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Transfer Fat
Transfer Fat is a haunting amalgamation of languages and elements — of science, of pregnancy, of whales, of the naturally and unnaturally grotesque — that births things unforeseen and intimately alien. Johannes Göransson's translation captures the seething instability of Berg's bizarre compound nouns and linguistic contortions.
- GenresPoetry
118 pages, Paperback
First published February 8, 2002
About the author
Aase Berg
40 books78 followersPoet, fiction writer, critic, translator, and one of the founding members of the Stockholm Surrealist Group.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
December 1, 2020
The book's original Swedish name has a much better rhythm to it: Forsla Fett.
Much has already been said about Aase Berg and her tendency to make a familiar language sound unfamiliar. In her own words, she wants to create `...a language that looks like us, instead of trying to discipline us.'
I love that line. Love it. Language's sneaky tendency to try and control all of our thoughts-in fact insisting that it's the only system in which we can think-has always rubbed me the wrong way. It's one of the reasons why I admire Berg as a poet. She has the guts to stand up to something as elemental as language and say `Fuck you' right back.
But like I mentioned, much has already been said about the fact that she contorts and reinvents language. I'm here to talk a little about HOW she does it.
This book is about pregnancy. It's about motherhood. And it's about childhood. These are topics on which countless poems have been written already. But Berg immediately chucks our expectations out the window with a dramatic shift in perspective.
Most of the book is written from the unborn child's point of view. From inside the womb.
To make this perspective feel visceral, feel real, Berg mashes together words from animal/ biological and medical/technological vocabularies. Here's a rough glossary:
`Hare' is the child. Tiny, pale, spectral, vulnerable.
`Whale' is the mother. The largest mammal on Earth, also the largest creature from the child's perspective.
'The voter' is the mother. Voting is ultimately an act of decision-making, a choice. The mother chooses to bring a new life, the child, to the world, without the child's consent. The child does not get to choose.
'The Shell' is the mother's womb and her entire body, surrounding and armoring the child. Also keeping it in, disconnected from the external world.
'The Whale Jaw' is the mother's vagina.
'Fat' is sustenance. It also sometimes stands in for flesh.
There are many, many more terms like this in the book, each more exciting than the last. And like the last example I mentioned, these terms are sometimes stripped of their previous meaning and dressed in a new one.
A gorgeous book. Can't wait to read her other works. I'll end with a reference:
reading Berg is somewhat similar to viewing an H.R. Giger painting. But not entirely. It's better.
Much has already been said about Aase Berg and her tendency to make a familiar language sound unfamiliar. In her own words, she wants to create `...a language that looks like us, instead of trying to discipline us.'
I love that line. Love it. Language's sneaky tendency to try and control all of our thoughts-in fact insisting that it's the only system in which we can think-has always rubbed me the wrong way. It's one of the reasons why I admire Berg as a poet. She has the guts to stand up to something as elemental as language and say `Fuck you' right back.
But like I mentioned, much has already been said about the fact that she contorts and reinvents language. I'm here to talk a little about HOW she does it.
This book is about pregnancy. It's about motherhood. And it's about childhood. These are topics on which countless poems have been written already. But Berg immediately chucks our expectations out the window with a dramatic shift in perspective.
Most of the book is written from the unborn child's point of view. From inside the womb.
To make this perspective feel visceral, feel real, Berg mashes together words from animal/ biological and medical/technological vocabularies. Here's a rough glossary:
`Hare' is the child. Tiny, pale, spectral, vulnerable.
`Whale' is the mother. The largest mammal on Earth, also the largest creature from the child's perspective.
'The voter' is the mother. Voting is ultimately an act of decision-making, a choice. The mother chooses to bring a new life, the child, to the world, without the child's consent. The child does not get to choose.
'The Shell' is the mother's womb and her entire body, surrounding and armoring the child. Also keeping it in, disconnected from the external world.
'The Whale Jaw' is the mother's vagina.
