Description

Poetry
170 pp.
6″x7.25″
November 15, 2024
ISBN 978-1-7346911-6-0

Cover art by Robyn Penn

WINNER OF THE 2016 NORDIC COUNCIL LITERATURE PRIZE

Katarina Frostenson’s The Space of Time (Songs and Formulae) is an unsentimental and smoldering study of the ecological and utopic function of grief. Frostenson seems to speak to the universal orphan lost in the Open, in the landscape, in literature, in bedwarmth, and in lamentation. And Bradley Harmon’s English enchants and conjures with as much stupefying wonder as Frostenson’s Swedish does. In fact, Harmon’s translation is more than a marvel of synaesthetic ingenuity and musical invention. It’s a monument to the inimitable qualities of Frostenson’s poetry.
—Gabriel Gudding

Translated by Bradley Harmon with great attention to its lyrical movement, this is the first English-language book by Frostenson, a leading poet in Sweden since the 1980s. Frostenson’s poetry combines philosophical inquiry (of language, experience, song) with arresting images, interrogation of language with a high lyrical velocity. The “lattice of language” moves and turns with a breathless momentum that lights up my synapses.
—Johannes Göransson

KATARINA FROSTENSON is one of the most notable living Nordic poets. The author of over twenty books, her work has had a major influence on Swedish poetry since the 1980s. She has in addition written dramas, prose, and an opera libretto, and translated works by Duras, Bataille, Bove, and Michaux. Frostenson has received nearly every literary prize in Sweden and many across European. Her writing has been translated into over a dozen languages ranging from French, German, Italian, and Spanish to Belarusian, Croatian, Polish, and Serbian. In 2003, she was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in recognition of her services to literature and in 2016 was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize—Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary honor—for the present collection, which has also been translated into French and Italian. In 2019-2021, she released the autofictional trilogy K, F, and A, the first of which also premiered as a stage play in October 2022 at the Folkteatern in Gothenburg. Her latest book, Alma, appeared in 2023.

BRADLEY HARMON is a writer, translator and scholar of Nordic and German literature, film, and philosophy. A Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University, he has been an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellow to Sweden, a Fulbright fellow to Germany, and an Emerging Translator Mentee with the American Literary Translator’s Association. He also is co-editor of the volume Rilke and the Horizons of Phenomenology (De Gruyter, 2025) and a special dossier on translation and literary citizenship in the American academy (MLN 138.5, 2023). The Space of Time is his debut book of literary translation.