Here’s an excerpt:
As a translator you become very much aware of these kind of excesses that form through the process of translation—excess of meaning, excess of language. Some of that goes into my Aase translations, but a lot of the time…I’ll be like, I want to keep going. I want to do my translation of my translation and go even further with that….Some of that would be in the translation of Aase for example, but at some point it would be rude. “Here’s your book, I translated your one poem 75 different times.” (laughter)
So, I made my own book like that. It’s definitely about a bilingual experience I guess. A lot of is based on translation of things I feel nostalgic about, which is usually 80’s Swedish punk music. There’s lots of quotations, and the characters that appear again like a carousel. There’s also stuff that’s based on Swedish translations of English texts or a lot of Mayakovski translations, the Gunnar Harding translation of Mayakovski, that I leave as sort of the English translations of the Swedish translations. So yeah, the interest in the excesses of language, the excesses of movements and meanings, probably comes straight out of spending a lot of time translating.