'Fat' is sustenance. It also sometimes stands in for flesh.
There are many, many more terms like this in the book, each more exciting than the last. And like the last example I mentioned, these terms are sometimes stripped of their previous meaning and dressed in a new one.
A gorgeous book. Can't wait to read her other works. I'll end with a reference:
reading Berg is somewhat similar to viewing an H.R. Giger painting. But not entirely. It's better.
March 23, 2012
An immense showering of birth—fat cells and proto-cosmos—not hued and textured like painting but resonant like music. More can happen in twenty words than happens in most novels. More happens in one word in some cases than in most novels, certainly than in most poems. Press the word like a piano key and it has eight initial meanings. Read to Göransson afterward on the translation first and try to follow the Swedish on the facing page. Try to pick at the book or read it in pieces: I say if you pay complete attention you will fail. I cannot help but read through this book. Dense and funny and sound-brilliant, the early passages mislead me every time into the amusement and curiosity each poem offers, but as I tear on I find my mind reformed around the possibilities of the womb: this is my favorite book about childbirth and my favorite book about hares. From the translations I have seen of poems from the forthcoming books, the intensity of my adoration will only increase.
March 16, 2012
Translator Johannes Göransson makes a good case, at the end of this book, on why Aase Berg's poetry is so difficult to translate: based on compound puns for which there are English equivalents, the poetry, in English pales compared to the Swedish versions on the facing pages. I don't read Swedish, but one doesn't have to to immediately see we're only getting a fraction of the potential readings available in the original. So then, three stars: without knowing the challenges facing Göransson, I would give Transfer Fat only two stars for a book of poetry that is merely meh. Göransson must have had a significant challenge in translating Berg, but the playfulness I can see in the Swedish has been lost.
September 18, 2016
I found Göransson's description of the ambient space of these poems to really open them up.
March 9, 2012
Wow. Another beautiful hit from the Berg / Göransson team. Transfer Fat is slick with new words, a 'deformation zone' as it is dubbed by Berg, where language is fluid and malleable, ever-(de)evolving. Some favorites lines include:
'Existence as an intervention in the surface tension.'
'A fatcatatonic election promise'
Right? Get it on with this book now. For real. Right now.
'Existence as an intervention in the surface tension.'
'A fatcatatonic election promise'
Right? Get it on with this book now. For real. Right now.
May 30, 2012
you need to read it more than once. sound driven words informed by animals and the cosmos. carved by rather. carved sharp but with soft feelings of fatty human need.
February 25, 2017
Because it is so spare and relies heavily on Swedish ambiguities, homonyms and half-puns, the work here doesn't translate quite as smoothly as Berg's longer poems. Gorannson's notes at the end are helpful and interesting in this regard. If you have a little familiarity with Swedish you can read both and get the musicality of the originals. Otherwise I'd recommend reading her other books first.
April 12, 2022
Kanske mer 3,5. Kan inte bestämma mig. Aase har en förmåga att tränger sig ner under de yttre lagren. Här om graviditeten, in i magen, i fettet, i fostret, liksom hur hon i Mörk materia trängde sig in i kosmos. Vi rör oss även i denna bland kometer, kosmos och bland harar. Hon skriver lustigt, äckligt och roligt men stenallvarligt.
December 4, 2021
Blänger för en fyra. Här är förf. dock som illusionistslarvern som glömde röken och speglarna hemma. Men om man trollar bort det och kissar med ögonen så är det om inte stort eller storartat så storartataktigt.
December 16, 2020
It's hard to know how to assess poetry in translation, but the result here reads like a series of rituals to bring earth and sky and sea together again.
February 14, 2022
Feeling outside of my literary comfort zone while reading translated contemporary poetry for a seminar I'm in, but I had a strange and fun and wonderful time. Loved reading about Johannes Göransson's approach to translation in his note at the text's conclusion.
