I try to not keep them entirely still
just get them (the words) to crowd around something
special (a theme) an idea that has such
weight that it
at least partially
can replace a person’s (your) glance
when it turns away (and from me)
A Different Practice
Fredrik Nyberg
Translated by Jennifer Hayashida
March 2007
I try to not keep them entirely still
Frederik Nyberg
A Different Practice is Jennifer Hayashida’s translation of Swedish poet Fredrik Nyberg’s influential book En annorlunda praktik, containing the five original sections “Rotor blades, movements 1—5,” “Pets—the private,” “You…,” “Shall these hands,” and “The Years.” Showing the influences of Ashbery, Roubaud, and Susan Howe, Nyberg’s quiet but forceful poems contend with the difficulties of using poetry as a form of remembrance. Through the transcription of memory, the collection creates its own fluid, mysterious, and startlingly intimate sense of time.
Jennifer writes of her experience translating Nyberg: “Because in my own writing I constantly find myself struggling against nostalgia, I felt a form of kinship with Nyberg’s concerns, since so much of what he writes is anchored in recollection…I feel that he resolves this tricky business by examining place as a metaphor for the past, and by interrogating the possibility of truthful recollection….”
About the Author
Fredrik Nyberg is a Swedish poet born in 1968, currently living in Gothenburg, Sweden. He attended the creative writing program at the University of Gothenburg, an institution which has fostered some of the country’s better-known writers, and has since become an established force in new forms of poetic expression there. En annorlunda praktik (A Different Practice) was his first book, published by Norstedts Förlag in 1998. Subsequent books Blomsterur – Förklaringar och Dikter (Clockwork of Flowers: Explanations and Poems), and Åren (The Years), were published in 2000 and 2002, respectively. In 2003, Nyberg wrote the play Tunnelsång (Tunnel Song), commissioned by Gothenburg’s Cinnnober Theater with the mission to stimulate and develop contemporary Swedish theatre. Nyberg serves on the editorial board of the Swedish literary publication OEI. Translations of his poetry appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of The Literary Review and the 2005 Spring/Summer issue of Circumference. His latest collection, Det blir inte rättvist bara för att båda blundar (It won’t be fair just because both shut their eyes), was put out by Norstedts in 2006, and his introduction to Erik Beckman’s Collected Poems was published in January of 2007.
Praise
The poem for Nyberg serves as a medium in which life is sifted, sorted, examined, and pulled through... Nyberg is confident enough to present the poem not as if it is mediating an experience, but as if it is the event itself.
steven karl, sink review
About the Translator
Poet/translator/artist Jennifer Hayashida is the author of A Machine Wrote this Song (Gramma Poetry/Black Ocean) and the chapbook Översättaren som arkiv/Arkiv som översätter (Autor). She is the Swedish/English translator of writers including Athena Farrokhzad, Ida Börjel, Kim Hyesoon, and Don Mee Choi. She has received awards from, among others, the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is based in New York and Stockholm.
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-933254-35-7
Trade Paperback
Smyth-sewn. 127 pp, 6 x 8 in
Publication Date: March 01 2007
Distribution: SPD