from getting lost
I screamed for you
in nights as deaf
as silent films
Black lips
and jumpy sequences
A sharp lack scratched the lens
I am selling my loss
as one sells a horse
Producing a bundle
from the inside pocket by my heart
Take the money and run!
*
You say I am as sad
as a self-fulfilling prophecy
You know this country
But I know the names
For example Bougainvillea
What does that mean?
That I can express things with my eyes
seems to count for nothing
Johanna Ekström (born 1970) is a writer and visual artist who lives and works in Stockholm. Her installations, collaborative and solo, involve a wide variety of media including sculpture, photography, film and dance. Her published volumes are: Skiffer (Slate, 1993), Vitöga (White of the Eye, 1994) Rachels hus (Rachel’s House, 1995, with one section inspired by “Ghost”, Rachel Whiteread’s cast of an empty house), gå förlorad (getting lost, 1998). In prose she has published Fiktiva dagboken (Fictional Diary, 1997) and Vad vet jag om hållfasthet (What Do I know of Stability, 2000). One of the stories from the latter has been published in English, together with a longer biographical article, in Swedish Book Review (200:1).
Sarah Death is a freelance translator, reviewer and literary historian and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at University College London. She specialises in translating modern Swedish literature and the work of Swedish women writers from various periods, and has been working with Johanna Ekström for a number of years.
The poems below are from getting lost and a new, as yet unpublished collection (provisionally entitled En annan åder, Another Vein) and were translated for the author to perform at international arts festivals in Portugal and the United States in spring 2001.
Translated by Sarah Death
Page(s) 46-47
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