June 30, 2022
Potentiellt intressant, men i princip obegriplig. Ibland undrar jag om orden öht betyder något, eller om koden bara är långt där borta någonstans, dold för mig, utom räckhåll.
April 10, 2013
Translator Johannes Goransson's afterword bumped this up from 3 stars to 4 for me. I'm not a big poetry person (OK, that's a bit of an overstatement--I'm not a poetry person at all), but I'm going to try and read a few good translated collections this year just to expand my horizons. Anyway, the poetry itself is a fun blend of words and strange verbal combinations that, to me, were more interesting just to hear/read than to puzzle over. It wasn't until reading the afterword though that I really saw what was going on in the language, and all of the difficulties Goransson faced in "translating" this.
"It's hard to speak of a translation of a text like FORSLA FETT as being faithful or correct. To begin with, there is the problem of the proliferation of puns and near-puns. For example, the word 'val' can mean 'whale,' 'election,' or 'choice' depending on the context; it also rhymes with 'hal' ('slippery'), which is of course also the name of the deviant computer in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Hal), one of the mail texts referenced in the book. Due to the ambient space of the book (i.e., the language is often driven by puns and lullabye-esque rhythms rather than sentences and narratives), this word, 'val,' becomes multivalent. So that in 'Mamma val' we get:
Mamma val
Amma val
Valyngelskal
Ge harmojolk,
alla val ar
samma val
One might say that in the blubberiness of the whale, we get a blubbery language that refuses to coalesce: every choice is and isn't a choice, is and isn't a whale. To invoke this mutability of 'val,' I have tended to translate it as both 'whale' and 'choie':
Mom Choice
Nurse whale
Whalebroodshell
Give hare-milk
all whales are
the same whale
[. . .]
In FORSLA FETT, even the simplest words become slippery and loaded with connotations; in places, the ambience of the book causes me to misread words. For example, the poem title 'Vagar' means 'Dares,' but the oceanic imagery of the poem causes me to misread it as 'vagor,' or 'waves'; the final translated title is 'Darewaves.' In the repeated word 'harpoon,' I can't help but notice the embedded word 'har' ('rabbit'): harpoon becomes harepoon. The word 'bekrafta,' which means 'confirm,' suddenly contains 'kraft,' or 'crayfish.' The result is a reading process--and thus a translation process--full of stutter and noise, a strange music."
This is a great book for anyone interested in the challenges and opportunities inherent in translating poetry.
"It's hard to speak of a translation of a text like FORSLA FETT as being faithful or correct. To begin with, there is the problem of the proliferation of puns and near-puns. For example, the word 'val' can mean 'whale,' 'election,' or 'choice' depending on the context; it also rhymes with 'hal' ('slippery'), which is of course also the name of the deviant computer in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Hal), one of the mail texts referenced in the book. Due to the ambient space of the book (i.e., the language is often driven by puns and lullabye-esque rhythms rather than sentences and narratives), this word, 'val,' becomes multivalent. So that in 'Mamma val' we get:
Mamma val
Amma val
Valyngelskal
Ge harmojolk,
alla val ar
samma val
One might say that in the blubberiness of the whale, we get a blubbery language that refuses to coalesce: every choice is and isn't a choice, is and isn't a whale. To invoke this mutability of 'val,' I have tended to translate it as both 'whale' and 'choie':
Mom Choice
Nurse whale
Whalebroodshell
Give hare-milk
all whales are
the same whale
[. . .]
In FORSLA FETT, even the simplest words become slippery and loaded with connotations; in places, the ambience of the book causes me to misread words. For example, the poem title 'Vagar' means 'Dares,' but the oceanic imagery of the poem causes me to misread it as 'vagor,' or 'waves'; the final translated title is 'Darewaves.' In the repeated word 'harpoon,' I can't help but notice the embedded word 'har' ('rabbit'): harpoon becomes harepoon. The word 'bekrafta,' which means 'confirm,' suddenly contains 'kraft,' or 'crayfish.' The result is a reading process--and thus a translation process--full of stutter and noise, a strange music."
