FROM THE “BUDS” TO THE “EMBROIDERED”

DECEMBER 2010-JANUARY 2011

SOURCE TEXT: 4 poems from Soon Into The Summer I Will Walk Out by Ann Jaderlund. They appeared in Typo Magazine’s Issue 7 and The Fairy Tale Review‘ s The Green Issue.

CONTENTS:

• The sound text Bud-bou-ki by Yannis Saxonis and Eleanna Horiti is linked to the word “buds”

• The image Virgin by Lakis and Aris Ionas is linked to the word “virgin”

• The photo Silver by Lakis and Aris Ionas is linked to the word “

• The prose-text Geography by Dimitra Ioannou is linked to the word “embroidered”

There was a religious text translated in swedish at the Vadstena Cloister around 1420; it was called The Soul’s Consolation. Some centuries later the Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund used it partially as a source text to create the poetry collection Soon Into the Summer I Will Walk Out (1990). She made a mysterious collage of various sentences which are read as allegories although they are not.

aglimpseof 06 presents four of these poems. The first and the fourth appeared in Typo Magazine’s Issue 7 ; the second and the third were published in The Green Issue of The Fairy Tale Review. All poems were translated by the author Johannes Göransson. As he points out in Brothers and Beasts An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (edited by Kate Bernheimer / Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 2007): “By removing the interpretative frame to the allegory, she creates an experience that is neither symbolic nor naturalistic; it is an intense experience of superficiality.”

Four poems by Ann Jäderlund

The big valley is a vast mother-of-pearl mirror. There walks the large dead swan in her dead shroud. And there walk the mother-of-pearl children. Or the fragile foundling clumps. That grow out of the virgin mother’’s throat. They led the swan into a forest and placed beautiful white stones of mother-of-pearl on her back. Go now and eat that which you have taken from the swans. Then one ran up and cut a branch from the tree and grabbed a burning branch and stuck it into her throat. And scrubbed her both up top and down below. Until the swan’s flesh fell off in beautiful heavy clumps. For some time the swan lay in the bushes and slept. And black merchants came riding on black mother-of-pearl horses. Then they took the swan and carried her away.

***

I found a glass lily in a murky bay. Dead grass that had been cut out of the field. Empty ray-birds circled endlessly above the dried bay. I wanted to pour something down the throat. Water clumps from a congealed drop glass. Deep inside the moist light. Water lilies were supposed to grow there. Of a rare blood species. But also with death’s unnatural species. I wanted to swallow something to annihilate the species. I wanted to fall in the thirsty field. With the peony line through my wrist. Or with the beautiful Chancre-sore simply embroidered across the thin joint.

***

The first rose is the guise of the second rose. Veiled by a wrinkled almond tissue. And tied to the endless canals. As buds they were cool and blank. For they were never buds. Of abandoned moistened currants. Identically the rose lies like a wrinkled rose. Now it has finished killing. For it will itself be killed for what it has done. And tied to the high hall. Now in the beautiful flesh it is broken up. Now they cut the silver thread out. Out of the heart of the murky tissue. The warm ripples of almond oil that runs down into the blinded canals of the rose. Where the heart of the rose always always sheds. One drop of camphor blood in the peel’s dead hand.

***

Close to the opened mouth grow the leaves in dried bunches. Large darkly blushing camphor leaves. Dried for you in the already dead. Carefully selected motifs. Opiates with virgin eyes. Peeled away little by little. Until only they in your inner flow out. You cannot open their calyxes. But that which is inside the buds flows out and forms miniature buds. The small murk-green pelvis down there. In the depths of the ugly mountains. Where your dead stone-heart juts out above the opened bay. Like a desolate point with the red heart following after it.

***

Translated by Johannes Göransson.