G-NT3806KSJP
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PHENOMENOLOGY 1.11
TEXT TO NAME
the name
comes like an angel
writes Tomas Tranströmer
but angels do not exist
and names
do not have spiritual contacts
are rather greetings
sounds
out in reality
constantly calling to us





My poetic name and my professional name are two different names, two different greetings. I write: To greet the good / to travel back in time / when this name was a good person. In an office in a concrete building, I make a call on an internal telephone line; I say my name: Lív. Like a telephone operator in wartime, I am an accomplice to violence. I sign diabolical documents. I get my salary from the state. I let my name be a mechanical messenger. And then I remember that old story: Grandfather in Norway during the war. At agricultural school. Norwegian  forest,  moose  and  bears. When the students were told to salute, he refused: I came to Norway to study agriculture, not to heil.






Lív Maria Róadóttir Jæger published the poem recording Mítt navn við hondskrift (‘My Name in Handwriting’) in 2014, and her first poetry collection, Hvít sól (‘White Sun) in 2015. She holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen and teaches creative writing at the University of the Faroe Islands. The poems featured here are from her second collection Eg skrivi á vátt pappír (I Write On Wet Paper), which received the 2020 Faroese Literature Prize and was nominated for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize.

Brad Harmon is a writer, translator, and scholar of Nordic and German literature, film, and philosophy. His forthcoming translations include Katarina Frostenson’s The Space of Time (Threadsuns Press, October 2024) and Birgitta Trotzig’s A Landscape (Sublunary Editions, November 2024). He currently lives in Stockholm. bradharmon.me