What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fifth series, What Translation Sparks, a group of poet-translators share a seminal experience in translation. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.  
Eva Kristina Olsson
Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson
when arms and hands around the breast

more and more divides the breast

more and more melt together sink

into each other

how the green lightens

when the white darkens

but I come to you

we are the same step

but you come to me

we are the same step

you lay the fragile thin white wings

in the scent of your fragile thin white wing

words are not words

sacraments are not sacraments

but they say

I dissolve all

except the angelgreen

winds staff after staff

in the green winding sheet

they are white and abandoned

unwinds staff after staff

from the green winding sheet

they are white and abandoned

they are inscribed and white

they are nothing other than green

wings

which are abandoned and white

I am abandoned when I come to you

I come to you to abandon me

I will never abandon you

you will never abandon me

in this room which is a step

of a word you know existed

but which you did not want to say

and will not say

which I said to you

when I wound it in my green wings

this slit in the opened breast

pair of wings in the doubling’s doubled doubling
from the book THE ANGELGREEN SACRAMENT / Black Square Editions
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Cover image of Eva Kristina Olsson's The Angelgreen Sacrament from the original Swedish publication
What Sparks Poetry:
Johannes Göransson on "The Angelgreen Sacrament"

"In difference to the traditional lyric model, where any 'inconsistencies' make the artwork suspect, Martell argues that it is these very rifts that open the poem up, throw the reader into a 'real' of artistic encounter. I would say that Olsson’s book is a 'rifted' lyric. It’s a lyric but it goes on too long, it confuses who is reader and who is writer, who is angel and who is human. It even confuses the angel with a dress worn as a teenager."
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Virtual Event: The Cheuse Center and Poetry Daily will be hosting a monthly virtual event Friday evenings at 8:00 EST. We'll feature a moderated conversation between four poet translators, as featured on Poetry Daily. Our second event will be Friday, December 18th, featuring Matvei Yankelevich, Taije Silverman, Johannes Göransson and Jonathan Stalling.
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Black-and-white head shot of Naomi Long Madgett in 1943
Champion of Black Poets Dies at 97

"Naomi Long Madgett was 17 when her first book of poetry was published, and just 26 when her work appeared in an anthology co-edited by Langston Hughes, an early mentor, that covered 200 years of Black poetry—a new name among the greats."
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