lønningspils

By Gregory Conway.

Kathleen Maris Paltrineri is a poet and translator from Iowa. I first encountered their work from their trasnlation of Kristin Berget’s and when the light comes it will be so fantastic, which won the Grage Prize in 2017. Their translation of this work came out in July 2025 with Northwestern University Press. She completed an MFA in Poetry from the University of New Hampshire & an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. She’s currently living in LA as a candidate at the University of Southern California’s Creative Writing & Literature PhD program. Back in January, on a shockingly cold evening, I got to chat with Kathleen about her work.

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LP: Hi Kathleen! Thank you for joining Lonningspils for a conversation today! I’ve just brewed some Earl Grey tea this evening, here in Peterborough, as we are gearing up for a historic cold-front (-31c), how is your day going in LA?

KMP: Glad you have a cup of tea! Thank you so much for inviting me for a chat and for your dedication to Nordic literature! Yes, my family is in the Midwest and already I’m getting the alerts about the cold windchill forecasts for tomorrow. I hope you stay warm! LA and California got historic rains over the holidays and is now out of a draught for the first time in about 25 years!

LP: Before we dive into your work and Kristin Berget’s great new book out on Curbstone Press / NU Press – I wanted to address a term I imagine we may use a few times in this interview – Ecopoetry: a term used to describe not only Kristin Berget’s work, but also your own.

Ecopoetry has a kind of hard to pin down difference between just being “Nature Poems”. From my understanding, Ecopoetry has to 1) center around the non-human world & 2) have an element of environmentalism in it – which could come in many different forms such as: putting the human in conversation with the non-human, acknowledging climate chaos & change, glancing at sustainability or conservation, land stewardship and frustratingly for a definition- you kind of know Ecopoetry when you see it. What are your thoughts on Ecopoetry and how did you become drawn to these styles of poems?

KMP: Yes, I think you have a good working definition. A simple definition of ecopoetry might be any poetry that expresses ecological concerns, whether implicitly or explicitly. These days, ecopoetry might also emphasize human impacts on the environments we live within.

I think poet Juliana Spahr offers a lovely distinction between ecopoetry and nature poetry in her 2011 collection Well Then There Now, which situates the beauty of Hawai’i within the fact of it having the highest rate of species extinction and endangerment in the US due to its history of being colonized and militarized. In a note to her poem “Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another,” Spahr wrote that she invites a departure from “nature poetry” of which she was “suspicious…because…it tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat.”

In terms of being drawn to Kristin Berget’s and when the light comes it will be so fantastic, I found her poetry to offer a critique of industrial agriculture and its impacts on the soil and water quality—a theme that is close to home for me having grown up in Iowa and spent my summers as a teenager working as a farm laborer and a tractor driver on industrialized feed corn farms that used GMO seeds and that used Roundup and other pesticides and herbicides made by Monsanto. Once I read and when the light comes it will be so fantastic, I knew immediately I had to translate it.

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LP: The translator’s note in Kristin Berget’s book really describes a unique moment in your life while you were working on this book in Iowa, during a natural disaster amidst the pandemic.

Iowa famously has a very strong community of translators, with a lot of great work coming from graduates of The University of Iowa’s translation program; How is the community in LA?

& during this interview I now realize we are in the midst of the anniversary of the devastating LA fires from last year, were you translating near the area during that crisis as well?

KMP: Yes, the 2020 derecho was a devastating storm that swept across the Midwest. The highest wind speeds of 140 miles per hour occurred in my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa and the storm destroyed two-thirds of the city’s tree canopy. What I didn’t have a chance to include in the translator’s note, due to publishing deadlines, was that I was editing the manuscript during the January 2025 fires in Los Angeles. So, this translation was created during not one, but two, natural disasters.

Regarding community, the Translation MFA at the University of Iowa is a wonderful program. I can’t recommend it highly enough!

In LA, some friends and I are slowly but surely building community–starting a grassroots group called the Los Angeles Literary Translators. We’re hoping to start a reading series and offer additional programs to new translators.

