{"id":293886,"date":"2013-04-27T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-27T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/04\/27\/why-this-book-should-win-transfer-fat-by-aase-berg-btba-2013\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:28","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:28","slug":"why-this-book-should-win-transfer-fat-by-aase-berg-btba-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/04\/27\/why-this-book-should-win-transfer-fat-by-aase-berg-btba-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Why This Book Should Win: "Transfer Fat" by Aase Berg [BTBA 2013]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA<\/span> Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA<\/span> poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here.<\/a> Stay tuned for more information about the May 3rd ceremony.<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

Transfer Fat<\/em><\/a> by Aase Berg, translated from the Swedish by Johannes G\u00f6ransson, and published by Ugly Duckling Presse.<\/b><\/p>\n

Jennifer Kronovet is the author of the poetry collection Awayward<\/em>, which was selected by Jean Valentine for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She is the co-founder of Circumference: Poetry in Translation.<\/em><\/i><\/p>\n

Why this book should win: It amazingly makes English feel like a new language with visceral power.<\/p>\n

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that almost everyone reading this review here is interested in foreign languages. Although some books in translation may try to hide the very fact that they are translated, many of us turn to books in translation because they are that—a twisty relationship, a multi-dimensional trip, a dynamically charged confluence, language within language within language. Part of the engaging pleasure of reading contemporary Swedish poet Aase Berg’s Transfer Fat<\/em>, translated by Johannes G\u00f6ransson, is that one feels as though one is reading in a foreign language, and yet, has access to understanding the words as themselves. <\/p>\n

Transfer Fat<\/em> makes a world and puts us inside it to hear its language, to be subject to its laws and materiality, to be a citizen called upon to act and be acted upon. Articles are removed, new compounds words are made, and commands are given, and so this language feels like a paradigmatic example of itself, essential and new as it subverts expected idioms and means multi-directionally. This language is both highly prepositional and highly visceral; we are in<\/em> relation and on top of<\/em> relations and at<\/em> relationships. With what? Whale fat, breast-gristle, hare-milk, glasswater, a fatcatatonic election promise, Hal, the hare Cosmos<\/em>, and more nouns that seem pure thing and pure metaphor, Swedish and of my Midwestern backyard, political and inborn. These contrasts are productively disorienting. One learns to see this new language (am I beginning to think in it?) as one capable of bringing the body and the body politic together, and the body and the mind that charges it.<\/p>\n

The first poem begins:<\/p>\n

\n

Cut the keel
\nin harebrood pool
\ncut fin in fat
\nfishtailborn<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Right away the speaker asks us to perform a violence (as translators are often accused of doing) and in that violence, a new word is made, fishtailborn<\/em>, and perhaps this new word is us, now composed of parts, of language severed and re-glued. After a large space on the page the poem continues: <\/p>\n

\n

Keep fat
\nlet fat wait
\nkeep time
\nlet time go
\nlet time rock calmly in hare
\nlet fat build core in hare
\nin the hare Cosmos
\ntime is shell<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If we follow the speaker’s suggestions, follow the new language happening, we end up with a new feeling for how time works, a new metaphysics. The manipulations of language in the book never feel coy or like play for playing’s sake. Rather, through the thick scrim of foreigness, language is amplified as being viscerally of the body and of time, capable of leading us to bold ideas if we follow its permutations.<\/p>\n

In the translator’s note, G\u00f6ransson, a poet in English and native speaker of Swedish, writes that Forsla fett<\/em> is “an ambient space where the Swedish language goes through all kinds of permutations: words, connotations, meanings letters are put into flux, combining and recombining continually.” G\u00f6ransson notes that Berg brings parts of English-language texts into her poems which further “deforms the Swedish language.” Thus, the book is its materiality, is the way it moves in language, or rather, moves languages out of themselves. How does one translate such a text, when carrying over only the “meaning” of the words would be to lose almost everything? G\u00f6ransson takes risks. He challenges and deforms English. He moves into the world of Forsla fett<\/em> and practices the processes it demands on English, cutting and recreating, melting together and splicing, transferring and fattening and thinning, and we are left with the fat and the muscle of meaning, new language we can work with, that works on us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[51236,48756,50266,31546,29146,1646,6436,51226,28616],"class_list":["post-293886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-aase-berg","tag-btba-2013","tag-btba-2013-why-this-book-should-win","tag-jennifer-kronovet","tag-johannes-goransson","tag-review","tag-swedish-literature","tag-transfer-fat","tag-ugly-duckling-presse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318336,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293886\/revisions\/318336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}