The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • The Ekphrastic Academy
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead

Birgitta Trotzig, Translated by Bradley Harmon

3/28/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
Trad, by Carl Fredrik Hill (Sweden) before 1911
Swedish:
Picture

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
Picture
Picture
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.


0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    The Ekphrastic Review
    Picture
    Current Prompt
    COOKIES/PRIVACY

    This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies.

    Opt Out of Cookies
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Join us: Facebook and Bluesky
    @ekphrasticreview.



    ​
    ​Archives
    ​

    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015

    Lorette C. Luzajic [email protected] 

  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • The Ekphrastic Academy
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead