Reading the opening of the book yesterday at the Cyberpunk. There was a good showing, and afterward a brief Q:A about translating, which is was a nice opportunity to talk about my work process. And I even got $30 in donations!

The Cyberpunk. I write in the room with the light on.

I posted to Cyberpunk Apocalypse's website about the reading: http://cyberpunkapocalypse.blogspot.com/2010/06/reading-27th-june-7pm.html

None of the crazy people I could think of, who I emailed about it, have gotten back to me. This only occurs to me now, when I've spent a good day translating and trying to work out other things (housing in South Bend mostly), and was going to sit down to make a note of why I'm too busy to write a proper blog entry. I'm not sure why this is important- I have one confirmed reader. But someone has read those emails too, they're just not responding.

My body aches with the consistency - however sporadic - of the work. It is like I am slowly killing some invisible monster inside me. The more I do the better it feels.

I killed Mom and went to North Yarmouth where Anna Banana helped me dispose of the body, then set to work on the erotics of grammatical elucidation, even syntax! To the max!

Now we're going to win this prize for translation by the Swedish American Scandinavian Mother's Have Been Killed by the Winners Federation. It is very sad to have to compete, really.

If only my beloved Åsa can provide me with a letter confirming that I can publish it. We're all rooting for her.

Hilary gave me an album with songs just for me. Tomorrow New York City. Then Pittsburgh City.

Copy. Edit the head flipped into the ravine. I got scratched up by some ferns, the wound washed off in the waters of Wolf's Neck.

Me and Mom sat down today and went through some of the phrases which have remained 'in red'. I now have a fairly 'clean' copy of the original 110 pages of the book, as clean as seems reasonable without having gotten to translating any more of the book yet. I am passing these pages on to a friend who is a copy editor, so as to gain from fresh reflection upon them.

I am aware that many of my formulations aren't in and of themselves American, or any other English. I hope that some of the otherness of Swedish in relation to English can be maintained without rendering the English obscure. But to allow it to be strange, when it suits a distinct sense. The more I go over it the more normalized it becomes, the better surely. It is a matter of working up that strangeness into something recognizable, not merely inchoate, but rather speaking with the fluency of ripe distinctions.

I'm passing pages 100, 101. They are glowing shining comprehending, Adam's paragraphs. The book feels too good for me. Behind me lies a pile of largely unedited, even unread, words that I've catapulted into English, into my Swedish Word program. In the middle there is a wonderful book, a striking experience, reality shattering formulations; you, I, can feel the inner right of mania, the Orphic faith of it. The pervasiveness of a normalized mania nevertheless, living to earn money. Yesterday, after meeting a lovely woman at a bar I received this email from her, a parcel of a larger conversation:

"Theoretically everyone is a product of their environment, whether good or bad. Those who don't follow what society deems as 'normal' are deviants and diagnosed with something as though they're somehow less than the rest of us who have learned how to play the game. People with schizophrenia just have a different reality than you or me and can't survive in the community."

I replied:

"Likewise the environment is a product of our actions, and therefore the community is not merely given, rather it is something struggled over. Also, those who are 'outside' the community nevertheless are essential to its identity. Another way to put this maybe is that you can't exclude reality, or rather that exclusion is part of a never immediately graspable reality that is more than any community. The risk that I read into your 1am summation is that community is conceived of as a given thing, that can be pointed to, rather than a process that includes exclusion (as part of the process). At one point in my life my reality landed me in a mental institution, and it could again. For me being able to survive in the community while not subordinating my experience to its norms, is the struggle for existence (god that sounds grandiose), let's say being existent, as an individual that can speak and communicate (in and with the community) and is not left in the dustbin of irreconcilable difference. There is the potential that respect for such difference is part and parcel of a certain conservatism about what constitutes the social order, and patronizes while being in awe of the exoticism of the other."

It's wonderful that Åsa and Adam could live together when they did. In a way the grounding of manic insight is the recognition of that impossibility in the everyday. The going over toward what cannot be settled upon, but is nevertheless re-engaged. Another woman I met last night described Tango to me, the pushing against each other of the bodies, the friction of it, allows each to know where the other is, and how to (re)act. Without that tension, a slackening, harboring the abyss or our individuality.

DREAM: I'm back together with Jenny. I'm distrusting though. But then my girlfriend comes along and I go off with her. It's going to be easy to break up I think, she's complaining about my lack of sexual interest and her own engagement with others on the internet. She has a yellow patch around her eyes, pimply, says she's depressed, wears sunglasses. Jenny's jealousy doesn't escape me. She's with a friend. I had been planning to play soccer with some classmates but we don't have a ball.

