A poem by Katarina Frostenson

Translated from the Swedish by Bradley Harmon

Heron Lands

Grain and sky

Cornfields   a flatland

Gray houses in a dream
Brain-barns

Weeds growing in the ditch

The fence green, beautifully carved far away so turquoise

Few flowers, does the sandy earth starve them out or
are flowers considered frivolous

Sparsely populated

Lonely trees. One with pears
Pears are called hruša
a soft tongue, Belarusian

the word FOG alone in the fog
a truly thick one as the nightingale’s song breaks through
the bird bellows, falls from a burst heart to the ground

Fog Cloud
unseen
Heron Lands
The black species hides out in the swamps

roads do not bend here
they stretch on into endlessness
a glimpse of the blue tractor

                                                 a pink gate

a remote land

and the forests
the moss
the poison in the sorrel
tears shivering over spring soup

what can I eat
where can I be
can I lie in the grass
quiet anxiety
life-threatening for humans

can this landscape heal
can it be itself again
and humans can return
see a child’s swing

never do the roads bend as they cut through the heron lands it is
a straight stretch into eternity and out into even sky

eleven thousand lakes lie in this landscape
none are visible
but farther in the distance runs a river named Pina
lies a city named Lida
a land that is a land that is no land to be remembered
long straight roads that never seem to turn
the monotony from which song must eventually rise
to the delight of the poet

Hägermarker

Ax och himmel

Sädesfält   flackland

Gråa drömhus
Hjärnlador

Kålodling i diken 

Staket gröna, vackert snidade långt bort så turkosa

Få blommor, svälter sandjorden ut dem eller
anses blommor vara onödiga –

Glest befolkat

Ensamma träd. Ett med päron
Päron heter ihrusja
ett mjukt språk, belarusiskan

Ordet FOG ensamt i dimman
en riktig tjocka som näktergalens sång bryter igenom
fågeln vrålar, faller av infarkt till marken

Dimma Moln
som inte syns
Hägermarker
Den svarta arten döljer sig i träsken

vägar kröker inte här
går ut i en ändlöshet
där skymtar den blå traktorn

                                                  grinden i rosa

ett avlägset land

och skogarna
mossan
giftet i ängssyran
tårar över vårsoppan

vad kan jag äta
var kan jag vara
kan jag lägga mig i gräset
tyst ängslan
livsfarlig för människan

när har det läkt
kan detta landskap bli sig självt
och mänskan komma åter till
en gunga

aldrig kröker sig vägen genom hägermarker den är
en raksträcka i evighet och ut i den jämna himlen

elvatusen sjöar finns i detta landskap
ingen är synlig
men längre bort rinner en flod som heter Pina
ligger en stad som heter Lida
ett land som är ett land som är inget land att minnas
långa raka vägar som aldrig verkar svänga
det entoniga ur vilket sång till slut ändå måste resa sig
till fägnad för poeten

Translator’s Note on Heron Lands by Katarina Frostenson

Long regarded as a difficult, experimental, and hermetic writer, Katarina Frostenson in her poetry has opened up into a much more meditative mode in recent years. While the poems’ thematic interests remain consistent, they are inflected with a wisdom that characterizes a poet entering her sixth decade of writing. To call poetry existential is virtually a truism, yet Frostenson’s existentialism orients itself towards the eventual indeterminacy and uncertainty of life. That we may never get the “answers” we’re looking for doesn’t render the search for them futile. Every honest attempt at philosophy, however bold, must eventually admit the unfinished nature of its project. Such is also the case of poetry. In my view, the best poems exude a self-aware air of this fact. It is not impatient resignation, but carefully considered endurance. This slant towards life’s indeterminate truth characterizes Frostenson’s poem Heron Lands featured here, which comes from the 2015 collection Sånger och formler (The Space of Time, Threadsuns Press 2024).

*

The notion of nature—be it an urban milieu, a suburban hometown, or a “natural” environment ostensibly untouched by the hands of humans, of machines—has been a consistent theme in Frostenson’s poetry. Rather than being a form of nature lyric or ecopoetry, Frostenson’s engagement of the natural world might be described as a poetic investigation of the non-human within or surrounding the human. As a poet who, for the lion’s share of her career, casts a suspicious eye towards claims of language’s access to truth, not to mention the patriarchal violence employed through the Word, much of Frostenson’s poetry has instead traversed the interstitial space between linguistic and pre-linguistic meaning (meaning understood here not as an interpretation of truth, but of something beyond the realm of truth as commonly understood). Such a skepticism may be why so much of her poetry concerns the body and its relation to language, to sound, to space, to being in the world.

