On Translating Aase Berg

I started reading Aase Berg’s poetry back in the nineties, when I was a John Donne–binging college student. Her first book, With Deer, with its visceral and over-the-top imagery—most memorably, perhaps, the guinea pigs swarming like insects in womb-like caves—re-excited me about poetry, bringing me back to the thrill of first reading Sylvia Plath and the surrealists. Berg brought that same energy to the visionary Dark Matter, a rewiring of Harry Martinson’s sci-fi allegory Aniara that noisily collages scientific terminologies and images until allegory is lost and the reader is submerged in a breakneck flow of catastrophic imagery. Both books could be read as nature poetry—but a perverse, surrealist nature poetry that doesn't exclude that most basic of biological phenomena, Death.

Berg’s most recent book, Aase’s Death, is also a book of weird nature poetry that operates in the orbit of Martinson, this time of his nature poems, offering compact images of nature enlivened by surprising metaphors. Here, verse lines move slowly and steadily down the page, delivering sudden synaptic shocks: we go from the shouting of quails to the rattling of a mechanical toy, from “the wind’s feet” to the image of a spaceship landing on earth. These unexpected couplings generate the poem’s energy.

I am reminded of Georges Didi-Huberman’s book on the Renaissance painter Fra Angelico, where he argues that the painter’s work contains “blotches,” moments not of resemblance but of “dissemblance,” where the painting ceases to be representative and instead directs us toward larger theological mystery. For example, in his take on the iconic Noli me tangere in which the resurrected Christ reappears in the garden, Fra Angelico stipples the ground with blotches of color that do not resemble flowers but are of the same hue, shape, and size as Christ’s wounds, and that pierce the scene with mystery. Just so, the “blotches” in Berg’s poems—for example, metaphors that bring spaceships and pianos into nature scenes—both interrupt the idealization of “nature” and involve us in its mystery.

Nature appears in Berg’s poems as both fundamentally other—a place where, as Berg writes in my translation, "nobody works,/everyone dies”—and also as the place where she dwells, or her “death.” Often the poems unfold on the bottom of the ocean, a place inhabited by slow, barely alive creatures. The poems included here, though set on land, have the same kind of saturation. This is the place of the death in the title: an inhuman space, where nature is both pretty and destructive and involves both butterflies and mechanical toys. The title is jokey and dark, referring both to a piece from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt and, more brutally, to the dark mood of the book. These poems are markedly different from the overtly political, moralistic ecopoems of contemporary US poetry, and may be—to invoke John Keats’s “negative capability”—negative ecopoems. The last page of the book contains a strikingly ambiguous statement cloaked in declarative syntax: “men jag ska rasa.” The first three words articulate an intention to act—"But I will"—while the last one, a word that can mean either “collapse” or “rage,” introduces a cosmic doubleness. In its final line, Aase's Death vaults into an impossible futurity. There the speaker will collapse, or she will rage—but she will not die.