Börjel's MA augments the mouth's O, then reverses it...
Bhanu Kapil
MA
Ida Börjel
Translated by Jennifer Hayashida
June 2023
MA, Ida Börjel’s award-winning abecedarian, is a maelstrom of voices cast in the underwater shadows and nuclear light of the Anthropocene. A refraction of Inger Christensen’s seminal Alphabet, published in 1981, MA speaks a furious incantation in the past tense, a grammar of loss, from the vantage point of a disintegrating here and now. Appearing for the first time in English in Jennifer Hayashida’s luminous translation, MA is less a curative than a testimonial, speaking simultaneously for the one and the many, the solitary mother and the insurgent multitude.
About the Author
Ida Börjel, poet and translator. Currently lives in Malmö, Sweden. In her award winning books of poetry, including Sond (Probe), Skåneradio (Radio Scania), Konsumentköplagen: juris lyrik (The Consumers Purchase Act: juridical lyricisms), and MA, she is enquiring into and trying to enact our contemporary, linguistic, and societal conditions in relation to different forms of authority, sovereignty and juridical systems. For the latest edition of her “Miximum Ca Canny The Sabotage Manuals you cutta da pay we cutta da shob”, she invited 21 colleagues worldwide to sabotage the manuscript. Her latest book, Arvodet Marginalintäkten (The Fee The Marginal Revenue) are radio plays encircling the language of Economish, and how that language of argumentation affects social distancing, or the distance between our hearts. Börjel has translated Valzhyna Mort’s Music for The Dead and Resurrected and Solmaz Sharif’s Look into Swedish. As a co-translator, she has translated poetry books from Russian by Maria Stepanova and Galina Rymbu.
Praise
Vowels exceed the alphabet, an utterance beyond the neon spiral that ends with Z. Börjel's MA augments the mouth's O, then reverses it, an anti-clockwise writing that's "broken into pieces." Hayashida's translation evokes these fragments as sound that's felt rather than heard across the line breaks: blood, sheet, cybernetics, cystic. The book works at the level of the nervous system, dispelling the tiny shocks and slack of circuits monetized by "dread," "crux," and corneal burn.
Bhanu Kapil
Ida Börjel recasts the great experimental Danish poet Inger Chistensen as a Cassandra, as a Sheherezade, sounding the alarm of her multi-layered, self-organizing repetition for our own times of the renewed atomic threat: Christensen's Alphabet is awoken in Börjel's MA. Poetry gushes from these pages, relentless in its returns and surprises, striking the gong of somber proper nouns at every turn, searching for blood relations between languages, nature, nurture, geopolitics, and violence. Sweeping, astute, and full of lament, MA is a poetry book written by language itself.
Valzhyna Mort
Where Inger Christensen’s Alphabet registered words fearing their imminent loss alongside planetary destruction, Ida Börjel’s powerful collection MA speaks to us from the center of such unravelling, the past tense—the loss of a child. Pushing into the light of the page from the right margin—the “negative space” embodied by the Japanese sign MA—her poems spell grief and grief’s rioting resistance into mantras of intense solidarity with those wrestling loss and violence globally.
Uljana Wolf
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.
In the News
Links
Poems from MA on Asymptote
Poems from MA on interim
MIXIMUM CA’ CANNY THE SABOTAGE MANUALS by Ida Börjel, tr. Jennifer Hayashida on Commune Editions
Jennifer Hayashida at the Rotterdam Poetry Festival
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946604-05-7
Trade Paperback
336 pp, 4.25 x 7.25 in
Publication Date: June 15 2023
Distribution: Inpress Books (UK), SPD