steve roden
fallen / spoken, 2000 - present
solo exhibition: pomona college museum of art, pomona ca, 2003

"fallen / spoken " began with finding the book valda dikter by par lagerkvist at a used bookstore. i had been looking for lagerkvist's poems in english ever since discovering his novels around 1988. finding the book on a shelf in a frequent used book haunt seemed to be quite a find until i opened the book to discover it was the original swedish with no english. still, i couldn't leave without it. i was hoping at some point to use it to trigger a series of visual works, finding some way of using the swedish text as a score. for years it sat gathering dust in my studio until one day i happened to try reading the swedish out loud to hear what it might sound like.

it was then that i decided to try an "intuitive translation" - to try to find corresponding words in english based on the sound and visual make-up of the original swedish. the title was easy - valda just kind of sounded like fallen, and dikter certainly related to diction, which ended up becoming spoken. i struggled with the idea of creating a dictionary, but felt that it would have a tendency to lead the translations towards nonsense. what i really wanted was for the new poems to exist in the landscape of lagerkvist's writing which i love very much.

even though i would hardly consider myself a writer, i didn't want the idea to be interesting on its own so much as i really wanted it to generate poems that i felt could have value on their own. i wanted it to generate poems that could never have been possible without the original text. i wanted the results to somehow be physically connected to the originals. in a lot of ways the ideas that came out of this project shifted (or focused) the trajectory of my visual works; where text no longer played a visual role, but became the guiding principle towards hidden structures, translation systems and scores...

and so i began poem by poem, writing in the book itself, and trying to find logic in a word and it's use, perhaps several times in a single poem. the first poem - angest, angest ar min arvedel - went relatively smoothly, in that angest could easily become angels, min become small (related to miniature), and arvedel sounded a lot like marvellous... so it became angels, angels small and marvellous... sar became stars, strupes became stripes, varlden became verdancy, and so on. some of the poems flowed like this and some were like clapping hands and making no sound. hence i've been working on them, tweaking and revising for the last 6 years or so...





angels, angels small and marvelous

angels, angels small and marvelous,
small group of stars,
with glowing skin of verdancy.
your vine laden sky
and mitten covered hands,
your sticks of silver
and stones of gold
            as large as mountains
have no value.
for your heart is everything,
your silence, spark of stillness!

that familiar sound i hear while drinking rum,
that clean dripping water moving through my finger,
that river moving upstream through my hand
            where blood leaves motionless frozen traces.

now, my voice slides from your fingertips,
my hand's river goes slowly, over
            the breath of morning fog,
            the hills of colored yarn
and the garden of clouds!

angels, angels small and marvelous,
small group of stars,
with glowing skin of verdancy.

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