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Hos Rådjur (1997)

by Aase Berg(Favorite Author)

4.31 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

9134518916 (ISBN13: 9789134518919)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Bonnier Alba

review 1: Nature feminized as the female body, but with all the dangers of a well-researched neo-Darwinian apocalyptic. This is a sad feminist tale told in prose poems (mostly) about decaying, being violated, getting slimed like in 'Ghostbusters', having your period, animals being gross and unresponsive, and trying to find your place in what James Brown chauvinistically referred to as 'a man's world'. She uses lots of anaphora to setup and knockdown 'shocking' images of like a bloody seal or a puke or some phlegm or something. It's very surreal stuff, translated from the Swedish, of which I know none. It has en face Swedish and English, so you can try to parse that if you would choose. There are some powerful sections that are, to me, very sad in the powerlessness they convey in the... more face of a pretty cold and dirty nature. There are some other sections that are just kind of corny shock-verbiage about menses and mud and stuff like that. I read it a couple times and I got a lot of the echoes of Vallejo, Cesaire, the Bible, Blake and maybe Clayton Eshleman. I think her effort to hyper-masculinize the experience of femininity as a target for base natures and base nature worked for me, in that all the poets I thought of reading her were men. Maybe I'm just really sexist. I hope not...
review 2: I adore Aase Berg's work and can't thank Johannes enough for making her work available to us who only read English well enough to truly enter the work. This particular piece was a wonderful way to get deeper into Berg's oeuvre after encountering Remainland, though I admit I was hoping for a full-length version of another of Berg's works first. That said, I was surprised by many of the changes the translator made; I'm sure they probably made the translation more acute, but I found most of the changes made the English version a little less fluid/forceful. Granted, that might just be my perception, as I had become so used to -- and so loved -- the versions included in Remainland.Overall, a wonderful read no one interested in contemporary poetry, particularly prose poetry, ought to miss out. less

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