Is Not Wind: Six Poems from Three Books
Translated from the Swedish by the author with Vivek Narayanan.
In the night she rose in violet light
thus proceeded things, snow flakes
fell sleeping through space, space
fell sleeping through snow flakes
Deep within the sorrow something
turned, twisting back a tapering vision
required no words, so far, moved around
the shriek of cut-down oak, she gathered
the moment inside, it gained weight, became
tectonic, syllables po-pounded, her hand
tried where the glass was, there’s the glass,
the bed laid out, alien, harmless
(From Solarna, The Suns, 2006)
Vanished month, greenery doused in
greenery. Everything visible, sticky, wasps
are chewing at the laundry, mouths dripping cherry,
the sweat, the sex. Anyone saying anything
will notice the words have eaten too much and that
the voice is absorbed before the sound. Anyone
who sets out a scale will find that the hand had merged
with the vast fermentation, the carrying over.
We are in the margin, the covetous margin. There
is no form here that is the time of grass, that can
see the visible. Nor shapelessness, nor flux.
Close your eyes, prevail. The rain and earth imagine
a sharp blade that cuts into being what is
always the other. Order inside orders, chew
chew and eject, dough for crusts.
The mud dies and rises. History exists.
Inland ice, the collarbone of a girl, clouds over
the human race, airdromes of tomorrow,
the autumn weighs itself.
(From Solarna, The Suns, 2006)
The garden was exhilarated about something that
morning. I stopped with a mug of coffee and
listened. The elm released its hands and the dew
was drawn to the sky. The actual condition
(my perceiving) of the place: substance loosening or
losing its grip, with a shy glance over shoulder,
maybe an invitation. My hand on the dark lubricated
table among yellow stains with smaller tints and inside
those yellow dots, stars, myths from the next age – the
absent is no salvage. Everything already done. And with
whatever’s left of the day I will write or read things
I do not comprehend, that do not comprehend me.
(from Skingra, Scatter, 2013)
Samos
The bell is sinking. The ships return
or depart. The lizard on the brick barrier
tries on the void a flash of thin tongue.
I carry a bag of paprika up the narrow
alley. Every colour leans slightly forward
but remains quiet. Perhaps this
motionlessness is taking place in the
Andromeda galaxy, which, they say, is on
its way to us. To intermingle and disappear
as seconds in the brain of the goat.
(From Inte är vind, Is Not Wind, 2015)
Summer is almost gone blackcurrants shine
in the motionless nearly dark light convex
mirrors where summer the anamorphous slowly
revolves round itself Does every berry reflect
its own dying summer or the same and only? Possibly
both innumerable and identical The substance of all
is outside the summer or it might be so cunningly
hidden in the summer that it forgets that it’s hiding
and therefore can’t be seen Cluster of differences
change it’s the substance that is unchangeable, that
resembles itself Your hands get sticky red and in
the kitchen roams that scent which begs you to harness
the dragon and steer it towards a steeper, harder tale
(From Inte är vind, Is Not Wind, 2015)
Window, Russel Square
Tinges of insomnia among the trees. All
is unusual & opens helplessly in green
shadow. When faces appear in the light
of other faces you imagine all memories
stored there on the inside. Rested like
umbrellas. Left in dark corners. Suddenly
flaming mad as parrots. Quiet again
filtered fragmented in the obligatory
drizzle that is sipped by the grass by a larger
palate: oblivion. That thus exists and tinge
by tinge abandons its darkness when touching
summer. Now you are here again for
the first time and will ride the red bus to the
world’s largest toy store. Now you are here
next time and have arranged to meet someone
who likes it when you watch her face and
wonder about its light and how the face
changes – as oblivion turns to memory –
when you approach. Only death is at one’s
destination. If there was a chary benevolence –
but the strophe eats itself with vinegar. In front
of the museum the antique shop has noses
from Epicurean times on sale. Behind voices,
silence. Behind silence, voices and
those seem under sail / that lie at anchor
safe. Emptiness carries all that is. Soon
the trees are invisible the poem forgotten soon
the rain is alone
(From Inte är vind, Is Not Wind, 2015)
Erik Bergqvist (b. 1970, Karlstad, southern Sweden) is the author of six collections of poetry in Swedish and has also been a critic writing on literature and music in the Swedish press for some twenty years. In 2015, he won the Gustaf Fröding Society poetry prize. Bergqvist has translated Simon Armitage, René Char, Mai Van Phan and others into Swedish; Virvlarna (“Whirlpools”), a large collection of his essays, fragments and occasional pieces, appeared in 2017. He is also a keen amateur lepidopterist and is one half of the pop/electronica duo Schaum.
Vivek Narayanan is Co-Editor of Almost Island. He was born in India to Tamil-speaking parents and grew up in Zambia. He did undergraduate and graduate work in the United States, taught at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and moved back to India in 2000. His first book of poems, Universal Beach, was published in 2006. A new, revised US edition of that book was published in 2011, and a second volume, Mr.Subramanian, is also forthcoming. Some of Narayanan's poems and short stories can be sampled online at places like The International Literary Quarterly, Pratilipi, Agni, Manchester Review, Blackbox Manifold, and elsewhere, as well as offline in recent anthologies like The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East,Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton).