Birgitta Trotzig, Translated by Bradley Harmon

Trad, by Carl Fredrik Hill (Sweden) before 1911

Swedish:

Hill’s Tree 

                        Hill’s tree grasps for the heavens as with a claw. 
      The sun is surrounded by one black-shimmering, trembling, dancing.
When one sees the sun, one sees black. An impenetrable cluster-darkness 
manifests. 
      The tree’s body has eyes. 
    It is a book-tree. The trunk has become knots of concentrated time, bound 
in tough clumps, deeply eroded furrows, creases, fine wrinkles force 
themselves forward through the silky-smooth thin bark-skin. The clumps of 
time are compressed impoverished faces, they have eyes. 
      Farthest inside the darkness the tree sees: 
                                                              the innermost of life is salvation; the  
outermost is death; this is the heart’s beat. 
      In the tree vaults, shadows of light, mighty flickering animal-shadows, the 
death-animal’s heart. 

Birgitta Trotzig, translated by Bradley Harmon

Vattenfall, by Carl Fredrik Hill (Sweden) before 1911

Hill’s Waterfall 

                       Hill’s waterfall is neither high nor low. It is beyond 

     –  like when I one year at Eastertime (the light across the sea) found the
overflowing brook’s outlet in the Baltic, transparent water roared and 
streamed down staircase waterfalls over the slate rocks out into the sea, I then 
remembered a dream: 
    a waterfall (“ninety meters,” people said, but it looked immensely higher), 
a silver thread against the dark back of a mountain, the precipices plummeted 
straight down into a dark blue lake which dimly reflected the blinding white 
looming iceberg above the thousand-meter black ridge, all without 
proportion, however big, however small. – How the iceberg seemed slowly to 
come to life, to swell, to glide, to move. – It turns out that not a man is left in 
that neighborhood any longer, all the houses are emptied and abandoned. We 
stand on an echoing empty city street and stare out alone, abandoned ochre 
houses trapped deeper and deeper under the power of a progressively
darkening blue-green shadow, colder and colder, later and later in the day –
the iceberg is on its way, we are alone in the emptiness and the silence of the 
vast natural world. How the huge folding ridge of ice, the translucent 
darkening icebeast will roll over the ridge into the lake. The floodway of 
rising water shall bury us. The menacing green-blue mountain range on the 
horizon. Now the waterfall is giant, translucent, a primeval beast’s death 
​glare, a world ceasing - the silence before all, after all. 

Birgitta Trotzig, translated by Bradley Harmon

These poems are Birgitta Trotzig's prose poem collection, Anima, 1982.

Birgitta Trotzig (1929–2011) is one of the twentieth century’s most revered Scandinavian authors. She wrote across many genres and is particularly acclaimed for the 1982 prose-poem collection Anima, the 1972 novel The Malady, and her 1985 masterpiece The Marsh King’s Daughter. She was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1993 and awarded many of the major literary prizes in Sweden. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
 
Bradley Harmon (b. 1994) is a writer, translator, and scholar of Scandinavian and German literature, philosophy, and film. His translations  have appeared in many literary journals and his book translations include Birgitta Trotzig’s The Marsh King’s Daughter, Katarina Frostenson’s The Space of Time,  and Monika Fagerholm’s Who Killed Bambi? He was invited to the 2021 Översättargruvan translation workshop in Sweden, placed second in the 2022 Anne Frydman Translation Prize, and is a 2022 ALTA Emerging Translator Fellow. He lives in Baltimore, where he's completing a PhD at Johns Hopkins University.