Björling

Sigh of relief. Our Björling book, "You go the words" (translated by Fredrik Hertzberg) is finally at the printer. It took a long time because of spacing issues and other things (such as us having Sinead etc).

Here is a translation of the title poem:


You go the
words
and where
were you, it was
I know not and
that to your ear
wants
and with the eye
just with finger


His method was an extreme form of what is now fashionable called "erasure." More about this later.


Here are the blurbs:

Gunnar Björling’s singular and independent language and rhythm has influenced generations of Swedish poets. These are overjoyous, unnatural and crazed poems. To read Björling is to eat language. - Aase Berg

Fredrik Hertzberg's revelatory translations make palpable the syntactically sprung, emotion-rent verse of one of the great Scandinavian Modernist poets. Hovering in an aesthetic space somewhere between Dickinson and Celan, Oppen and Creeley, Gunnar Björling is a poet of the everyday and its words, as if the abyss between souls could ever be ordinary or ever anything else. – Charles Bernstein

Du går de ord, the last collection of poems by the great Finland-Swedish Modernist poet Gunnar Björling, here superbly translated and introduced by Fredrik Hertzberg, is a milestone in the annals of experimental poetics produced in our century. Björling’s lyric is one of extreme reduction and syntactic dislocation: “Cut out, cut/you, your word/cut our your/contour, that you cannot/explain,” wrote this poet in 1938, insisting that every word, indeed every morpheme and letter count in a densely Heideggerian poetry of being. Like his American counterparts George Oppen and Robert Creeley, Björling prefers the “small words” – if, and, as, that, like you, the, it–; like theirs, his “minimalism” is conceptually and erotically charged. Reading You go the words is a great pleasure. – Marjorie Perloff