Older Elektra
translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson
The great tit chirps in the january darkness
Or sparrows Girls I don’t know Just sounds
They suggest hope
Do the dead forget to die in the dark
All kinds of people take deep breaths
They shouldn’t chirp
Birds make patterns of sound
Inside and outside my head
My brain is dragged like stones
Dragged by ox children up a mountain
Stones buried in cliffs of snow
I have waited in the scant night
I can wait without light or children
We always cry too late, it is said,
and always sing too soon
Äldre Elektra
Talgoxen kvittrar i januarimörkret
Eller sparvarna Flickorna Jag vet inte Ljud bara
Glömmer de döda att dö i mörkret
Alla möjliga människor andas tungt
De måste inte kvittra
Mönstret av fåglar låter
Inuti och utanför huvudet
Hjärnan släpas som stenar
Dragna av oxbarn uppför ett berg
Stenar begravda i klippor i snö
Jag har väntat i den glesa natten
Jag kan vänta utan ljus och barn
Man gråter alltid försent, sägs det
och sjunger alltid för tidigt
Copyright © 2026 by Jenny Tunedal, translated by Johannes Göransson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 15, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Older Elektra’ is part of a series of poems centering a figure who, very much like her famous namesake, is a sister and daughter whose existence is defined by grieving. My Elektra mourns her little sister and the fact that her mother’s gaze was taken away from her. She is a timeless loser—a woman alone, childless, middle-aged, stuck, angry with her therapist. Her desire is to sleep, because in dreams you can steal back the dead from death. ‘I cannot not grieve,’ says Elektra in Anne Carson’s translation of Sophokles’s play. Elektra is older in my poem, and she knows she should not not grieve, since that would be a betrayal. Who am I to tell her otherwise?”
—Jenny Tunedal
“This poem is from Jenny Tunedal’s book Dröm, Baby, Dröm [Dream, Baby, Dream], a reference to the American cult band Suicide’s famously incantatory song. Like the song, the poems in the book are both dreamlike and wounded. The poems are elegiac but also proto-poetic: This poem invokes birds and birdsong, those fundamental metaphors for poetry itself. As in John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ the birdsong both invokes death and creates an artistic zone in which the speaker or poet can survive, if not escape, death’s haunting.”
—Johannes Göransson
Jenny Tunedal
