{"id":397702,"date":"2018-05-05T15:00:13","date_gmt":"2018-05-05T15:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=397702"},"modified":"2018-05-07T10:47:12","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T14:47:12","slug":"third-millennium-heart-by-ursula-andkjaer-olsen-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2018\/05\/05\/third-millennium-heart-by-ursula-andkjaer-olsen-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Third-Millennium Heart” by Ursula Andkj\u00e6r Olsen [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series is from poet, translator, editor, and BTBA judge, Aditi Machado.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Third-Millennium Heart<\/em><\/a> by Ursula Andkj\u00e6r Olsen, translated from the Danish by Katrine \u00d8gaard Jensen (Denmark, Broken Dimanche Press\/Action Books)<\/strong><\/p>\n

What\u2019s a translated book got to do to survive?<\/p>\n

If you live in the world I\u2014curious judge, irritated poet, hungry editor\u2014live in, you might think, as I do, that a translated book survives by its ability to say: I got you and that\u2019s why: you get me. <\/em><\/p>\n

And you might also think, as I do: why must we get each other so? What is this desire, from literature, for solace?<\/p>\n

And then you might get to a place of wondering, as I am: what\u2019s a translated book got to do to live? I mean, really<\/em> live. Exceed all of the reasons why someone should translate it and publish it and why it is translatable and why it could not possibly be translated. Exceed even the reasons why \u201cwe\u201d \u201cmust\u201d \u201cread\u201d \u201cit,\u201d all the prerequisites of our meagre but essential industry of publishing.<\/p>\n

Because all the truly excellent books on my shelves are excellent precisely because they have nothing to do with me. They owe me nothing. But I owe them everything. And it\u2019s my obligation to read them, learn from them, treat them as the miraculous, overpowering creatures they are.<\/p>\n

This is the realm of excellence in which Katrine \u00d8gaard Jensen\u2019s translation of Danish poet Ursula Andkj\u00e6r Olsen\u2019s Third-Millennium Heart<\/em> exists.<\/p>\n

I would love for everyone to read this book\u2014I am advocating for its circulation. At the same time, the book doesn\u2019t need us to read it in order for it to be alive. We need to be alive to it.<\/p>\n

Third-Millennium Heart<\/em> is a book-length poem, a happy 200-ish pages long. It is spoken by a speaker whom we cannot fix to a particular biography or body and whose mechanisms of desire are fueled, perversely, by hegemonies of structure. But something about the voracity of this desire unsettles the structures it witnesses and absorbs: patriarchy, capitalism, culture, nature, sex\u2014all get processed through the speaker and rewritten in a new language.<\/p>\n

At times I think the speaker a factory for turning money (\u201cback\u201d) into leaves. Other times I think it\u2019s too simple to say the speaker simply turns every hierarchy on its head\u2014a book that did that might indeed be too simple. It\u2019s more like there\u2019s a mutual interpenetration of the subject and her environment. Some very complex mutations occur, so that we get, for example, the horrifically compromised \u201cMatriarchate,\u201d with its echoes of \u201cmatriarchy\u201d and \u201cmarket\u201d; or the extraordinary \u201cbabel cunt\u201d and \u201civory brain\u201d with which the speaker thinks.<\/p>\n

\u201cMatriarchate\u201d is a good example of the suggestiveness of the source text, the suggestibility of the translator (to be moved by the text in the way that it moves), and also her wit. My lack of Danish doesn\u2019t prevent me from consulting the great dictionaries of the internet and one of them informs me that the Danish for \u201cmarket\u201d is \u201cmarked\u201d and for \u201cmatriarchy\u201d is \u201cmatriarkat\u201d; the word Olsen uses in her poem is \u201cMatriarkatet\u201d (a declension or neologism, perhaps?). In English, \u201cMatriarchate\u201d is an apt discovery, for it denotes matriarchy (of which it is a rarer usage) and connotes the market inside<\/em> matriarchy or of <\/em>matriarchy.<\/p>\n

The Matriarchate III<\/p>\n

You can fuck Mother Market, it won\u2019t help anything.<\/p>\n

Every hole seals itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are ever so many things to say about this book and its two mothers, but I\u2019ll end, simply, with what Olsen Jensen have to say in and through the palpating Third-Millennium Heart<\/em>:<\/p>\n

I take my name from my surroundings: a place so namedrunk it matches the namedrunk in me.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

I am the cradle of culture: lean, lean<\/em><\/p>\n

out of my towers.<\/em><\/p>\n

I am exposing the structure.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

The male and the female, I rub these two against each other<\/p>\n

until everything happens, I think with babel cunt, with ivory brain<\/p>\n

until I think babel brain, with ivory cock, and nothing inside<\/p>\n

me will keep you from going there, where society is not, and color<\/p>\n

your longings with RED radiance.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

No one<\/em> will stream through my<\/em> paranoia-carcass.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

Everything<\/em> must stream through my<\/em> paranoia-carcass.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from poet, translator, editor, and BTBA judge, Aditi Machado.\u00a0 Third-Millennium Heart by Ursula Andkj\u00e6r Olsen, translated from the Danish by Katrine \u00d8gaard Jensen (Denmark, Broken Dimanche Press\/Action Books) What\u2019s a translated book got to do to survive? If you live in the world I\u2014curious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":397712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[35996,66446,49386,37876],"class_list":["post-397702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba","tag-btba-2018","tag-btba-poetry","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397702","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=397702"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398192,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397702\/revisions\/398192"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}