An atrocious penalty for a radical pacifist. How many times had I not suffered all the qualms of hell listening to this command from where I used to live in the Old Town in Stockholm, right next to the castle. During each changing of the guard, a solider in the bailey of the castle will shout: “igevääääääääääääär!” (present arms) This happens twelve times a day in the summer.
So, I had been sentenced to shout i gevär in eternity. I will admit that during the first years, I performed this command quite half-heartedly . Indeed, in a hesitant, often quite sad voice. At one point, when my holler resounded even more sad than usual, General Bussig approached me yelling: “Hodell is crying like a faint maiden! Act like a soldier dammit! Use your vocal resources! This is how it should sound: iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…” At this point he interrupted himself. A couple of pointy i’s had gotten stuck in his throat. He began to cough violently. That’s when I had an idea. I figured that if I shouted i gevär and kept on going at the vowels i and ä as long as I could without pausing to breathe, the semantic content of the exclamation would dissolve. It would extinguish itself! I confided my idea to an old Zen master. He immediately hit my head with a butt of a rifle and exclaimed “Satori!”. Then he said: “If you succeed in this, the exclamation: i gevär can be transformed into a remarkable mystic musical experience and …” – “Really?” I interrupted surprised, “it can?” The Zen master continued: “If you prolong one and the same note infinitely it will no longer be the same note that you hear. The note will be transformed into another note, which in its turn will get transformed into another. Kimi hi take.”
The Marathon Poet
Åke Hodell
Translated by
Fia Backström
Edited by
Kira Josefsson
November 2020
Poets like Hodell hold the bean-counters accountable. Read this as a form of apostasy that reaffirms the soul. Read this to laugh, or cry, or both at the same time.
Gregg Bordowitz
Iconic poet-artist of the Swedish post-war avant-garde, Åke Hodell tells the story of his artistic journey through the absurd, satirical, tour-de-force that is The Marathon Poet, originally published in 1981 and now available for the first time in a facsimile-style English translation.
Hodell’s book is centered around a fictional race between poets, in which our author-protagonist becomes the sole qualifier after some fitness and alcohol tests. The narrative of the race is intersected by apocryphal origin stories of Hodell’s earlier works that freely blur fact and fiction, taking us even as far as Hell to find a publisher for one of his books. Through para-fictional devices, repetitive language techniques, phonetic writing, and satirical humor he continuously mocks authority. Hodell’s tall tales unmask and satirize oppression’s many guises—from disciplinary speed reading in elementary school to the forced repetition of a military command. In one chapter, Hodell relates the history of capitalism by way of a multi-vocal sound-poem featuring the voices of European and American automobiles. Through all the tribulations experienced by the marathon poet, Hodell’s pacifist and anarchist politics are always present, always in solidarity, always in resistance.
About the Author
In 1941, while serving as a fighter pilot in WWII, Åke Hodell (1919-2000) miraculously survived a plane crash. During his convalescence, he decided to change the course of his life and became a poet and artist, influenced by socially critical art movements as well as by Fluxus. His experiments with language and visual art moved fluidly between a variety of forms and genres, including concrete poetry and artists books (such as igevär and Orderbuch), collage, spoken word, performance, radio theater, sound- and object-based installations, and pioneering sound-art works such as Mr. Smith in Rhodesia and Where is Eldridge Cleaver?
Praise
I am grateful to translator and artist Fia Backstom for making Åke Hodell accessible to me. Hodell is a singular voice, a type of composer known in all languages. He is the anachronistic resistor—a much-needed addition to the library of non-conformity. We need such word conjurers as examples guiding and inspiring our own poetry to skewer society’s “rational organization toward irrational ends” (Marcuse). Our world calls for ridicule. We need Hodell’s ridiculous analogies, allegories, and para-fictional retorts that take a stand for sanity amidst mind-numbing capitalist metrics; the soulless multiplications, rationalizations, and quantifications, the statistical erasures that render death acceptable. Poets like Hodell hold the bean-counters accountable. Read this as a form of apostasy that reaffirms the soul. Read this to laugh, or cry, or both at the same time.
Gregg Bordowitz
After a bad night, Åke Hodell turns to a nationalist poem that has haunted him since childhood. He tears the pages out in a fury, only to notice his anger becoming a creative flash of joy. This swirl is a “message of Triumph” to bring to Athens. In the end, “satori = wordless insight” looms—or a book. As Hodell runs towards his final destination, he faces his own dissolution. I tried to run while reading this book. Too dangerous. I tried to read it in my sleep, but it kept me awake. Why run? Just run with it, through the oppressive moments of the past, through the poetry damage sites at school, the verbal brainwash of the military. Run past the disciplinarians, the authoritarians, and the militarians! Don’t fit in. Wear a hat. Tie a microphone to your mouth, wear a recorder on your back (it’s the 1980s). Follow the trickster poet and run. Run!
Ida Börjel
Off to the races with Åke Hodell, who takes off across the twentieth century with a passel of Swedes, all of them poets, dead and alive. The point of it being to catch our breath, or take it away, to leave us chuckling in amazement, wincing in pain, trying to keep pace. This marathon is every bit as wild as Alice's looking-glass.
Molly Nesbit
As an anarchist, anti-militarist, and anti-nationalist, Åke Hodell will obviously turn against any kind of disciplinary arrangement. Though his book is a playful work, packed with fun and humor, it does not prevent the composition from being rigorous. The poet certainly runs a marathon. The reader hurries to follow him, as he runs through an Athenian landscape superimposed over the surroundings of Stockholm.
Dagens Nyheter
The Marathon Poet is a rousing, fast-paced book that vacillates from poetry to prose, never concerned with the speedometer’s numbers, racing into sound after sound, sinking deeper and deeper into a desert of language, only to embrace collision itself.
Paul Cunningham, Kenyon Review
About the Translator
Fia Backström is a Swedish artist based in New York. Her multi-disciplinary practice includes photography, performance, events, installation, display architecture, and writing. Her work engages questions around the construction of the collective fabric often through collaboration or by re-contextualizing works by other artist. In her book COOP A-Script (Primary Information), she continues her exploration into modes of visual and spoken language. Backström received the Bernard Heidsieck – Centre Pompidou literary prize in 2018. In 2019, she performed Fluid Sites – Haunted Debris: virtual, possible, viscirreal with choreographer Mariana Valencia at the Centre Pompidou, and exhibited Facing Her Land – Notes from elsewhere at the Thiel Gallery Museum (Stockholm). Backström is an Assistant Professor at The Cooper Union.
About the Editor
Kira Josefsson is a writer, editor, and literary translator working between English and Swedish. She was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her work on Pooneh Rohi’s The Arab. Her work has appeared in Granta, Words Without Borders, The Nation, Exchanges, Triple Canopy, Kritiker, and Arbetaren. She serves as Assistant Translations Editor for Anomaly, and on the editorial board for Glänta, a Swedish independent journal of arts and philosophy.
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Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-47-3
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 152 pp, 5.25 x 8.25 in
Publication Date: November 01 2020
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)
Series: Lost Literature #30