Politics of the Unspeakable

Matthew Rana reviews Ann Jäderlund’s “Lonespeech,” translated by Johannes Göransson.

By Matthew RanaJuly 29, 2024

• Poetry

“CAN WE FIND the words,” queries a speaker in Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund’s Lonespeech (trans. Johannes Göransson, Nightboat Books, 2024), a long and sparse poem that takes its starting point in the correspondence between writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. Between 1948 and 1961, the German-language authors exchanged nearly 200 letters, postcards, and telegrams chronicling their ill-fated romance. Several of the letters contain heartfelt declarations and pleas for “just a few lines” in response, while others call to mind Theodor Adorno’s lesser-known claim that “misunderstandings are the mediums at the heart of which the incommunicable is communicated.” Although the lovers became close friends and supported each other’s work, their differences were ultimately irreconcilable: Bachmann’s father was an early member of the Nazi Party in Austria, whereas Celan’s parents died in a Transnistrian labor camp. As the book’s title suggests (in Swedish, Ensamtal, a portmanteau that could also be translated as Oneversation), theirs was a dialogue that enacted the impossibility of dialogue.

In Lonespeech, Jäderlund mines this impossibility to bring about a “catastrophizing of communication,” as Göransson puts it in his translator’s note. Halting and seemingly interrupted utterances such as “I cannot / see / the words / you / start out / from,” suggest impasses between interlocutors caught in an opaque exchange that is both “multireversable / and lost.” Elsewhere, the poem drifts between isolation, coupling, and decoupling, between dissonance and monotony: “Each and every one / with one / with its one / enclosed one / about their one / and one / clang.” Amid such terse, indeterminate lines, references to Bachmann and Celan abound: the recurring phrase “it burns” recalls the former’s death in 1973 a few weeks after her nightgown caught fire while she slept; similarly, “the river” evokes the latter’s suicide in the Seine a few years prior. The result is a poem suffused by silence, longing, and melancholy.

Yet Jäderlund achieves more here than merely ventriloquizing a difficult and seemingly doomed relation, for the letters—Celan’s in particular—also testify to the precariousness of a life lived in exile. In a letter dated June 6, 1958, Celan (born Paul Antschel), a Romanian Holocaust survivor living in Paris, wrote to Bachmann, then in Munich: “Troubled times, Ingeborg. Troubled, eerie times. How could it have been otherwise—it was already there. Do this or that? One tries to answer, decides on one or the other and feels the grip of the vice.” This sense of trouble also permeates Jäderlund’s book, as reflected in the lines “today can / you answer / I cannot / hear / speak.” Enjambed and faltering, they indicate what is arguably one of the book’s central concerns—namely, how poetry might answer troubled times.

Here Jäderlund, who has engaged with Celan’s work since the mid-1980s, seems to echo his claim that “the poem is born dark,” a singular phenomenon “loaded with world,” as obscure as it is potentially revelatory. Or, as Jäderlund puts it early on: “Awe / it is burst / even there / raw and / clearabout / clearabout / it is burst.” The book’s concluding lines cite Celan’s poem “Speak, You Too,” published in 1955, in which he makes the following claim: “Speaks true, who speaks shadows.” Just so, Jäderlund suggests throughout Lonespeech that the poem’s truth bursts forth paradoxically in its incomprehensibility. The poem answers its conditions of possibility through a “catastrophizing” of language that, somewhat counterintuitively, strives towards realism—the constitutive poesis of a world made strange that is both the mode of its witnessing and the fulcrum of its politics.

Whereas Celan’s poetics bear witness to the catastrophe of the Shoah, Jäderlund’s long poem speaks true to the current crisis of the Swedish state. The last decade in particular has seen an unprecedented questioning of the waning doctrine of “Swedish exceptionalism.” Among other things, this has involved the beginnings of a collective reckoning with the country’s colonial history, including the links between the Swedish Institute for Racial Biology, the German racial hygiene movement, and the eugenics policies of the Third Reich.

