Book record
When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back
Naja Marie Aidt
Translated from Danish by Denise Newman
Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back, translated by Denise Newman, is a devastating work of grief that refuses the tidy arc often imposed on mourning. The title sounds like advice, but it is stranger and more impossible than consolation. What does it mean to give death something back? What remains to be returned? Aidt’s book is known as a hybrid work of elegy, prose, fragment, citation, and rupture, and its presence in a poetry library makes sense because grief often breaks genre before it breaks silence. Newman’s translation gives English-language readers access to that broken form without smoothing it into narrative recovery. I would read this book as an act of witness to loss when ordinary language has failed but language must continue anyway.
- Publisher
- Coffee House Press
- Language
- Danish
- Country
- Denmark