The Art of the Angelic Book: The Intensive Materiality of Eva Kristina Olsson’s The Angelgreen Sacrament
I not only translated Eva Kristina Olsson’s Det Ängelsgröna Sakramentet (The Angelgreen Sacrament), but I’ve also written about it quite a bit. Together with Michael Taussig’s writing on mimicry, it was translating this book that made me start thinking about mimicry - in translation, poetry, etc.
There’s a big chunk about it in my recent essay on Translation and Mimicry at the Poetry Foundation, of which I want to call attention to the part where I refer to the design of the book:
Both the “angelgreen” of the title and this “pistachiogreen” color attempt to name, to mimic, the “sensuous” ambience of the encounter in a profoundly sensuous way. The green ambience is evident before one even opens the book. The original cover is an “angelgreen” paper that is almost translucent, as if to imitate the appearance of the angel’s frequently invoked wings. This color comes into the very type of the poem, as the words are printed in color. In two climactic moments, entire pages of the book go green.
It is as if color is stronger than language. In what Taussig might call moments of “metamorphic sublime,” color overwhelms the print medium. In this hyper-sensuous, nonsignifying ambience, I am reminded of Taussig’s discussion of sacred color that can transform the viewer: “Color vision becomes less a retinal and more a total bodily activity to the fairytale extent that looking at something, we may even pass into the image.”
For people who don’t have access to the original Swedish book, I took some photographs to get at the importance of the color, texture, sensuousness - the thin
”angel green” fabric that is the cover (which we can read through, perhaps it’s the wings), and the color of the ink, which becomes several pages of green signifying surfaces:
I also wrote an essay about the book for Poetry Daily, where I write this about the color and design (and its origins in mimetic excess):
When I asked Olsson in a recent interview about the origins of the book, Olsson told me:
“I have always wondered about these sheer creatures with their wings on their slender bodies — where do they come from, how do they survive the winter? I rarely see them in the summer, sometimes it happens, then with a more intense green body and with more clearly drawn wings.”
But then she quickly pivoted to another source for the book:“There are different inspirations for Angelgreen; the angel is one of them, another is a long pistachio green prom dress I wore when I was 16, 17 years old. Another touchstone is an unusually vivid and clear dream I had several years ago: a densely populated city and a small door.”
As in the book—which ends with the line/dedication “to the angels and my first 12 years”—Olsson’s vision of the poem brings together something as different as angels and a dress she wore when she was a teenager: the extreme alterity of the angels coexists with the personal memory of a dress. Like the angels, the materiality of the dress—both its “green” color and the “pistachio” that gives a strange physicality to the dress—appears throughout the poem, at times it even seems to be a stand-in for the angels. But for me, it ultimately serves a role akin to that of the poem itself: the intensive materiality brings her (and the reader) into the dream, into the strange encounter.
There’s quite a bit of renewed interest in emphasis these days - poems that respond, describe, engage with paintings - and it seems to me that Olsson’s project is the most brilliant: it seeks not to describe but become that intensive surface of green.