Helena Österlund’s WORDS, translated from Swedish by Paul Cunningham, is a fugue state, an exercise in duration, differing and deferring itself through time along the skeleton of a narrative. WORDS is the first of two long poems that constitute Österlund’s 2010 book Ordet och fägerna. The book is divided into three sections that correspond to verb tense: “Was,” “Is,” and “Will.” The three sections all appear in the same mostly unbroken stanzas, short end-stopped lines, and simple syntax. Beneath the outwardly simple texture of the language, however, Österlund enacts a complex interplay of sound, sense, phenomenal apprehension, and the fraught encounter between self and other.

WORDS creates the impression of narrative through its direct, declarative sentences and recurrent images of snow, silence, the colors white and black, grass, a raven, eyes, flesh, fish, and teeth. We know that it is winter and that the speaker confronts a beast with sharp teeth and yellow eyes. We know that this encounter is violent. We know that the speaker meets a raven and a fish. Yet the poem’s structure of repetition with minor variations calls into question the stability of narrative as a concept. Repetition simultaneously erases and magnifies difference and folds narrative back on itself:

I saw black
And yellow eyes
I saw black
And yellow eyes
I saw black
And yellow eyes
I was silent
I was completely silent
I was lost
I was
I was
I was really there

Österlund has explicitly acknowledged John Cage’s influence on her work, an influence that is evident in WORDS. In the essay “45’ For A Speaker,” Cage writes, “The principle called mobility-immobility is this: / every thing is changing / but while some things / are changing / others / are not.” Cage’s description of “mobility-immobility” is an apt description of the experience of reading WORDS. Österlund controls duration through repetition, line length, and stanza breaks, but she holds the reader’s attention by pressurizing small variations. “The silence was silence,” she writes, “The silence was absolute silence.”

WORDS also grapples with language as an imperfect medium of knowledge about the world. As a result of the poem’s homogenous syntax and limited vocabulary, we get the sense that we are watching the speaker’s process of becoming self-aware through the material of words. This appears most clearly in the speaker’s interaction with the raven, which dramatizes the relations between self and other, signifier and signified:

I see that it sees
I see that it sees with its eyes
But I don’t see what it sees
I see that it sees with black eyes
But I don’t see what it sees
And I don’t know what I know about a raven
And I don’t know what I can know about a raven
But I know the word for it

Cunningham’s translation is highly sensitive to Österlund’s philosophical project and he is invested in transmitting the musicality of the Swedish. The translation is presented alongside the original text, which is especially useful in a poem that is as musically notational as it is content-driven. In his translator’s introduction, Cunningham writes, “I embrace the relationship between translation and failure,” an ethic that aligns closely with Österlund’s interrogation of the space between word and world. It also leaves space for the strangeness of the Swedish text to erupt in the English version, as in the nearly homophonic sounds of “ice” and “eyes” in the third section.

WORDS is a long trance, a musical syncope, a study in phenomenology, and a fairy tale fed through a tape loop. Cunningham’s translation serves as a valuable (and currently the only) entry point for anglophone readers into Österlund’s mesmerizing world:

I said the word
Snow
It did not snow
It was already snow
It was the word snow
And I believed in it