from When I Was Eleven I Knew It All
by Emma Ahlgren
translated by Nichola Smalley
A girl falls into
a head
a body
a state
then she is stuck
So opens När jag var elva visste jag allt (When I Was Eleven I Knew It All, 2019), the second collection of poetry by artist and poet Emma Ahlgren. Composed of short poetic fragments, the collection explores a young woman’s life and the many roles and states that she comes – or is made – to inhabit.
Jumping back and forth through time, the poems in this collection build to form a multifaceted portrait of a life, the darker sides of which often recounted with disarming honesty. With their concise, exact language and striking, associative juxtapositions, the poems tread the line between humour and tragedy, the mental and corporeal, the mundane and the transcendent.
This excerpt is taken from near the start of the collection. At times, Ahlgren enters into direct dialogue with Sylvia Plath’s Ariel; As in the source text, these instances are denoted by italicised text.
from When I Was Eleven I Knew It All
When I was one I was gripped by mortal fear.
I was worried about how
my parents treated me.
I was scared that my siblings would
stick spiked objects
into my fontanelle.
(lolly sticks, pens, toothpicks)
Sometimes I would scream a long while until
I stopped.
We try to settle
her
place a chair in
the hall she curls
up
melts into the seam
between back and
seat.
In the foetal stage I was long and slim
slipped supply into situations.
I came and went.
Now I hide myself in a face
in a daughter’s nostrils
in the corners of my grandmother’s mouth.
When I was twenty-three I bore a son.
He was blue and white.
With the spirit of his fatherland
he filled his lungs.
Inside me there was a vanishing and swelling void.
Shortly thereafter I began
a relationship
with a handheld
blender.
We shredded and made smooth
purees of sweet potato and other things.
Oh
so
smooth!
When we were finished there was
nothing left of me.
We feed the children with
forks and knives
mouths gaping kindly
the potatoes hiss.
Her life lies in
a wreath around
her legs bound
to an ever more
evasive nature.
I came down with sudden
anaesthesia.
The doctors could not get a handle
on me.
A nurse claimed
I was too much
of a handful.
That I flinched from their plastic-gloved hands.
We stroke her thin skin
on hand.
It lies smooth and
threatening over us
like
a sharp piece of paper.
Between
the inner and the outer
between taking pains
and
pain.
När jag var elva visste jag allt
Schildts & Söderströms, 2019, 68 pages.
Foreign rights: Schildts & Söderströms.
We are grateful to Schildts & Söderströms for permission to publish this translated extract.
Emma Ahlgren is an artist and poet. När jag var elva visste jag allt is her second collection of poetry, after 2018’s Isotopia. In 2022 she published her first prose collection, Hur Kärlek Fungerar (How Love Works)
Nichola Smalley is a prizewinning translator from Swedish and Norwegian.