You go the words (Scandinavian) [Paperback]

Gunnar Bjorling (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0976569256 | ISBN-13: 978-0976569251 | Publication Date: August 1, 2007 | Edition: 1st

Du gar de ord, the last collection of poems by the great Finland-Swedish Modernist poet Gunnar Björling, here superbly translated and introduced by Fredrik Hertzberg, is a milestone in the annals of experimental poetics produced in our century. Björling s lyric is one of extreme reduction and syntactic dislocation: "Cut out, cut / you, your word/ cut our your / contour, that you cannot /explain," wrote this poet in 1938, insisting that every word, indeed every morpheme and letter count in a densely Heideggerian poetry of being. Like his American counterparts George Oppen and Robert Creeley, Björling prefers the small words if, and, as, that, like you, the, it ; like theirs, his minimalism is conceptually and erotically charged. Reading You go the words is a great pleasure. --Marjorie Perloff

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Chatty, frivolous, impatient, depressed, alienated, lovelorn and prone to outbursts, the poems in 24-year-old Tao Lin's print debut (another collection appears online) will appeal to the reader's inner adolescent: " 'I am going to email a shitload of people tonight.' I think that's funny.// I feel angry. No I don't. I am bored." Haunted by the fear that advanced telecommunications estrange us from face-to-face human relationships ("I wanted to ignore her but we were looking directly at each other"). Titles like "some of my happiest moments in life occur on AOL instant messenger" and "i hate the world and i'm not immature" gesture, quite obviously, toward teenage angst. If Lin sometimes manages to fall short of this already low goal ("4:30 a.m." repeats the line "i am fucked existentially" no fewer than 60 times), his language overall is charged with raw nerve and vitality; he surprises, here and there, with a flash of emotional complexity, insight or wit: "...movies are processed and experienced in the mind which is where real life also is processed and experienced." The book would have gained much, however, from analyzing its anxieties rather than just acting them out. (Nov.)
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Review

Fredrik Hertzberg's revelatory translations make palpable the syntactically sprung, emotion-rent verse of one of the great Scandinavian Modernist poets. Hovering in an aesthetic space somewhere between Dickinson and Celan, Oppen and Creeley, Gunnar Björling is a poet of the everyday and its words, as if the abyss between souls could ever be ordinary or ever anything else. --Charles Bernstein

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Product Details

• Paperback: 150 pages
• Publisher: Action Books; 1st edition (August 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976569256
• ISBN-13: 978-0976569251
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,016,953 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)