New Swedish Books, Spring 2020 1
New Swedish Books 14 Translator’s choice ‘It is a
sad fact that only a handful of Swedish poets are translated, and none of the younger generation’ Athena Farrokhzad (b. 1983) White Blight, poems, 2018 Publisher Albert Bonniers Rights Athena Farrokhzad What books from contemporary fiction deserve to be re-discovered? Maria Tapaninen is planning an anthology where exile, life in the urban suburbs, and Sami people’s experiences are given a new guise in the Finnish language. I have previously translated Finnish poetry into Swedish. Now my plan is to translate Swedish poetry into Finnish, my other mother tongue. It is a sad fact that only a handful of Swedish poets are translated, and none of the younger generation. The idea is to publish a small anthology, perhaps ten poems by ten poets, with one of the major Finnish publishing houses. The selection will, of course, be my own, but the aim is for the collection to reflect the diversity of Sweden today. From around the mid 70s to the end of the 80s I worked as a librarian in Stockholm’s northern suburbs, where there is a great mix of languages and cultures. In the middle of that sometimes chaotic environment I used to think what a perfect hotbed for creativity this is. I thought that soon enough there would be writers, writing from new perspectives, introducing themes such as exile and suburban life into the Swedish canon. I thought that these people’s texts would perhaps even influence the Swedish language and its development. Nowadays there are many writers and poets from diverse cultural backgrounds. Jila Mossaed, a current member of the Swedish Academy, writes about the sorrow felt when, as a writer, she had to change language; about growing up in Tehran, and about a life in exile on the west coast of Sweden. Burcu Sahin’s prize-winning book Embroideries looks at older immigrant women’s luggage: both what they physically brought with them in their suitcases, and the impact of the psychological inheritance they leave for their daughters. In White Blight Athena Farrokhzad allows a few family members’ conversational to and fro form the frame in which a young girl’s upbringing in an immigrant home bound by tradition is described. Johannes Anyuru, who nowadays concentrates on prose fiction, depicts suburban life in the Gothenburg area in his debut collection Only the Gods Are New.