“Clusters of Naming”: A Conversation with Ida Börjel and Jennifer Hayashida

It could not not have happened; this conversation with Ida Börjel and Jennifer Hayashida. I had gone back to Inger Christensen’s alphabet for the umpteenth time, the way a fledgling would return to its nest. But Christensen’s seminal work is neither a sanctuary nor something I would call a “place of belonging.” If anything, alphabet makes you aware of the fragility of existence, and of language’s ability to anoint this rite of passage.

And that’s when I discovered Börjel’s work, expertly translated by Jennifer Hayashida, MA (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023) furiously echolocates Christensen’s world, both as a homage and as a reckoning. In this long-drawn email exchange, we confessed our shared admiration for alphabet, and more. MA is a tour de force, a rigorous inquiry into what makes us human, well, more or less.

Shriram Sivaramakrishnan: Ida, I would like to begin by talking about something other than MA. I am referring to the interview you gave to This Podcast is a Ritual, titled “How To Subvert A Stifling Structure.” That conversation, centered around your book, The Sabotage Manuals (also translated by Jennifer Hayashida), touches upon the idea of sabotage as an act of, among other things, political resistance.

The Sabotage Manuals is, to quote the blurb from the publisher’s website, “[a]t once practical handbook and philosophical inquiry, Ida Borjel’s exploration of sabotage and its history throws a wrench into the machinery of contemporary language, generating strange affinities between wreckers, iconoclasts, and saboteurs of all types.”

I am using this as a jumping off point to segue into our conversation about MA, a book that is considered by many (including yours truly) as a worthy successor to Inger Christensen’s Alphabet. Christensen’s seminal work is often seen as a project of cataloging, a stock-taking of a world on the precipice. It is quite reassuring to be told that things still “exist.” Maybe, cataloging is an act of upholding structures, however stifling they are.

Is it fair to assume that MA continues this project forward? Or, if not, what do you think is its project? All of this is to ask, how did you embark on this journey?

Ida Börjel: A flower, if I may, before we begin: a red anemone as a token of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Bearing the colors of the national flag it has long served as a symbol of Palestinian endurance, belonging and struggle for freedom from the sionist ockupation.

From there, red on red: some nicknamed her “Princess of the Red,” the jawsmith, traveling agitator, the women’s and workers’ rights advocate Elisabeth Gurley Flynn. In her 1916 IWW handbook “Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers Industrial Efficiency,” she nails the essence of sabotage as “a fine thread of deviation.”

If we are referring to a conscious act, it seems to ring true, but what if the deviation is done unconsciously, like a thought drifting away in a critical moment, the gaze from the driving lane? In my gatherings of documentary material, also including workers diaries and an OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to CIA) booklet, the theme of self-sabotage quickly became an integrated part of that action poetry book.

Although I dived into the past of the phenomena of sabotage, the question was of course if and how and where one could pick up or spin that thread? Since I’m not a weaver about to toss my clog into a Spinning Jenny, what then is the factory of my life, the assembly line of my perceptions?

Miximum Ca’ Canny The Sabotage Manuals displays seven attempts, set in seven different linguistic frames from a word book entry to a lyrical sway, from the manual to the fable.

It was published one year ahead of MA, but it was written after MA was completed (i.e the difference of time lines between a tiny and a big publishing house).

While The Sabotage Manuals are playful and at times witty, MA was written in a state of anger, and loss. Inger Christensen’s Alphabet turned out to be a portal I had sought for for so long, banging my head against the wall, unable to write. Her spell worked on me. She referred to it as such in her book of essays Hemmelighedstillstanden (published by New Directions as The Condition of Secrecy): a spell, an incantation of the earth, our biological interconnectedness including not only apricot trees and butterflies but also language in itself, which she regarded as a biological phenomena among others. She started writing it after staring into the white void for a long time.

Perhaps as an outcome of a catalonging? The dream of a contained world, which fits into a reasonable order . . . an act of genesis, a claiming wor(l)d order, a ridiculous aim, making me smile even when I’m about to write a shopping list because of the kind of hubris it correlates to, and yet and still it is linked to necessity for without the list, I’d be all lost at the supermarket . . .

As I had already taken on the burden of writing MA, I learned that Inger Christensen began her work with Alphabet as a naming game, like the ones she played with her young son. And there I was, writing my version, in memory of the child I had lost.

So yes, and thank you for this opening, Shriram, MA is clinging hard to the structure of the alphabet, without which only chaos and depression seemed to loom. But the promise I made was sworn to the past, stating what must not be forgotten, or ignored in the dark waters of human made civilisation. In addition, I too felt that the imperative task of becoming a parent was to name the world, possibly its strokes of solace, the points of references, and of no return. 

