On 13 April 2022, my closest friend, the Swedish writer Johanna Ekström, died of cancer.
How strange it is to write that. Huge and final.
I helped care for Johanna during the last weeks of her life, and I was with her most of that final night. It is something to watch over a friend who is dying, who has already slipped into unconsciousness. Counting the seconds between uneven breaths, witnessing sudden flailings, movements, sounds – the utterly alien yet somehow deeply familiar act of keeping watch. We instinctively know how to do it. It’s a knowledge so deep in the body we don’t even know we possess it.
The experience hardens you. Scars you, and burns the guilt out of you, too.
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Johanna and I grew into adulthood together. I am finding it hard to put into words the kind of friendship we had. It may be beyond me. There was such intimacy in the deep relaxation of our bodies. When I think of us now, we seem forever to be throwing ourselves down on sofas, taking our shoes off, exclaiming, laughing, talking, listening.
I had it. I had her, and now she’s gone. ‘Fuck it’, she’d say. Then, ‘But it is what it is.’
No more to be said. Or maybe just this: I had no other friend like Johanna. We were so young when we met, and our friendship was formed in a tight web of familiarity, shared history, references and feelings. She was like a younger sister I never had – gifted, hilarious, empathetic and defiant. I took care of her when she was sick, and she took care of me. Even as she was dying.
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When Johanna learned that her cancer was terminal, she asked me to edit her last notebooks and turn them into a book. I held her hand and said yes.
That makes it sound like a proposal, and perhaps it was. Something more than a promise, anyway. A kind of vow.
Thirteen grey notebooks.
I couldn’t look at them for months. Then I read, transcribed extracts, wrote my own reflections, and made a book of thirteen chapters, one for each notebook. It was published in Sweden, and did well. And then – in stubborn denial of the fact that that I would eventually have to let her go – I decided to translate the book myself and publish it in English.
The work lifted me up. A life buoy as I was drowning in loss.
Looking back, I think I stayed with the text for as long as I needed to give meaning to my grief, crying not in Johanna’s absence but with her.
My loss – I think this is true, but of course there is no way of knowing – was tempered by the intellectual challenge of translation. It was not easy. Anyone who moves from one culture and language to another one lives in translation, but I am a translator only in that very narrow sense. Johanna’s voice is – was – also quite distinct – wildly experimental, yet exacting and precise. To properly unravel sentences I had only transcribed before, was healing, or honing might be a better word. When I missed Johanna most, I could lose myself in her text and hear, or imagine, her comments. ‘Just play with it’, she often used to say (in real life), and so I did, until I had worked out the text like a Sudoku of meaning and voice.
But truthfully that page-by-page unravelling of meaning was also unbearably sad. One of the hardest scenes in the book is a description of watching a Paolo Sorrentino film with a friend, and – for a moment – forgetting her diagnosis. She needs the bathroom; they pause the film, and reality hits as she shuffles off (her words) to the loo, barely, by now, able to walk. She writes about her need to remain in that painful reality in order to be able to take it. For those of us who, like Johanna, rely on the daily relief of losing ourselves in films or books, that is a hard truth to digest. There is no escape. For Johanna, staying present was the only way to bear it, to not let herself forget, even for a moment, the reality – the work – of dying.
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There is little reference to gender in the notebooks. Sweden is more gender-equal than Britain, and has a new third gender pronoun used by those who prefer not to refer to ‘him’ or ‘her’. Johanna didn’t use it much, but she didn’t write from a distinctly female point of view either. Her sense of self in the notebooks seems to me almost genderless – she is a neutral being amongst the menacing animals haunting her dreams. Three bees, a bear, a potentially lethal baboon with a baby, an innocent-looking lamb biting her arm, a horse pushing her against a wall, a giant lobster, cooked but still breathing, laboured painful breaths. Where did they come from, these expressive, intentional, beasts? ‘No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream’, Allen Ginsberg wrote in his long poem, Kaddish. The Beings suffer too. We should know, we made them.
As for notes on the craft of translation, it’s simple. You have to be a good soldier: disciplined, loyal, alert and diligent. One foot in front of the other. And that was Johanna, too – for all her wild anarchy, she was a good soldier. She faced her illness and dying with extraordinary resolution, burnished by the knowledge of her own impending death. The last notebooks, an account of ordinary days of living with the knowledge that she was soon to die, are as vivid as they are profound.
We made a film together in one of the last dreams in the book, and acted in it, Beings in a dream, walking arm in arm along a road where we pass ourselves as old, dressed in the same clothes. ‘Is it drama or comedy?’ Johanna asks me, and I answer (as she so often did), ‘Just play with it’.
Just play with it.
Image © Susan Wilkinson