I keep being drawn back to the yellow patch, it is like urine - I think of old age. She was interesting there though, it was something to focus on. Is it the translation? My Swedish dictionary is yellow and a bit ugly. Really I want to go back to my old loves ...

The Hospital at Mora.

I've come (too slowly) to the most jarring part of the book yet. Adam has finally made it to Sweden from the hospital in France, only to be considered healthy by the hospital at Mora, and let out to Åsa's panic. After what seems a night or two he heads off to Paris again. He is obviously manic, by his own account as well. The hospital's main difficulty though is in dealing with Åsa, to them he is a bit flighty, but ever so charming, and ultimately healthy. He cleans his room thoroughly before going, taking all his photos from the wall with him, except that of Åsa- she's not coming.

Åsa the superego. Evidence of the illness. Reality. Flight from.

Presumably reality lies somewhere inbetween. I recall my own anger at being forced into hospitalization in Sweden. I perceived that my mother got a perverse joy from having me fixed in one place, and from organizing my social contacts.

I've been given a writer's residence for June here: www.cyberpunkapocalypse.com

Still waiting to hear back from three agents, so far three uninterested responses.

The writing is quick when I do it, but slow in doing. Spring is popping up with surprising consistency.

I recently viewed a very late interview with Bergman where he was talking about writing on Fårö. He talked about how boring it was to actually write manuscripts, the work-books were fun, but the manuscripts dead boring. He could only work for three hours a day, always in the morning, sitting for 45 minutes and then taking a break.

That has stayed with me as I round the curb of fifty pages of the original, that's thirty pages in Word (before when I said thirty pages, that was of the original). Re-reading is the worst. I must start doing it in sections. The beginning seems fine, but I fear that I lose the thread later. The language doesn't sound real, and resists my attempts at getting it right.

Unfortunately I don't have Bergman's hard-fast schedule. But I do have enough to show a publisher, and fresh eyes are what I need now.

I've now finished a 'dirty draft' of the first thirty pages of The Book of Adam. I say 'dirty' because the translation is in large part intuitive, which doesn't mean I don't make more use of dictionaries than I would like to. It does mean though that the language is still involved with the original in ways that may not yet distinguish it as a text-in-itself. Or rather for-itself, since it is there, I'm just not sure to what degree it has a coherency beyond that of mere translation. Meaning that the final version, while obviously being a translation, should be first-and-foremost its own discreet work, not only an explanation of the original. There it's still not.

On another note my recent visit to Notre Dame, Indiana led me to believe that I could lead a productive life there teaching, reading, writing. It's not the ideal location for a fledgling social life, in what for me is in certain ways a new country. Adam has a description of Paris that echoes my own feelings about Brighton (where I've left):

With the support of a generous friend I'm trying to write a book that I'm not even sure it's worth writing. Paris is eating me alive, asphyxiating me. The frenzy, passion and French charm are lost on me. I only see McDonald's everywhere, and people walk around with billboards printed on their souls. (p. 30.)

I don't have to wait for Notre Dame though, even Portland, Maine has the Lekholmen effect on me. From Lekholmen Adam writes:

I lie within ideas, you quickly become addicted. The bears and me. And the silence. (p. 33.)

Of course he's writing to Paris. The connection is necessary.

It's about two weeks before I'll be able to quietly sit down with Adams bok and continue, on the plane of everyday encounter, my translation work. At the moment I have the most ready distractions, universities offering me money, airplanes flying me across the Atlantic, across the Baltic, across the most fathomable parts East of the Mississippi. I recognize the work as a sort of gift, something to continue doing, something to marry with so long as the project lasts. In Åsa Moberg's Simone och jag there's a quotation from Beauvoir about the initiation of her lifelong partnership with Sartre:

We were never going to become strangers to each other, never would one of us cry out in vain for the other; nothing would be more important than this union, but neither would it ever be allowed to degenerate into force or habit: at whatever price we needed to protect it against such an abasement. (p. 61)

Maybe I'm drawn to this pact, and the posing of its negative aspect, in light of an uncertain realization that neither of the institutions I've been accepted to for PhD work would provide sufficiently for a sense of myself and my own engagement. This marriage, if it is not to another person, is to the process of writing. Which I consider in its most meaningful form inseparable from a kind of ethics, of making actual something intimated in such a way that allows it to live in the world. Is it Kant?: The actual is the right, and the right is the actual. In terms of my own engagement this can't be quite right. Rather what is actual is a process, which like a marriage, isn't just given as right, but the work is to make it so. In this case to make the words of Swedish right themselves into English. While my tendency is always to foreground the psychological motivations for certain endeavors and dynamics, I am suddenly made to contend with the oddly subtle truth that the work in itself is something I am drawn to, seek to be part of, and is its own justification.