I Don’t Want to Move On: Johannes Göransson and Niina Polari in Conversation

Johannes Göransson is the author of nine books of poetry and one book of criticism, Transgressive Circulation: Essays On Translation, as well as the translator of works by Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, and many others. Together with his wife, the poet Joyelle McSweeney, he is also one-half of the founding team at Action Books, one of the most exciting, risk-taking small presses working in the U.S. today. I first met him a decade ago when Action published my translation of the Finnish poet Tytti Heikkinen’s collection, The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal.

Göransson’s poetic work is informed by multilingualism and translation, and often defies genre and the limitations of narrative in poetry. Summer, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press, is his most recent book of poems. It deals with the death of his daughter, Arachne, but also with debt, capitalism, the economic framework and “worth” of poetry, and many more interwoven topics. We have several things in common in addition to our translation and writing practices: immigration at a formative age and family-building in America; publishing works of poetry in the same year that deal with the grief of child loss; a resistance to healing narratives around the subject of grief. Talking with Göransson about many of these subjects was a privilege.

Niina Pollari: I have so many questions to ask you about Summer, but let’s start here. The book is teeming with Swedish words and phrases, which are not translated, leading the reader to choose one of two paths. You can either speed through not understanding some of the passages but appreciating the voice, or you can stop to translate (which is what I did) and gain the pleasure of the many double entendres, but at the expense of the unbroken reading experience. Then I got to this line: “I only ever write / about childhood / because that was before I died”—you immigrated to the U.S. in early adolescence, so is this death in a certain way a linguistic death? How did you choose the form of the language in this text?

 This really cuts to the heart of the book, and to my writing in general. When I’m asked about my reasons for writing, I mostly answer that I write out of homesickness. I think one of the driving forces behind  was finally realizing that that place I have yearned for for so long doesn’t exist.