Shriram Sivaramakrishnan: There is a lot to unpack here, Ida. I see shades of that promise in the epigraph by Birgitta Trotzig, “what happened, it happened and happened.” The repetition is interesting. Even though the entire fragment is in the past tense, the repetition of the word “happened” alludes to the cyclical nature of, among other things, grief itself. That the past is always alive, even after we cross the points of no return.

I want to spend a little time on the anger you were referring to. Anger as a generative force behind the genesis, in this case, of MA. What is interesting to me is its outward motion, by which I mean the register is not one of the private, but one of the public, the political, a gaia-level turning of what is an embodied personal grief. Seen this way, writing then becomes an act of solidarity, with the displaced, the trod-upon. A “catalonging.”

Right from the first chapter, the lens is cosmic: reference to the breaking of the supercontinent, which eventually, if not causally, led to the Anthropocene. The following chapter, “B,” starts elsewhere, that is, a shift of the focus from the cosmic to the cosmopolitan: in this case, the plight of orphaned children in Bulgaria. This is not surprising. The act of naming is, first and foremost, political, which brings me to my next question: what do you think is the relationship between grief and naming? Or, is there a dynamic between anger arising from grief and the gift of language to name?

Ida Börjel: In Swedish “gift” is pronounced yift, meaning poison. Etymologically they share the same root, in the sense of gift/present. The difference lies in the dosage . . . as if it was a matter of Plato’s pharmakon, written text as remedy and/or threat, memory enabler and/or distortion.

If the dosage of anger is big enough, it will cause destruction. The effect might—if the one being angry is not scary enough—tip over into comedy. 

But isn’t the act of naming primarily an act of love, aimed at belonging and survival?

When you wonder about the gift of language to name, what comes first to my mind is the abundance of joy there is in giving a child a language—the shared pleasure in the declamations, the denotations, the neologisms and the ability to put feelings into words, to see someone put language into action, discovering that it actually works, that a person turns their head when called upon, and that a no means no. 

Before that stage of language acquisition, as is the case with MA, one of her very first tasks in becoming a parent is to give the child a name. A name is also: to exist in language. The child will answer to it, carry it, state it. It will settle into the name, and in doing so, make a claim in the world.

And from there, a mother begins to name the world. The pinnacles, the objects and actions and emotions whirling around the child. All the things near and dear.

But in MA, the child has died. And so the gaze is turned outwards, far beyond the physical one metre radius sphere of mother and infant.

In her diaries from the sixties, Birgitta Trotzig speaks of what Lauren Berlant or Leslie Kaplan might refer to as a leap: “To dare to have a language. To enter into a relationship with reality.”

Anger is related to courage, as is fear. And I think what has been said about fear might also apply to anger, in one of her speeches Audre Lorde states that “we can learn to work when we are afraid as we have learned to work when we are tired . . .”

Anger as a way to dissipate the fear, to outvote anxiety and pluck up the courage to make a claim. For me, anger broke the paralyzing silence of apathy.

Trotzig also urges us to enter into a dialogue with the unbearable. The unbearables, the unnamables—are they to be named, reworded? or avoided, since even the thought of being able to capture them in my own words is vanity, hubris? Also: what happens when an atrocity is dressed up in words, made legible, graspable, reasonable?

It’s an old dilemma, for sure. Language can be taken into service, it’s not loyal to any cause but grammatical ones, and grammar works willingly with cold labels of tiny warm broken paws.

I was haunted by this peril while writing MA, how clusters of naming, of calling out historical violent and horrible traumas, wouldn’t result in trivializing and/or a neat ordering of chaos. This, and also, the presence of “beauty”: of harmonic sounds, clusters of alliterations. Perhaps they arose out of a necessity, glimpses of light to be able to endure. Also, there is no contradiction in placing beauty next to a phenomena of evil, as one might be struck by the beauty in an image of a mushroom cloud.

The question is how chaos or unrest can be enacted/pictured without them appearing to be controlled, even though they are laid to rest within the frames of a book.

Shriram Sivaramakrishnan: I like the way you have structured your response as a wreath of thoughts, more like vignettes, in which each one enriches the whole but necessarily each others. I find in the shared dynamic between the parent and the child, insofar as the partaking of language is concerned, a mirror to the “shared pleasures” between an author and a translator. I can’t think of a better way to welcome Jennifer Hayashida.

Jen, let’s start with the shared pleasures: “the declamations, the denotations . . . to see someone put language into action,” and then to take that language and make it one’s own, not to forget the task of naming. When it comes to translation, is it important to find common ground, or maybe dig a semantic field where two different families of denotations, by which I mean “the pinnacles, the objects and actions and emotions whirling” around disparate worldviews, “enter into a dialogue” with each other?

