Night Talks

Translated by Rika Lesser. Written after the tragic and unexpected loss of her young husband, this spare and startling collection by celebrated Swedish poet and novelist Elisabeth Rynell offers a raw elegy in which everything lived--a visit with a therapist, a memory of lovemaking, a venture into the wilderness--becomes an expression of grief. Unflinching in their refusal of irony, these poems are elegantly rendered in Rika Lesser's translation, which is the first appearance of Rynell's verse in English.

"Rika Lesser's fine translation recreates the demanding original with sympathetic resonance and perfect pitch." --Richard Howard

"Elisabeth Rynell's Night Talks--which can be read as either one long poem or a cycle of shorter poems--spirals around a woman who experiences the abrupt death of a husband still young. With its concise, intense lines, spare but far from simple, Night Talks oscillates between stark grief and memories of lush sensuality. American poet Rika Lesser brings Rynell's requiem into English with unerring sensitivity. . . . In Rika Lesser's skilled hands, Elisabeth Rynell is revealed as a poet of startling depth coupled with a firm and unpretentious humanness." --Susanna Nied

" Elisabeth Rynell's Night Talks, translated from the Swedish by Rika Lesser, is an essential work for the twenty-first century. In poems naked as flames, the book confronts a death and its sequel: 'out of this despair / grows a force / more than human. . . .' Night Talks is visceral, broken, adamant; Lesser's translation is seamless."--D. Nurkse

Poetry. Women's Studies.

Elisabeth Rynell is an award-winning poet and novelist. Her literary debut was a collection of poetry in 1975 and was followed by fourteen more books--six novels, six collections of poetry, and two of essays--including, most recently, the poetry book NIGHT TALKS (World Poetry Books, 2019) and the novel Moll (2017). Her breakthrough work was the novel Hohaj (1997), which brought her four prestigious awards and Swedish Radio's Prize. In 2014, she received the prize named for her mentor Sara Lidman. Her novels have been translated into Danish, Dutch, English (To Mervas), Finnish, German, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, and Russian. Rynell was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Umeå in 2012.

Rika Lesser is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Questions of Love: New & Selected Poems. She has translated sixteen collections of poetry or fiction for readers of all ages, among them works by Göran Sonnevi, Gunnar Ekelöf, Claes Andersson from the Swedish, Rafik Schami, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Hermann Hesse from the German. Her most recent poetry translation is of Elisabeth Rynell's NIGHT TALKS (World Poetry Books, 2019). Her honors include the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Fulbright Commission fellowship, two NEA Translation Grants, and two Translation Prizes from the Swedish Academy. She shared the 2014 Greek National Translation Prize for The Brazen Plagiarist by Kiki Dimoula with co-translator Cecile Inglessis Margellos.