Jonas Ellerström

Jonas Ellerström is a writer, translator, art critic, and publisher. In 1983 he founded Ellerströms Publishing House, which has released more than 650 titles. He is the author of several poetry and essay collections, an alternative history of Swedish poetry, and a book about chess. His translations include Swedish versions of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), and poetry by Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates. Ellerström has twice received the Karin and Karl Ragnar Gierow Prize from the Swedish Academy. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Together, Mörling and Ellerström have translated Philip Levine’s 1933 into Swedish and Edith Södergran’s poetry collection On Foot I Wandered through the Solar Systems into English. They are also the co-editors and translators of the anthology The Star by My Head: Poets from Sweden.

(Original version Swedish)
In the Center
I take one step to the left and
find myself at the center.
I take three steps forward and
find myself at the center.
I walk to the other corner of the block
and find myself at the center.
These are the consequences
of an infinite universe.
But I do not wish to find myself at the center.
I want to be in the margins.
(from the collection Through the Looking-Glass, 2017)