Poetry

This is a collection of poetry in translation, written over a number of years and occasionally published on blogs, list-servs, & misc. other locations. No rights reserved.

A film should stand on its own. It’s absurd if a film-maker needs to say what a film means in words. The world in the film is a created one, and people sometimes love going into that world. For them that world is real. And if people find out certain things about how something was done, or how this means this or that means that, the next time they see the film, these thing enter into the experience. And then the film becomes different. I think it’s so precious and important to maintain that world and not say certain things that could break the experience. You don’t need anything outside of the work. There have been a lot of great books written, and the authors are long since dead, and you can’t dig them up. But you’ve got that book, and a book can make you dream and make you think about things. David Lynch, “Interpretation,” in Catching the Big Fish.

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Concerning the war in Vietnam

Behind the TV the light changed from the windows. Darkness turned into grey and the trees appeared to be black in the clear grey light of the recent snow. In the morning everything was buried in snow. Presently I go out to sweep up from the storm. I hear on the radio that the USA have released a white paper on the war in VIET NAM where North Vietnam is accused of aggression. Last night as we watched a film on TV made from the Viet Cong side we heard the slow flapping of helicopter machines from the ground, from the side of those who were fired at. A few weeks ago a different film showed an interview with American chopper pilots on CBS. One of them described how he ejaculated when he finally got a hit on a “VC:” the rockets hurled him nine feet. It will surely snow more today my neighbour says. He is dressed in black, on his way to work where he embalms corpses and works as a night nurse at a mental institution. The area where I live – Lund and surrounds – is turning into an ever whiter paper, the sun appears to throw its burning cold rays onto our vast pages. The dead are numbers that sleep, spin like crystals, in the wind of the fields. So far an estimated two million people have died in VIET NAM. Here hardly anyone dies for any other reason than the most personal. The Swedish economy kills very few people, at least in this country. No-one goes to war in our country to safe-guard their interests. No-one burns us with napalm for the sake of a feudal freedom. In the thirteenth- and fourteenth-centuries there wasn’t any napalm. Here the sun rises towards midday. It is almost March 1965. Every day more people are killed in America’s disgusting war. The snow flakes in President Johnson’s photograph at the time of the latest bombings of North Vietnam – he stepped in or out of a car – fall ever more densely across the white pages. More dead, more justifications, until everything is buried in the snow of a night that finally alters its light outside the windows. Göran Sonnevi, “Om kriget i Vietnam” (first published in BLM 1965: 3), reprinted in ingrepp – modeller [incisions – models], 1965.

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