Aase Berg Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Today we have a dark surreal special, with a selection of poems by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Göransson. In the 1990s Aase was a member of Surrealistgruppen in Stockholm. While Surrealism in its prime made dreams the centre of its research, the Swedish Surrealists of the 1990s focussed on metaphysics and natural science. These poems are from her Selected, Remainland, from Action Books, which Johannes co-edits. Here is an extract from her essay, Landscaping, in Tsunami from Solaris, also available from Action Books, followed by the poems:
“Martinsson’s sci-fi epic Aniara: a machine projecting films, holograms, or maybe instructional dance videos. I don’t know how I became hooked up to these worlds, but I receive them with fascination mixed with horror.
The landscapes are always first to get my writing going. The content of my poems is driven by the landscape’s atmosphere, color, smell, light, and, not least, weather, temperature, and the four elements. Is it an icy cold, airy, high-blue glacier atmosphere? Or an underwater world of deepblue breathing sounds? I don’t understand how it works, I maybe have a highly-functioning tendency for hallucination, but when I write it’s like I sleepwalk and suddenly find myself in that place.”—Aase Berg
X-Ray
Lemurs shimmering blue. Their sharp glass features that only appear at rare frequencies. The sounds in their entirety deadly – could tear the eardrums out of our ears if we did not constantly stiff hold the binocular muscle contracted. I can adjust my body at an angle, preferably in the light-pocket between optical wavelengths. I would then be able to perceive the spotlight’s nervous ray then, or maybe during certain cases of sparse twilight. The urclouds of our solar system would then move balanced – through the Skrea Chasms like limberly billowing, pain-red masses of ether. From the corrosive odor I would also be able to localize the focal point of the lenses.
Lemurs shimmering radiation blue. To break minerals with light waves. From the mountain nobody comes back alive. This is sharpness – concentrated spectrum – this is liquid burning glass. From the vaguely corrosive odor I would also be able to locate the smoldering point of Purgatorius. In the crypt there is such deadly clinking and crackling: this is where the lemur queen of the cornea rests. And on shelves of ore in the inner caves of Skrea, volt-racked glass animals shriek, climb.
In the Heart of the Guinea Pig Darkness
The gorge is swarming with guinea pigs. They crawl on each other like spiders: here in the gorge, here in the stack, here in the heart of the guinea-pig darkness. The gorge is swarming with guinea pigs, and we run, you and I, with your soft wax skin and our love. We run in the tunnels and the rumbling water chases us in a wave of guinea pigs rolling against each other. Jupiter hangs heavy and cruel up there in the firmament, and nerve spies lurk behind every evil corner. Guinea pigs are swarming. They are born, they hatch, out of caves and holes. The guinea pigs are swarming and crawling around on the gigantic guinea-pig queen’s sensitive, swollen egg-white body. She gives birth and groans, she moans and bleeds. Everywhere the membranes, everywhere their bloated puff bellies. We run with the heart in the tunnel, you and I, while nervous systems break down behind us, while the amniotic fluid surges in the pumping, pulsing chasm. Rotting acids and guinea-pig lymph are streaming yes streaming down the walls. Guinea pigs are thronging. Here they come to get us! Now they’re opening us up, now they’re swallowing us with their pink flesh organs. Now I love you and now I fear you, and now I finally roll out your guinea-pig body on the baking sheet. And you lean back and let your skin grow into the stinking cell plasma of the guinea-pig wall, my beautiful traitor, and the guinea pigs swarm all the way into the depth of your treacherous guinea-pig organism.
Slippery Hal
When undead Harey is locked in a capsule which is slung out into the cosmos murk and the demented computer sings its plancktime song in weightless space
It snuffs
It---
crustles
Hare Rag
The hare conductor stringed
attracts the opposite tone
the string vibribrates
dimensions that will
crook the Instrument
Hearing has a strungtime
tugs faster than the string beats
harpy births child
conducts child over fields
of the as-of-yet unprepared
Logging Time
Hard trunks chafe. The ghost herb is cold and rustles. The slow soil waits patiently. Fog rolls across the sour meadows.
This is logging time. Hard trunks chafe; bark tears bark. The wax girl rinses sores. Far away, thunder crashes down against great blank metal sheets.
The slow soil waits patiently. The wax girl scrubs sores. Foxes and crows close in with fixed blood gazes. They gather. They multiply. They grow hazardously more and more numerous.
From the hunger moss, one can hear whimpers and hunting games. The wax girl rubs her sensor prong against the tight skin of the large scar. The liver spots come loose, the fox tree glows red. Now the logging time will slowly start to heal.
Purgatorius, Indri
Handle substances, with lemurs in the shape of the breath the cold. Break through the middle ear construction: the eardrum remains with certain species their entire lives in a single phase, which correlates to the fetal phase.
What is happening in the cisterns? A ray cuts through dark matter. A call runs through glass, a bow glides through heavy metal.
Handle big screens. Sharp octaves, clangs. Peculiar fiberglass structures and a strong frequency profile. The rare element iridium, particularly in Purgatorius and the cool brittle Indris.
The crowded voltage fields with autistic acoustic; like chilled silk. While the resonance fluid burns tracks in dark matter.
Aase Berg (b 1967) is the author of eight books of poetry going back to her debut, Hos Rådjur (1997), as well as three works of prose and one book of criticism. Her next book, Aase's Death, is forthcoming in the fall of 2023. Her writing has been widely translated, including six books in English, including With Deer, Dark Matter, Transfer Fat, Remainland: Selected Poems, Hackers and Tsunami from Solaris, a book of essays. In the 1980s and early 90s, she was a member of the Stockholm Surrealist Group.
Johannes Göransson (b 1973) is the author of nine books of poetry and criticism, most recently POETRY AGAINST ALL (2020) and Summer (forthcoming 2022), and the translator of several books of poetry, including works by Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Helena Boberg and Eva Kristina Olsson. His poems, translations and critical writings have appeared in a wide array of journals in the US and broad, including Fence, Lana Turner, Spoon River Review, Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Kritiker (Denmark) and Lyrikvännen (Sweden). He is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame and, together with Joyelle McSweeney, edits Action Books.