I suppose it is another way of asking, how did you go about translating a work like MA, a work that straddles multiple lived realities? And given the fact that you have previously translated Ida, what registers did you tick?

Jennifer Hayashida: I believe that Ida and I entered into dialogue regarding the translation of MA in 2016, when she and the Swedish poet Jenny Tunedal visited NY together with Per Bergström, who runs Rámus, a Swedish publisher of poetry in translation. At that point, I had translated her chapbook Miximum Ca’Canny The Sabotage Manuals, published by Commune Editions—that work began in 2014, but if I remember correctly, Ida and I met in person only when the book was released in 2016. Working on The Sabotage Manuals was like a dream in a way that very few translations are for me. I can’t help but think of how Don Mee Choi says that she translates Kim Hyesoon in a trance: entering into, and turning (or torquing), Ida’s poetry was revelatory, both because of the poems themselves, but also thanks to her remarkably generous and experimental stance with regard to her own work. That slim book insisted on a kind of commoning, which forced a third way to open up where Ida and I could play and turn words together.

All this is to say that the work on MA began a decade ago, and many things happened over the course of that decade which both facilitated and hindered work on the translation. When you in your question write that translation could be to “dig a semantic field,” I think that a lot of the time spent working on MA was time spent tilling the ground for what would eventually become MA in English. My professional and personal life took many turns: I left the US for Sweden, I started a PhD program, and throughout I would say that Ida and I grew closer and closer, but also more and more uneasy with how long it was taking to translate the book. And still, I couldn’t seem to move any faster: it was as though I had to do all these other things, other translations, in order to figure out how to be bold enough with regard to MA. Whereas working on The Sabotage Manuals involved a kind of trance, MA was a different creature: I felt like a surgeon engaging in an experimental transplant, and any unaccounted-for move might kill the work. At the same time, the translational procedures had to be experimental, even polemical: if I was too dutiful, the insurgently mournful (or mournfully insurgent) spirit of the book would fly away. I don’t think I could have translated MA to a point where I was satisfied had I not in the meantime also translated Don Mee Choi and Kim Hyesoon from English to Swedish: I am convinced that it was necessary for me to be in their poetics, and politics, in order to be courageous enough in my treatment of MA.

I think it’s important to say that I did not respond to Christensen (or her amazing English translator, Susanna Nied) while working on MA. In the past few years, I have thought a great deal about translation and the paraphrase—a question I take up in my research, as well—and, to me, the translation had to insist on being a singular response to MA and, in that sense, to Ida’s inherently dialectical poetics. I think the most stark example is the fact that Nied in her translation of Christensen uses the English verb “exists” in response to the Danish “findes,” whereas I settled on “was” as a response to the Swedish “fanns”—also, of course, taking into account that Christensen operates in the present tense, whereas MA indexes retrospectively, a kind of Orphean index. In that sense, my translational solidarity (a term I much prefer to “loyalty,” which to me contains the multiple violences of gender and citizenship) has remained with Ida’s interrogatory stance as a poet and thinker throughout.

Shriram Sivaramakrishnan: Ok. There are a lot of through-lines that I want to pursue, Jen, but for the sake of time, I will stick to this one: I am intrigued by the way you describe translation as “being a single response to MA,” as well as to the dialectical poetics of Ida, while keeping that of Christensen at arm’s length. I am tempted to think that you arrived at this singularity mainly-if-not-only by translating the works of Don Mee Choi and Kim Hyesoon, two writers whose poetics challenge, among other things, the hegemony of language to assimilate dialectics of any kind into a faithful aberration.

I admire your decision to settle on the infinitive ‘was,’ even though I do not know the modalities of conjugation in the Swedish language, by which I mean that your decision fragments the language down to the unit of lines. There are too many to point out, but here is a sample:

cement foundation was, cells
ground air was
(. . .)
the muddling was
crops, genetic modification was
and grotesquerie
(. . .)
oil, coal, gas
hoarding was and buffer

Reading the text aloud left me in dissonance, akin to eavesdropping on someone talking over a phone on a noisy interstate bus. You get to hear one-half of a conversation, plus the ambient spillage. I construed the syntax as a non sequitur; the effect was captivating, if not disassociating, in that, it tonally steered the text away from the polemical.

I would like to phrase my next question this way: What does it mean to look (more like “sense,” become aware of) at a work, the work, through the apparatuses (poetical, political, polemical, etc.) afforded by another work(s)? And in what ways does this approach singularize a translator’s gaze, if it singularizes at all?