Parallel to this, however, recent years have also seen the rise of the Sweden Democrats (SD), an ultranationalist right-wing party with origins in Keep Sweden Swedish (or BSS), a neo-Nazi organization founded during the late 1970s with the fascist British National Front as its model. At present, SD is the country’s second-largest political party and—following the European migration crisis of 2015–16, when the Social Democratic–led government, fearing “system collapse,” revoked its long-standing open-door policy for people fleeing war and persecution—has largely succeeded in mainstreaming a racist and xenophobic agenda (primarily Islamophobic but also antisemitic) centered on law and order. For example, this spring, the center-right coalition government introduced new migration policies focused on stricter asylum legislation and “combating the ‘shadow society.’” Although such developments are hardly surprising in the contemporary European context, they nevertheless represent a startling shift for a country that long prided itself on being a safe haven.

In what may seem an unlikely turn for a poet who has been dogged by accusations of hermeticism since her debut in 1985, much of the language in Lonespeech mirrors these recent shifts, the brutality of which is underscored in Göransson’s stark translation. Lines such as “Right hand / not by my hand / right eye / which waits and stings / maybe was cut out of / the left preceding” seem to disavow resurgent right-wing politics while also implicating the Left in their emergence. On a slightly different register, references to geographical boundaries—forests, rivers, mountains—call to mind migration routes and border crossings, while nonnative flora, specifically arnica and lupines (the latter of which is classed as invasive in Sweden), metaphorize the migrant body: “every seed in / the sack / crowded against / the / others.” “[D]on’t we know / is it the friend,” one speaker asks, while elsewhere another bursts out: “I have / been / stabbed to / the brains.”

Throughout her career, Jäderlund has been preoccupied with the boundaries and limits of speech, as in the early poems collected in I en cylinder i vattnet av vattengråt (“In a cylinder in the water of waterweep,” Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2006), where deconstructive formal strategies expose the materiality of language in excess of the utterance. Here, by contrast, speech fragments tend to remain discursively anchored. The poem resounds with what at times read like liberal clichés: “Can we listen,” or, somewhat more ambiguously, “I will / listen / to you / but / help me / you too / by / listening / to me.” At the same time, it also questions what is received in such a hearing. “The ears are exposed / to many / sounds,” Jäderlund writes; “one can hear them,” an unintelligible cacophony of voices and words melding into one another.

Readers may therefore sense that the poem’s various communicative ruptures reflect not only the polarization of political discourse but also an increasingly diversified linguistic environment where “everything is / equally strange.” Indeed, the dialogical impasses suggested by the lines “I cannot / see / the words / you / start out / from” might just as well describe an encounter with foreign script. Likewise, moments of repetition, grammatical error, and syntactical disjunction might evoke the experience of stumbling through a new language much as they do misunderstandings between lovers. Here, the unspeakable, a concept central to Jäderlund’s inquiry (not to mention those of Bachmann and Celan), twists from an ontological category into a political one. “Not a single time / the word is / mentioned can it / be mentioned it is / turnable,” she writes. Nevertheless, something persists: “It cannot be / taken away / with words / but it / goes away / with the words.”

In the poet’s typical fashion, what “it” is remains unclear. Yet this ambiguity opens onto questions surrounding, among other things, charged issues such as freedom of speech and the institutionalization of inclusive language. At the same time, it also summons what Jacques Derrida, writing on Celan, referred to as the third party of testimony: “We don’t know about what and for what, about whom and for whom” the poem bears witness, except that it bears witness. Grief, alienation, and trauma demand telling, but the question of how to speak this void at the heart of the unspeakable here becomes a matter of not only poetic form but social form as well.

If we read the monologic exchange between lovers kept apart by historical calamity as an allegory for the breakdown of discourse—that is, for the loss of social links whereby speakers are bound to one another—then what might this mean for its politics? Jäderlund’s poem indicates the impossibility of a collective or representative body to which we might address ourselves and anchor our identifications. Yet it also holds forth the possibility of inventing new vocabularies, new ways of speaking and receiving that are founded on that very impossibility, on that absence, where everyone is strange, foreign, beginning. Can we find the words?

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Featured image: Maria Lassnig. “Dicke Grüne” (Fat Green), 1961. Archive of the Maria Lassnig Foundation. CC0, marialassnig.org. Accessed July 28, 2024.