from "Everything Shimmers" by Naja Marie Aidt

“In Naja Marie Aidt’s excerpt from ‘Everything Shimmers,’ a whirlwind of a moment unfurls, and a reader/listener experiences a conflation of color and image with smell and sound, and the ‘little call / to waken the sleepers,’ is also a call to awaken and see the world with fresh eyes. In Suzanna Nied’s energetic translation that embodies shifting modes of diction, this experience culminates in the startling ‘marzipanescent body’ at the end.” —Arthur Sze

Then suddenly beech woods, all green behind the dozing eyes
a deer leaps across the forest road
scents of acid and moss and cheek against bark, sunrain
between trunks, I’m home and hear the Baltic Sea
crash against big rocks far away and I rest like a
fairy or a witch in the sweet smells of the forest floor
we can so easily forget what we are who we are
that we are, but it takes only a little call
to waken the sleepers, as now, in the forest, for
LISTEN, isn’t that song and the chiming of goblets
sounding in the green chambers? YES by golly, a celebration
for the child in his seventeenth year, who never has
been happier and never will be happier; the world shimmers
everything unimaginably possible while a handspring
and a new but not disturbing sensitivity have settled
in the middle of his irresistibly marzipanescent
body.

“In Naja Marie Aidt’s excerpt from ‘Everything Shimmers,’ a whirlwind of a moment unfurls, and a reader/listener experiences a conflation of color and image with smell and sound, and the ‘little call / to waken the sleepers,’ is also a call to awaken and see the world with fresh eyes. In Suzanna Nied’s energetic translation that embodies shifting modes of diction, this experience culminates in the startling ‘marzipanescent body’ at the end.” —Arthur Sze

Then suddenly beech woods, all green behind the dozing eyes
a deer leaps across the forest road
scents of acid and moss and cheek against bark, sunrain
between trunks, I’m home and hear the Baltic Sea
crash against big rocks far away and I rest like a
fairy or a witch in the sweet smells of the forest floor
we can so easily forget what we are who we are
that we are, but it takes only a little call
to waken the sleepers, as now, in the forest, for
LISTEN, isn’t that song and the chiming of goblets
sounding in the green chambers? YES by golly, a celebration
for the child in his seventeenth year, who never has
been happier and never will be happier; the world shimmers
everything unimaginably possible while a handspring
and a new but not disturbing sensitivity have settled
in the middle of his irresistibly marzipanescent
body.