waking night dream. At the beginning we meet the poetic “I” on a park bench. To be on the safe side, the bench is left empty, so all one has to do is sit down in the author's position. Then we set off on a journey, an inner journey, but still in a largely recognizable world, with concrete features (troubles) to make up our minds about. The distinguishing characteristic of this world is described in the title. Hall is a Swedish prison: the whole world is locked up in it.

The poetic “I” is suffused by a never-ending flood of pain and discomfort. Prison scenes, riots in Paris and Copenhagen, flashbacks to the war in Algeria, expressions of alienation and suffering in modern society fill the poems like short, specific scenes of violence. On a more abstract level Anyuru chooses – with a shade too much didacticism – the lock as a symbol of oppression. Detailed descriptions of various locking mechanisms pop up repeatedly. Another motif – the law – appears with lesser frequency, becoming lost in airy ambiguity.

There is obviously something impressive about a poetry collection that runs to 358 pages, and one feels that the sheer mass of print would be enough to knock the critics on their backs. For myself, however, I think that The Cities Inside Hall suffers from monotony and lack of conceptual focus. The poems seem to constantly generate new poems because they find it difficult to stand on their own. It is, after all, impossible to read a colossus like this as carefully and with the same attention to the whole that one would devote to an ordinary collection of poems. The question then becomes: what is the poetry form really being used for?

That question is reinforced by the fact that the form itself is also problematic. The staccato idiom employed by Anyuru often does not work particularly well in print. Presumably, it was originally conceived for reading aloud, but in contrast to two of his obvious models, Göran Sonnevi and Bruno K. Öijer, Anyuru finds it hard to create a style that also works in print. He falls short of his predecessors on another point, too. This has to do with the poetry’s political potential. Anyuru has been hailed as a renewer of the political poem, but I find neither the political acumen of a Sonnevi nor the provocative anti-politics of an Öijer in his work. Anyuru ends up in a tepid middle ground where much centres on the idea that policemen are not nice people.

The Cities Inside Hall strikes me as a book that is only half-finished, written by an author who is feeling the heavy hand of expectation on him. That doesn’t alter the picture of Johannes Anyuru as one of the most promising voices in Swedish poetry.

Life is short

by Michel Ekman

I imagine a place of permanent, unspecific existence, a time without time, a limbo, a death without death’s finality and sharpness of definition, where the souls are stored away in an incomplete state of being that has no aim or meaning. It may be a veranda, but outside the windows no lilac bushes are visible, just an unbroken grey darkness.

And what do they do there, the souls? Well, they do crosswords, they play patience, they read detective novels. The boxes are constantly filled with words, the cards finally end up in four piles of equal size, the detective concludes by revealing to the surprised and slightly disappointed reader that it was actually the person who was murdered who committed the murder, even though everyone went on thinking the opposite for as long as possible.

Life is short and full of suffering, our bodies weigh us down to the earth, our routines clog our senses. The pull to escape from it all is almost irresistible. The crosswords, the games of patience and detective novels are of course very blameless and old-fashioned ways of doing so.

They stand vividly before me, a middle-aged man, because I remember an older generation which doggedly waited for death while occupied with these pastimes. But in them dwells the seed which – via the infinite number of television channels, computer games and the commercial music industry – has, in the wake of increased leisure time, turned the whole of life into a waiting for death. We have come many steps closer to what Elmer Diktonius put into words in one of  his aphorisms: “If the purpose of art were to anaesthetize, to make us forget life, then a hammer-blow to the skull would be the simplest art, and the best” – though perhaps not quite in the way that Diktonius meant.

But why do I dwell on detective novels in particular? Perhaps because texts are such a large part of my life, literary scholar that I am. Ever since I developed grown-up reading habits some thirty years ago, I have been sceptical about the plot, that two-stroke engine that will helpfully chop any mass of text at all into little pieces. True, there are also books that make even me turn the pages nervously and skip to the end. Joseph Skvorecky’s The Engineer of Human Souls was one such book, for example.

But on the whole it seems to me as though the plot, when it isn’t in the hands of the greatest masters, is a way of leading the reader past the text’s weaknesses, past the thin, in human terms uninteresting, linguistically mediocre by holding out the prospect of something more, something that will come later as long as one follows the sequence of events without stopping to think about that it is one’s reading right now. Rarely, rarely are those promises fulfilled – and even if they were to be fulfilled it would not be worth picking one’s way through the stereotyped masses of text just in order to be finally rewarded with a stereotyped surprise: the novel’s dénouement .

And what literary genre is more slavishly bound by the compulsion of plot than the detective story and the thriller? And as a result, more stereotyped in its particulars and its structure. The opera, of course – and one can only imagine the joy of seeing Tosca without music.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff