Translation: "(Spring)" and Three Other Poems by Hanna Riisager
Translated from the Swedish by Kristina Andersson Bicher.
When Hanna Riisager’s debut collection För Kvalia was released in 2015, one reviewer in Sweden described it as “a distinctive collection of poems that taps into philosophical theories about perception…playful and straightforward…worth discovering for those who dare to see the world in other than black and white.” Svenska Dagbladet placed Riisager among Sweden's 20 most important young poets in 2016. A review in Jönköpings-Posten noted how “Riisager plays freely and self-consciously with all the tricks of modernism, crossed lines and morphemes scattered across the white page.”
This book in which these four poems appear is both exploration of and ode to qualia (as if she were a person). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines qualia as that concept which seeks to “establish that conscious experience involves non-physical properties. It rests on the idea that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might yet lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that being.”
Riisager draws on Frank Jackson's philosophical thought experiment to prove the existence of qualia: the (so-called) Knowledge Argument. Jackson imagined a distinguished woman scientist, Mary, trapped in a black-and-white room. Mary specializes in the neurophysiology of vision, but she can't experience it. What will she learn when she sees the color red?
As a translator, these were thrilling poems to dig into. With only loose narrative threads, the poems are borne along on drifts and false trails of imagery and language which accumulate then waft away. Cohesion is fleeting, like a passing scent. Colors figure prominently. Word pile-ups alternate with buckets of white space. The book draws upon classical poetic traditions but also brings in commercial products from the beauty industry that employ language seeking to re-define the self.
(Spring)
Embedded in snow-silence. In March’s last winter. Not my theft. It's a thick blanket, the traffic waves’ heavy flow. There are a thousand fluttering cherubs that loose themselves from the gray sail and fly in shoals towards a light absorptive sky. Snow falls on the street. An ice cream truck bleeds. Traffic stops at the red light. It turns silent. Turns white.
(To Be)
Is bright. Light blue.
It is azure. She is so impatient.
It’s
going to
You
get used to it. She
hangs it around your neck, fastens
the silver chain. I
didn’t want to
It’s an ice-drop of glass, a
frozen river, spiral-shaped, twisted
time.
I'm healing.
Not bleeding. Scar of glass.
It's a gravelly spring day.
Windy. This white, almost white,
light light blue.
I do not need
I
do not need that(A grave)
It weighs eight kilos and speaks to me from my breast. I can't kill it because it’s not like me. It is white. Light blue. It talks with an uncle's nonchalance, a darker voice, hovering hand movements. The weight of this body in the bed corsets me during the day. I'm on the couch in the corner.
(Were)
You – Here – Come out, be grave. Receive the inheritance, our parts, kernels. Your neck’s granular tissue. Your star-shaped thick crust of grenades that will continually heal. Hair like a Venetian blind when she bends forward to snap the lock in your neck. Angel. Emptied of crying. I guard you. Your black silhouette, the azure-blue light-from-night No more mornings, no more eye stones.
Hanna Riisager is a Swedish poet and critic living in Stockholm. She has an MA in literary studies from Stockholm University and is one of the founders of the feminist publishing house Dockhaveri förlag. Her first full-length poetry collection För Kvalia (2015) was short-listed for the Swedish Authors' Association debutante prize (Katapult prize) in 2016. Excerpts from För Kvalia have previously been translated into Romanian, French, and Greek. Poems translated into English have appeared in Asymptote, ANMLY, and Four Way Review, and are forthcoming in Plume and DIAGRAM.