Jennifer Hayashida: I have been giving this question a lot of thought, simply because it prompted me to understand that I always look at a work—the work—as something polyvocal, across time and place. A source text is never singular, is never the source text, and always contains the paraphrastic, the promiscuous, the parasitic. When I translate (and this is especially true when it comes to poetry), I realize that I rarely look only at the translation or its source: rather, I am intent on context, poetics, influence, the currents within which a work comes into being and then, continuously, exists. I am suspicious of authors and translators who insist that they primarily toggle between source and target, since, for me, those two are not necessarily the one-to-one match. Perhaps the source is primarily in dialogue with another work (or issue, question), and then not simply as another source (so not MA as it relates to Alphabet): what do I as a translator do with that other paratext, or -texts? Thinking of Don Mee Choi, she is in dialogue with various vocabularies (linguistic and otherwise) concerning neocoloniality and militarism, but it makes little to no sense for me as a translator of her work to Swedish to squarely home in on moving the American English into Swedish: I need to contaminate the Swedish as she has the American English (or as the American English is already contaminated by militaristic jingoism), and then the Swedish must be in dialogue with other sources where that type of violent polyphony becomes possible. With MA, there are numerous instances when Ida or I intervened between source and target to create a kind of poetic static, to make the translation tremble a bit. And to me that has everything to do with opening the aperture of the translation, refusing to become singular in your process. A translation should never reify the so-called original.

Shriram Sivaramakrishnan: Many thanks for delving into the rabbit hole, Jen. I am glad you brought up the “poetic static.” I have been working out language to aggrandize this concept and segue our conversation towards it. But first, there are two terms I want us to sit with: “polyvocal” and “polyphony.” My understanding of polyphony is similar to that of Mikhail Bakhtin’s: a narrative that contains multiple voices, perspectives, or worldviews, none of which are subordinated to a single dominant voice; whereas polyvocality, I have come to see, as an intentional interplay between voices. In a slightly reductive way, I find the difference to be one of intent—polyphony implies a sort of structured interaction between voices, often with an underlying artistic or narrative harmony, whereas polyvocality signifies the presence of multiple voices that may or may not be in conversation or agreement with each other.

MA sits at an interesting precipice in this regard. There is a distinct lack of the speaker’s voice in the first half. The ‘I’ is conspicuously absent yet symbiotically alive, gathering voices disparate, disquieted; voices in distress. That is, until the utterance of the word “Ma,” at the end of the section ‘L’. The following section, titled ‘M,’ starts with that word. What follows is startling:

I see
through the open gate
I breach
no it is impossible to write
it cannot be written
I cannot
I cannot
it should not be possible to write
how can I be where the poem is

I want to dwell on the last line of this excerpt. The voice is almost on the verge of negating itself. It is as though the poem cannot exist, in the Christensensian sense, if the speaker’s voice does, which is probably why the latter disappears after this section. The simultaneity of this self-negation and curation of other voices is the violence I perceive in Jen’s usage of the term “violent polyphony” in MA. But the artifice makes me wonder if the work is one of polyvocality, unlike The Sabotage Manuals, whose aesthetic make-up eschews multiple voices into a slightly unifying narrative, and is thus polyphonic.

All of these is not to say that I disagree with Jen’s point. On the contrary, I agree with hers. MA partakes in, if not borrows, Alphabet’s Fibonacci variation, and as such, is structured as an infinite fractaling of voices. But it is the creation of the poetic static during translation, a practice that involves contamination of Swedish (and American English)—and thus their many linguistic and cultural registers—that unleashes polyphonic undercurrents.

Jennifer Hayashida: A clarification from me: I think the “violent polyphony” I’m getting at has to do with how the matter of the poem—everything and everyone in the dark waters—looks at and speaks back to the reader, via the poet. I also think Ida’s question regarding to what degree monovocality even is possible, desirable, bears (down) upon (or against) the act of witnessing: what is witnessed is not passive or static, but in motion across time and geography and politics. And the same is true for the poet, who in my mind is also in motion, turning her senses this way and that, carefully gleaning.

Translation, then, becomes another witness, someone walking near the poet—sometimes alongside, sometimes behind, sometimes even up ahead. My map has been Ida’s poetics, but also the matter of each poem, the grieving fates of the book, entangled with its “I” but also with each other, uncoiling and recoiling. I feel that, even though the author is a solitary figure, there is a choral aspect to the text itself (if not its composition), an accretion of voice(s), considering grieving as both a solitary and collective process. Solitary, it is perhaps a retreat, and collectively I’d like to imagine it as an assertion, a public lament intended to elicit attention and action. MA, I think, enacts both, and is both alone and together, with and without.

Shriram Sivaramakrishnan: Translation as another witness, especially in the face of collective grieving! That was beautiful. I can’t think of a better way to end this conversation. Ida Börjel, Jennifer Hayashida, it was truly an honor to eavesdrop on your thinking, and thinking-through, poetry and translation.