“The Forbidden Door: The Selected Poetry of Lasse Söderberg, beautifully translated by Lars Gustaf Andersson and Carolyn Forché, is one of the most important and moving collections of poetry in translation that I have read this decade.”
The Forbidden Door
by Lasse Söderberg
tr. by Carolyn Forche & Lars Gustaf Andersson
Sweden’s foremost living poet, Lasse Söderberg appears here in the first comprehensive selection of his poetry in English, masterfully translated by one of America’s leading poets, Carolyn Forche, in collaboration with celebrated Swedish writer and translator Lars Gustaf Andersson. The Forbidden Door invites readers to encounter a singularly emancipated sensibility for whom language serves as an instrument of transformation: “The air is like gold leaf,” he writes. “I take a deep breath/and become gilded inside.” Inspired by both French and Spanish surrealists, Söderberg’s work reflects his singular synthesis of different cultures and political moments, gliding effortlessly from one reality to another: “When I got up from the park bench/I let my melancholy stay there.” As the translators note in a brief but illuminating introduction, “to be within poetry to is to be attentive toward everything that happens, including political life.”
“The Forbidden Door: The Selected Poetry of Lasse Söderberg is compiled of imagistic and dreamlike poems that travel far from the poet’s native Sweden through Arthur Rimbaud’s France and Frederico García Lorca’s Spain, ultimately forging ties with Spanish-language poets on both sides of the Atlantic, such as César Vallejo and Octavio Paz (whom Söderberg also translated into Swedish).”
-Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation
Lasse Söderberg
Lasse Söderberg was born in 1931 in Stockholm, Sweden. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, and he is the foremost translator of post-war contemporary poets into Swedish, including Octavio Paz, Yves Bonnefoy, Charles Simic, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, and Rafael Alberti. He founded International Poetry Days, a festival in Malmö, Sweden. He has received numerous awards for his poetry in Sweden and was named to an honorary professorship by the Swedish government in 2002. In 2019, he received the Max Jacob Prize in Paris.
Translators:
Lars Gustaf Andersson is a poet and critic. He has translated works of British and American poets into Swedish, among them a selection of the poetry of Carolyn Forché, Mot slutet (Rámus 2020) and Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, De dövas republik (Rámus 2021). He is Professor of Film Studies at Lund University, Sweden, co-author of among others Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2012) and The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking (Intellect Books, 2019). He lives in Lund with his wife Carina Sjöholm.
Carolyn Forché is a poet, memoirist, and translator. She is the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and five books of poetry. Her most recent poetry book, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin, 2020) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton, 1993) and co-editor of Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500-2001, with Duncan Wu (W.W. Norton, 2014). She has translated five books of poetry, most recently America by Fernando Valverde (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). She is University Professor at Georgetown University, and lives in Maryland with her husband, Harry Mattison.
“Lasse Söderberg is capable of holding birds in his hands. The reader will have the opportunity to see the world from the flight and tremor of one of the most important European poets.”
“Lasse Söderberg is one of Sweden’s most highly regarded poets. His gaze is soulful and evocative—it dissolves what is complicated or unnecessary, revealing an immediacy and rare clarity of light, trees, stones, fellow humans as they are. Every poem is framed by a resonant silence. This exquisite collection has finally arrived in English in the vivid and eloquent translations of Lars Gustaf Andersson and Carolyn Forché.”
“In these fine translations from the Swedish, the present tense haunts itself. Here is an eternal pause, the pause of a surveyor. What is left, and for how long? Sweden, white at the top of the map and curled into the icy sea, a language mostly seen in subtitles (white) as if snow. There is also an echo of Latin American poetry, as if in translation from Spanish into Swedish then English, as a sweet gift from the rolling globe. How great it is to recall the time of Octavio Paz while reading these lovely poems.”
“The Forbidden Door: The Selected Poetry of Lasse Söderberg, beautifully translated by Lars Gustaf Andersson and Carolyn Forché, is one of the most important and moving collections of poetry in translation that I have read this decade. There is a vividness in the lyrics herein that doesn’t just allow us to see our world, but also helps us to see its mysterium. There is shimmering quality to the language, one that opens the door to the labyrinth of being. If clarity is the deepest mystery, one sees this notion come to life in these precise translations of this major Swedish poet.”
