from The Garden of the Dead

Marie Lundquist

The dead are spilling out like rapids when I lift the stones up from the ground. I have a rather sizable collection now. I throw them at the page like little spears.



*

I sit with my gaze chained to the ditch and stare down into mundanity. The old passions shorn and rinsed in so many waters that all the fibers have floated up to the surface and flocked there. All that’s left is what is scraped clean, gnawed into the bone. With these salt remains I build a seawall against death swelling over me with its unending story.



*

I don’t know anything about turtles and their apathy. I lay my cheek against the shell and mull over the most difficult question of all, the one about restlessness. Now, everything is rusting, even the small and unremarkable padlocks that have slept in oil baths all winter. They say you can learn to talk about sexuality and I think about watermelons and our surprise over the black seeds in our mouths and all that red.



*

A beetle can, for example, be made of copper and sunk in vinegar so that it patinates to a beautiful scarab green. So too can a person become metallic through mistreatment and neglect and reshaped into a neck ring with a lock that can only be opened by someone else from behind, with a gesture similar to a caress over that which we, in everyday terms, refer to as the pillar of the body.



*

Besides the aspen, there is a certain kind of person who maintains the art of small talk. Like floatplanes, they make everyone into listeners with their faces turned up toward the sky. Their words spawn everywhere, in piles of sawdust, raised beds, and compost heaps. I walk around with my shovel, scraping them together to cover the most delicate seedling, silence, whose name is rosemary.



*

If god exists, he is shut in an atrium like the one inside us, developing a person in the glow of a little red lamp. With antennas sensitive to everything tender, he finds his way to the most blood-filled and tense part, wherever it is. Cuts a line from the base of the neck, down through the armpit and the surging coast of the ribs, files down a piece of bone-bar, and kneads the heart until it looks like a flat-headed pine borer, shimmering with metallic fervor.

translated from the Swedish by Miriam Åkervall

Read the original in Swedish

Listen to an excerpt read in the original Swedish by the author:

The challenge of translating Astrakanerna began with the title. In Swedish, astrakanerna denotes the common name for a domestic variety of apples. It’s a name that carries cultural nostalgia, like a Honeycrisp or a crab apple in the United States. Swedish readers may also associate astrakanerna with the classic novel by Vilhelm Moberg Utvandrarna (The Emigrants; Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1949). Marie Lundquist and I wrestled with how to preserve these associations in English, but ultimately she suggested retitling the collection. The Garden of the Dead borrows a line from a moment that centers on grief and the “activities” of the dead, who, along with Death, frequently appear as a returning cast of characters in this book-length poem.

Lundquist also often creates words, which track logically to a Swedish ear thanks to an established system of prefixes, suffixes, and compound words. In English, the transliteral results can be less forgiving. As a poet and native Swedish speaker, I have found sound to be a trusted guide in navigating these moments. In “[If god exists, he is shut in an atrium like the one inside us],” Lundquist creates a word referring to the place on the body where god “cuts a line,” combining revben and kust with the possessive s and the article en: revbenskusten. The transliteral definition in English is “the rib-coast,” or “the coast belonging to the ribs,” but in this translation I chose instead to follow my ear. Sonically, “the surging coast of the ribs” more closely follows the lapping stresses of the Swedish language. 

My ear leads me to take liberties that, to me, prioritize a fidelity to the experience of a poem rather than a static transfer of its content. Though undoubtedly filtering Lundquist’s work through my own personal feel for image and sound, I try to follow her inventiveness into English whenever possible. When the opportunity arose to create a word in the same poem, I settled on “bone-bar” as the English mirror for the Swedish gallret—the bars on a window or a fence. Here, I felt that gallret, closely following revbenskusten, was doing more complicated image-work than could be encompassed by the word “bar.” In Lundquist’s poetry, the body is always nearby, listening for the preceding or foreshadowed images. My hope is that these translations do the same.

Marie Lundquist was born in Sweden in 1950 and is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. Formerly a librarian and a teacher, she published her first book of poems, Jag går runt och samlar in min trädgård för natten (I Walk Around Gathering Up My Garden for the Night; Bonnier Alba) in 1992. The collection was published in English by Bitter Oleander Press in 2020, in Kristina Andersson Bicher’s translation. Lundquist also translates the work of Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse from Norwegian into Swedish. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including Sveriges Radios Lyrikpris (2002), a stipendium from the Svenska Akademien (2007), De Nios Lyrikpris (2008), and Aspenströmpriset (2015).

Miriam Åkervall is a poet and translator. Their translation of Astrakanerna (The Garden of the Dead; Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1995) by Marie Lundquist won an Honorable Mention in the 2024 Nadia Christensen Translation Prize and is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse. Their poetry appears in Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Åkervall’s writing has received support from the Vermont Studio Center and the American Literary Translators Association. They live in Moscow, Idaho.