Some scholars of Frostenson’s writing have argued that her writing “turns” at the millennium from said hermetic skepticism towards a Rilkean (via Heidegger) “Open” (Offene), understood both as a kind of poetic mysticism; that is, a view of what poetry is and what its function is (the power of becoming; the ability of the poem to detach the world from its human conditioning; to be in the world and with it, connected to nature through poetry and the rhythm of the breath, the pulse of the body), as well as a kind of necessary attempt to write away from the perspective of the human (for Rilke, only non-human animals have access to the Open). For Frostenson, the Open manifests both in the poetic image and poetic form (sometimes simultaneously) and shows a more explicit ecological engagement reminiscent of what American scholar Lynn Keller terms “poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene.” Formally, we see it, for example, in the 2011 collection Flodtid (Floodhour), where its deep structure follows a network of vowel patterns (including the breakdown of the written word into only vowels)—Swedish has the same vowels we have in English a, e, i, o, u, y (pronounced differently, of course, and both short and long) as well as three extra vowels å, ä, ö. This “vowel-play” falls in line with the indeterminacy of the compound word Flodtid (flow/river/flood + time/hour).

When it comes to the poetic image, the poem “Heron Lands” is an illustrative example. In Swedish, the poem bears the title Hägermarker (heron + lands) and is presumably set in the Belarusian countryside – the poem refers explicitly to the softness of the Belarusian language and gives two “coordinates:” the city of Lida and the river Pina. Yet, crucially, the poem implicitly gestures towards the poet’s childhood: Frostenson grew up in the district of Hägersten (heron + stone), which lies at the outer southwestern edge of Stockholm. This place has likewise been a consistent theme in Frostenson’s poetry, whether as the subject of entire poems or as a passing reference (it appears but once in The Space of Time, in the poem Silent Directive: “Hägersten in a kangaroo pouch in thought”). The Space of Time as a whole is inspired by and dedicated to the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva—the Swedish title Sånger och formler (Songs and Formulae) derives from a quote from Tsvetaeva that appears as a concluding epigraph: “Two dear things in life: song and formula”). There are countless gestures throughout Frostenson’s oeuvre to literary figures both known and overlooked; her poems are in dialogue with them as much as they are in dialogue with the poet’s own memories and new experiences. Given the weaving of Belarusian landscape and the nation’s capital into the fabric of this collection, one can presume that, in this poem, a trip to Belarus also conjures a union with the past, resulting in a speaker content with abiding the natures of existence, uncertain though they might be.

*

Of this collection, one critic wrote that “Frostenson has long had an ability to articulate feelings that have no words, to articulate the wordless,” an existentially serious skill that nonetheless carries an ability to abate anxiety, perhaps the kind described as life-threatening and silent in this poem. An akin ability to conjure new linguistic glimmer into the meaning of life characterizes the strongest of poetry, hence why Frostenson is considered amongst the most fluent practitioners of Swedish letters, but a uniquely palpable patience pervades in her lines, perhaps emerging from the monotony of being, a “monotony from which song must eventually rise / to the delight of the poet.”—May 22, 2023

Katarina Frostenson (b. 1953) is one of the most notable living European poets. The author of over twenty books, her work has had a major influence on Swedish poetry since the 1980s. She has in addition written dramas, prose, an opera libretto, and translated works by Duras, Bataille, Bove and Michaux. Frostenson has received nearly every literary prize in Sweden and many across the European continent. In 2003, she was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in recognition of her services to literature and in 2016 was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize— Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary honor—for the collection Songs and Formulae. In 2019-2021, she released the series of books K, F, and A, the first of which is being adapted into a stage play to premier in October 2022 at the Folkteatern in Gothenburg.

Bradley Harmon (b. 1994) is a writer, translator and scholar of Scandinavian and German literature, philosophy, and film. His writing and translations have appeared in many journals including, most recently, Astra, Asymptote, Denver Quarterly, Plume, West Branch, and The White Review. In 2021 he was invited to the Översättargruvan translation workshop in Sweden. In 2022 he received second place for the inaugural Anne Frydman Translation Prize and was an ALTA Emerging Translator Fellow. His book translations include Monika Fagerholm’s Who Killed Bambi?, Katarina Frostenson’s The Space of Time, and Birgitta Trotzig’s A Landscape; Anima; and The Malady. A PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University and a 2023-2024 American Scandinavian Foundation Fellow, he lives between Baltimore and Stockholm.

Published July 15 2023