Gabriel Gudding
Photo coutrtesy of Gabriel Gudding
Bio
Gabriel Gudding is a poet and translator who works as a professor of English at Illinois State University. Gudding is the author of four books of poetry and has translated from Norwegian the books Inventarium by Pedro Carmona-Alvarez (co•im•press 2025) and, by Gunnar Wærness, Friends with Everyone (Action Books 2024) and Touch Jesus (Oktober 2021).
Project Description
To support the translation from the Norwegian of the multigenre collection To Write is To Ask for Too Much by Gunnar Wærness, who speaks and reads Norwegian with a trøndersk dialect, a sonically complex mode of Norwegian spoken in and around Trondheim. To Write is To Ask for Too Much is a 415-page selection of previously uncollected work consisting of poems, illustrations, collages, short essays, and hybrid texts, which showcase Wærness at his weirdest, most unwieldy, and most compelling.
I was raised in an immigrant community in northwestern Minnesota where Norwegian was once widely spoken, and somehow as I watched my parents age it became important to me to learn the language and to translate from it.
I'm very grateful to have received this fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. This support will help me translate a portion of Gunnar Wærness's extraordinary book Å skrive er å be om for mye / To Write Is to Ask for Too Much, a 415-page selection of his uncollected work from 1988 to 2020. Poet and critic Henning H. Bergsvåg called the book a "truly boundary-crossing book" ("aldeles grenseoverskridende bok") and declared it a "punk masterwork" in a 2020 interview on the podcast Poesiddig. In praising To Ask for Too Much in Le Monde Diplomatique, Espen Grønlie in December 2020 says, "Like few other Norwegian poets Wærness knows how to put poetry to use both musically and graphically, on stage and in print." NEA support means being able to bring part of this extraordinary work to anglophone audiences.
About Gunnar Wærness
Gunnar Wærness (born 1971, Trondheim) is the author of nearly a dozen books (mostly poetry, graphic poetry, and visual collage) and has received Norway's most prestigious prizes and fellowships in poetry. Considered one of the most groundbreaking and influential poets of his time, he has co-edited with Pedro Carmona-Alvarez the most comprehensive collection of world poetry in Norwegian history, with a special focus on the global south. A prolific translator from English, Russian, and Bulgarian, he is an illustrator, visual artist, musician, composer, cabaret performer, and associate professor in Creative Writing at SKA (Skrivekunstakademiet) in Bergen.