A Different Practice

Author: Fredrik Nyberg 

Translator: Jennifer Hayashida

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2007)

A Different Practice is Jennifer Hayashida’s translation of Swedish poet Fredrik Nyberg’s influential book En annorlunda praktik, containing the five original sections “Rotor blades, movements 1—5,” “Pets—the private,” “You…,” “Shall these hands,” and “The Years.” Showing the influences of Ashbery, Roubaud, and Susan Howe, Nyberg’s quiet but forceful poems contend with the difficulties of using poetry as a form of remembrance. Through the transcription of memory, the collection creates its own fluid, mysterious, and startlingly intimate sense of time.

Jennifer writes of her experience translating Nyberg: “Because in my own writing I constantly find myself struggling against nostalgia, I felt a form of kinship with Nyberg’s concerns, since so much of what he writes is anchored in recollection…I feel that he resolves this tricky business by examining place as a metaphor for the past, and by interrogating the possibility of truthful recollection….”