Dark Matter by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Görannson (Black Ocean, 2013)

John Cage said “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry.” I think this quote, like Cage’s work, can be bent and reshaped in different ways and never quite mean the same thing. As I read Aase Berg’s Dark Matter I kept thinking of Cage’s quote because I’m not sure I know what Berg is saying, but she’s saying it, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it is poetry.

Dark Matter is a sprawling and ambitious collection of text—sometimes lineated, just as often not—that mutates and evolves just as it breaks down and disintegrates. Berg looks closely at the minutiae of matter and cellular life in order to demonstrate how the world around us functions as a massive single organism. The closer she looks, however, the more is missing from the fabric of reality and Berg begins to explore the negative space, the dark matter of existence, teasing out new connections and hallucinations, so that even reality itself is surreal.

Late in the book, there is a poem called “Immaterial” that begins:

Matter lives.

Matter is pure evil.

Matter compact and resistant.

Throughout the book, matter is dark, strange, and dangerous. Matter shifts and changes, boundaries blur between real and unreal. “Now the matter writhes in unthinkable lines.” Even the English and Swedish texts on facing pages seem to blend together. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up reading the same thing twice, but only understanding it once. Yet, somehow, Berg still has “a trust in matter.” A whole section of the book is titled, “Bordercuts.”

There and here borders cut between different ways of being a life form. I, with my silhouette: without becoming a tree I dare to rest here beneath the tree.

Images of touch and tactility abound, but what surfaces Berg finds in her explorations are “fragile grainboundaryskin[s]” and even “continental plates topple and are cleft.” The surfaces remain, but they have moved.

As Berg looks closely at the fabric of reality she finds that “there are no shadows between the things, there are holes. There are no things next to each other stacked in clean rows.” Berg zooms in so close that she bursts through to the other side of reality where “planets drift in a stressed twitches across the sky” [sic]. “From this exact view, in this exact light,” Berg writes,

                                                            I can see

the strata of air, strata of oxygen and helium overlap—

weave—break each other down.

To Berg, you can only see a thing if you look at what’s around it.

Berg finds tension in language and contradictions: “You were supposed to whisper my name by my side. I would seldom hear you. One morning I would hear you.” Johannes Görannson’s translation is alive and sensitive to Berg’s intent. In his foreword, Görannson notes Berg’s neologism “grainboundaryskin,” which comes just before her use of the standard Swedish word for reptile, which translates, literally, as crawlanimal. Görannson chooses this peculiar translation to highlight the way Berg weirds language and makes strange the familiar.

But throughout the book, there’s a sense that more has been lost in translation than might be lost in other texts. What other puns and verbal weirdness has Görannson been unable to translate due to the limitations of English? His diction is varied and expansive, and the surreal landscape Berg has created is communicated, but to what end? Görannson notes in his foreword that Dark Matter is “semi-narrative,” but though the characters—named and unnamed—move through a series of dreamscapes, it’s hard to see why the urgency, which is palpable throughout, is needed.

Of course, my own inability to understand Berg’s intent does not necessarily mean the translation has failed. Görannson is a thoughtful translator and Dark Matter is considered a masterpiece by one of Sweden’s leading contemporary poets. Berg finds surrealism by focusing on the edges of things, the places where matter meets other matter and leaves gaps. She pushes into those gaps and finds new worlds. I may not understand what she is saying, but Dark Matter is a lyrical odyssey in prose that re-situates the reader on the borders of their own thoughts.

Have you read a book that baffled you, yet kept you reading? What other authors alienate even as they draw their readers closer to the text?