Kristina Frostenson's The Space of Time arrives as our second entry in an unnamed series of literature in translation. Brought over from the Swedish and tuned to an English key by the skilled ear of Bradley Harmon, Frostenson's ecopoetic opus guides readers through the internal and external geographies of a planetary grief. The Space of Time is a study of the background noise that pollutes our respective presents and potential futures, the dissonant affective tones and linguistic whitecaps brought on by the rising tides of waste and loss. Most importantly, in the face of climate anxiety, Frostenson pushes back against apathy, finding agency in the word:
Feel the current of language
The crosspollination, the meeting of the unfamiliar
So that you again get a feel for what language can be
Always remember what language can be
Speak not. Do. For
the language of poetry may be dying. Nettles, the sprawl, the amorphous
springing forth, searching with snout and scent across the earth
the mundane remains, a voice says resist
By force must the song be written
In Sweden, the collection bore the title Sånger och formler (Songs and formulae), and was selected for the 2016 Nordic Council Literature Prize, earning substantial critical acclaim. Aase Berg called it "a collection to be read many times." Magnus Ringgren wrote, "Its three suites are roads, streams, wanderings. They lead in different directions but collect bits and pieces of consciousness that become an itinerant unity, an image of life."
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.