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LP: In Kristin Berget’s book and when the light comes it will be so fantastic, there are no titles to any of the poems, zero punctuation and in some ways blurs where one poem starts and another one ends – for example, there is a section between pages 39 & 49 that feels like one long poem, but they could all be looked at individually as well – for the reader, below is a layout of two pages in this section:

P. 46.

will we then let this happen
will we then let this happen

P. 47

will we give thanks for the grace all grace all food
Is it right to seek advice is it right to be bewildered

Does this kind of style offer any unique challenges in the translation process?

KMP: I love this section of the book that you’ve highlighted! The couplets ask rhetorical questions of conditionality and causality and many of them open with anaphoric phrases, is it right, will, if, and so on. This section of the book, I think, is fascinating in terms of tone. There is an interplay between the sincere and the ironic, with the examples you offered above, and with another on

P. 44
will we bow to this policy
will we bow to this god

As you noted, there is a cohesion to the poems that if they were to appear together, they could be read as one long poem, so connected are their language and concerns. Yet Berget has chosen to break the poems across multiple pages, each poem opening new manners by which they can be read together. The poetic matter is separated by an abundance of space and the lines themselves are broken up with spatially extended caesuras.

I found this style of poetry a delight to translate. Repetition is important to this collection, and I found myself tracking where language or rhythms repeated, so that I could also create repetitions, or conversely distinctions, in the English translation.

LP: Are there any plans for more of Kristin Berget’s work to appear in English? I’d love to see something like Sonja Sacre Cœur, the short novel, appear in English.

KMP: Yes, I’ve begun translating Berget’s 2009 poetry collection, Der ganze Weg, and her 2024 poetry collection, Middelalderen. I’m moving at a slower pace, however, since I’m currently in the Creative Writing and Literature PhD program at USC.

I would love to translate Sonja Sacre Cœur!

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LP: Oh totally understandable for the slower pace & exciting about the PhD program. I did also want to ask about academics and study within the University system.

In 2022 you were able to give a couple lectures at the University of Oslo, in topics such as “Ecotranslation as Ecopoetic Recomposition” and “Oversettelse av Norsk Økolyrikk (Translation of Norwegian Eco-Poetry)”, can you tell me a little bit about these lectures in Oslo and how you balance academic work in Ecopoetry alongside your own poetry and translation work?

KMP: Both of these lectures took place while I was a Fulbright research scholar in Norway from 2022-2023. I had the joy of dividing my grant between the University of Oslo and the University of Tromsø. While I conducted literary research during my Translation MFA at Iowa, being in Norway offered me a wonderful gift of time and access in order to read both literary texts as well as ecocriticism scholarship. Both of the talks allowed me to share my translation experience and to share scholarship that helped influence some of my translation decisions.

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LP: On Sunday I went and saw a production of A Doll’s House, in Toronto. While doing some browsing prep online before going to the show I came across your piece in the Los Angeles Review Of Books interviewing Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik, who did more recent translations of Ibsen for Penguin.

With someone like Kristin Berget being never translated before to English, would you ever want to go into a completely different direction and work on revisiting an older Norwegian classic yourself?

KMP: So cool you saw a production of A Doll’s House. I love that play!

Possibly, if I found the right book that I thought could benefit from a retranslation.

There are just a few of us specializing in translating Norwegian poetry into English, however, and so many brilliant poets yet to be translated. I could easily dream of a lifetime of translating new-to-English authors.

Also, fun to note that Berget’s books have previously been translated into Swedish, Danish, and Polish with excerpts of her poetry translated into Serbian, Slovenian, Dutch, German, French, and Hungarian. All this to say, we need more students of the Norwegian language (languages really) and more translators!

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LP: I wanted to say thanks for taking the time to chat and translating the Kristin Berget book, it was certainly a highlight of my 2025 reading. It ended up on our site’s top 5 Nordic translation releases of the year.

To end on, what all are you working on these days? I imagine a lot of your time is tied up in the PhD program and translating more Kristin Berget!

KMP: I’m so grateful to you for reading the translation and for sharing Nordic literature on Lønningspils! How wonderful that it was a top release!

I’m working on a collection of my own poetry, which is which is an elegiac exploration of love and loss, of caregiving and grief, and of spiritual seeking. I hope to be able to share poems from the manuscript soon.

Tusen hjertelig takk!

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and when the light comes it will be so fantastic by Kristin Berget, trans. Kathleen Maris Paltrineri is available here.