{"id":420632,"date":"2019-05-14T15:30:15","date_gmt":"2019-05-14T19:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=420632"},"modified":"2019-05-14T16:54:21","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T20:54:21","slug":"the-easiness-and-the-loneliness-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/05\/14\/the-easiness-and-the-loneliness-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"the easiness and the loneliness [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Laura Marris<\/strong>\u00a0is a writer and translator. Her poems and translations have appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The Yale Review,\u00a0The Brooklyn Rail,The Cortland Review,\u00a0The Volta,\u00a0Asymptote, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell Colony fellow and the winner of a Daniel Varoujan Prize. Her recent translations include Louis Guilloux\u2019s novel\u00a0<\/em>Blood Dark\u00a0(New York Review Books),\u00a0<\/em>The Safe House\u00a0by Christophe Boltanski (University of Chicago Press), and\u00a0Paol Keineg\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Triste Tristan and Other Poems\u00a0(co-translated with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press). She lectures in Creative Writing at Boston University, where she serves as the Director of the Favorite Poem Project.<\/em><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

the easiness and the loneliness<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Asta Olivia Nordenhof, translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied (Denmark, Open Letter Books)<\/p>\n

This is a book made from strange transitions, from in-between spaces where observations dilate, where the passage of time doesn\u2019t feel very healthy. There\u2019s a residual dread here that\u2019s easiest to approach sideways, a critique of empty, mean systems of social support that make it safest for the poet to stay in the present, glancing at the difficult past and the future she worries she might not survive. Take the opening lines:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

a wet lawn and me<\/p>\n

itll be nice to walk out onto it<\/p>\n

smell of maples here<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the easiness and the loneliness<\/p>\n

not to die by my own hand\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 not to own myself completely<\/p>\n

legalities and duties<\/p>\n

provide tea and oranges for the ill\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 that life comes from the outside<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

mornings earliest water<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the nerves are crazier than i<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"To be a body in the landscape, to be alone for a moment with the wet lawn or the smell of maples, invites a question\u2014what does the life that comes from the inside<\/em> sound like, and what would it be like for that life to have a voice in the world? It\u2019s the kind of writing that gets done on stolen time, when the writer is supposed to be caring for someone else or earning money for a family, dealing with \u201clegalities and duties.\u201d It\u2019s a voice stolen from its own nerves that threaten to take over.<\/p>\n

But most importantly, in Asta Olivia Nordenhof\u2019s book, and in Susanna Nied\u2019s brilliant translation, the full power of that voice gets to confront, take apart, and examine the misogynist, classist structures that want to depersonalize a thirty-year-old woman writer who has worked as a prostitute and lived with many forms of lack. These poems, written without traditional punctuation, titles, or other markers, have a kind of unanchored clarity it hurts to look at. Not the usual \u201cdew\u201d but \u201cmornings earliest water.\u201d<\/p>\n

In their false casualness, these lines seem almost throwaway, but this interior voice can be startlingly sharp in its engagement with other writers:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

red red sun<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

you so lovely you so indifferent to whether i throw a plum in your name<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

and amager how tender you gave me a plum to throw<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Is it a coincidence that \u201cindifferent\u201d and \u201ctender\u201d are so close together? In the context, I don\u2019t think so. In the juxtaposition of these lines I hear an echo from Albert Camus\u2019 The Stranger<\/em>: the \u201ctender indifference of the world\u201d his protagonist throws himself upon at the end of the novel. In Nordenhof\u2019s hands, it\u2019s both an acknowledgement of her love for the world and a subversion of the canonical writer, the high-toned absurdity of Camus\u2019 idea. It\u2019s a testament to Nied\u2019s translation that hints like this are preserved in all their subtlety and humor.<\/p>\n

One of the most impressive aspects of this translated book is how funny it is. In one example, the speaker\u2019s long-suffering mother gets the last word about her dead spouse:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

he was the first one in the family to get a higher education<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

first he spent a few years at the school of architecture then a few doing international\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 studies, finished neither<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

found a collage my mother made<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

various nude or half-dressed women, photos my father must have taken<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

across the collage she wrote INTERNATIONAL STUDIES<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The pacing of these lines, as they swerve away from feeling sorry for the father, carry an unexpected zing of delight, both for the speaker and for the reader. These women all refute the simpler story, refusing the expectation that they will pity the men who have harmed them. The ways they flip their lives the bird are sometimes self-destructive, but Nordenhof is there to document the moment of rebellion against the norm, whatever its later consequences may be.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth noting that many aspects of Nordenhof\u2019s landscape are American exports\u2014empty malls, tract houses and condos, deserted KFCs, and financial crisis. This book deserves to be widely read here for many reasons, not least because it has something to say about the fallout of American financial inequality and how it has been transmitted to vulnerable neighborhoods around the world. In one outrageous scene, a young bank employee visits a low-cost block of housing the tenants think they own:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

its no fun to go from one condo complex to another with this unpleasant message, said<\/p>\n

the young man from the bank, he didn\u2019t understand it himself he said, so don\u2019t be<\/p>\n

embarrassed if you don\u2019t either. the subprime loan and lehman brothers<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

In Nied\u2019s deft translation, Nordenhof\u2019s discursive sharpness is a great tool for both addressing and dismantling complicated myths about society. She strikes hard, glancing blows at diet culture, the side effects of birth control, financial meltdowns, what\u2019s become of her childhood friends, and people who disparage the right to public assistance. And how could you not root for this voice that so fiercely wants to take up space the world?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the wealthy life<\/p>\n

to be so stingy<\/p>\n

look out im gonna come rob you<\/p>\n

with my child-breasts that have meanwhile grown so huge<\/p>\n

i put on twenty pounds after i switched to the new pills<\/p>\n

here i am<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Laura Marris\u00a0is a writer and translator. Her poems and translations have appeared in\u00a0The Yale Review,\u00a0The Brooklyn Rail,The Cortland Review,\u00a0The Volta,\u00a0Asymptote, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell Colony fellow and the winner of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":420642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-420632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420632","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=420632"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":420682,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420632\/revisions\/420682"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}