This is a great book for anyone interested in the challenges and opportunities inherent in translating poetry.
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August 31, 2016Words smash together, fat against fat, shit against shit, that dark residual clay-like matter that somehow you know is human but in animal way. You can smell it, or not quite smell it exactly, it's just something you feel in your chest. Everything is possible under the freedom of these structures, strictures, carpenters, rabbits and whales. Is this anything? Is this art? Is anything art? Are we all lost forever? I don't know if there's anything in here I'll remember except the freedom to see the world in its natural state, a frozen northward castigation, but an iciness that soothes. Do these words transfer you to me or me to you? A spoon scraping out the stars from a shieldshell. A transference of heat from one to another. How can we melt fat in the frozen outlands? How can we care about words in the brutality of the sea, in the darkness of the forest? I learn about structure, I learn about the hard lump, the rabbit in the hatidote, the meat that flows between fingers, the water that recreates itself in the tension of existence. Yes, we are pioneers. Yes, we are voters. This doesn't matter. This confession has meant nothing. Hey Jules, you were right.
January 3, 2016
The poems are slippery and difficult, language play drives most of the work of the poems. There seems to be no "fat" or "blubber" to them, though, they are sharp and full of cutting edges. A rewarding book to spend time with. The translator's note is by far my favorite part: "To translate such a book makes impossible the common illusion of bringing over a pristine 'original' into a necessarily flawed 'translation.' Rather, it forces the translator to be a kind of conductor of interactions between languages, a 'transfer-er' of 'fat' into the English language, an ambient translator."
May 4, 2013
Super weird and awesome poetry book. but this poetry is brutal and strange and filled with bizarre imagery and wordplay about meat and fish and tunnels, it's kinda gross in a cool way. and like Chad said in his review, the translator's afterword (I LOVE AFTERWORDS AND HATE HATE HATE FORWARDS AND PREFACES) makes reading this collection all the better, Johannes Göransson did a really damn good job explaining how this translation happened and the radical ideas behind the word choices in English. love it, love ugly duckling too!
August 30, 2012
I really enjoyed reading this, speaking as an English graduate obsessed with words and the way they sound when put together. I didn't "understand" any of it though! Although I get that it is in someway referring to birth and nurture.
I have used the term visceral before in reviews, and have patted myself on the back for being clever. I wasn't. This book is as close to a working definition of visceral as could be possible
I have used the term visceral before in reviews, and have patted myself on the back for being clever. I wasn't. This book is as close to a working definition of visceral as could be possible
November 7, 2012
I found myself meandering over to the Swedish side of the text as I read, wishfully willing my brain to conjure up some dark latent familial understanding of the language so that I could get two poems per page. this book is lovely, lyrical, a translation infused with humor, I found I wanted to read it outloud and again almost at once.
June 15, 2016
I had to read the translator's note to fully appreciate what is happening in this, and it's an interesting method if you are interested in translation theory. The text is a bit too opaque for my taste, but it's a fun and thoughtful look at the strangeness of language and the relative smallness of large ideas.
May 13, 2014
Reading Berg's poetry I felt as if someone kept wispering a lullaby right into my ear, a whale song-cry that melts into soft wax-fat and slowly inavades the body. Experimental, somatic, contagious, unique. Loved it.
May 13, 2014
Reading Berg's poetry felt as if someone kept wispering a lullaby right into my ear, a whale song-cry that melts into soft wax-fat and slowly inavades the body. Experimental, somatic, contagious, unique. Loved it.
January 30, 2013
This is a beautiful and excellent book of poems. The translator afterword is... You must.
March 29, 2013
creative engagement & "imagined" translations: http://www.5cense.com/13/transfer_fat...
June 14, 2013
a luxuriously fatty experiment in translation
April 12, 2012
HAREPOON.
November 7, 2014
so intense and compact. bloodfat rotgut gorgasm
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews