Wordplay with Sonnevi, Before Email

(This is the second in a series of posts with translator Rika Lesser discussing Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi. Lesser's translation of Mozart's Third Brain by Sonnevi has just been published by Yale University Press, and Lesser has translated previous work by the poet. Sonnevi's work is also available in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, from the Center for the Art of Translation.)
Following my conversion experience at the Guggenheim, and our walks around the city and in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, before his departure for Sweden, in the SAS lounge at JFK, I had Göran record a couple of poems for me onto a cassette. How else could I retain the sound of that reading voice? When we began to correspond (typewriters, pens and pencils of various colors), I began by translating lines of his poems into English in the way the Mother Goose Rhymes or Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames in the d'Antin manuscript are translated into French, which is to say, by sound alone.
The poems I selected for A Child Is Not a Knife (1993) came from four of his books published between 1975 and 1991, the majority published after 1983. Reading through the Acknowledgments to that first book-length selection of his work, I look back on better times for social democracies, when I could thank various Swedish cultural institutions that enabled me repeatedly to consult with the poet in person . . . the Swedish Information Service and the Swedish Institute. The former was absorbed into the office of the Swedish Consulate in New York years ago, which now, like the Swedish Consulate in Los Angeles, is slated soon to be a tabula rasa. . . . (We translators of Swedish belles-lettres worldwide did help preserve funding for translation through Kulturrådet, the Arts Council, but that's another long story.)
Remember that in the 1980s international phone calls were prohibitively expensive, and we were not yet using e-mail. So for years I typed and he inked colorful letters, which we sometimes photocopied or cut and pasted, and sketched on. Occasionally I would use the consular fax and Göran would use the one at Bonniers (his publisher). And perhaps once a year, we would meet, usually in Sweden. In any case, we went over just about every word in every poem that appears in A Child, along with some other poems that were not included. And we did this in both languages. Well, maybe not every if and and but. But almost. And we still do. Even if I have become quicker and surer of what I do. I did not used to think this was fun; now I find it funny, sometimes hilarious.
On 15 April 1991, when I began the preface to A Child, Sonnevi: A Translator's Retrospective Montage, there were some fourteen hundred pages of Sonnevi's work in book form. His next four books of poems—The Tree (Nov. 1991), Mozart's Third Brain (1996), The Book of Sounds (1998), and The Ocean (2005)—in their Swedish editions add about 1050 more pages to his single long poem that is oändlig—unending/infinite—and continues from book to book. The title poem from The Tree was seventy-five pages long and I had balked at translating it. Instead I signed on later for the two hundred pages of Mozart's Third Brain.