The tongue, the text and the tape recorder. Vernacular and the technology of writing in Ralf Andtbacka's Wunderkammer: Vernacular and the technology of writing in Ralf Andtbacka’s Wunderkammer

In Wunderkammer (2008), Finland-Swedish poet Ralf Andtbacka (b. 1963) explores the dynamics between orality and technology, and between writing, eroticism and desire, through the discussion and artistic use of the vernacular, i.e. dialectal, Ostrobothnian Swedish. Thematically and linguistically, the collection confronts its readers with a process where spoken words, as sounds, are transposed into visual objects on the book page. Writing is one of many technologies for collecting, preserving or reproducing the human voice through history; it also has a transformative power.
Andtbacka’s collection is a Wunderkammer of languages, jargons, intertextual references and encyclopedic exerpts fusing historical marginalia, transatlantic poetic influences and locally inscribed language. Furthermore, Wunderkammer engages with the historical legacy of Finland-Swedish language regulation, and brilliantly manages to work through a force field of purity and authenticity where the literary use of the vernacular has been either condemned or reterritorialized in terms of national identity and historical rootedness in a territory.
In this article, I explore the the aesthetic and political ramifications of the dynamics of Ostrobothnian and technologies aimed at recording or reproducing the vernacular in Wunderkammer. These technologies include the literary work itself, as text, and in this context, Andtbacka’s erotic poems involving the vernacular are central. From a perspective of literary multilingualism, multimodality and reader experience, and with inspiration from the critical work of Daniel Heller-Roazen and Naoki Sakai, I argue that Wunderkammer’s hybrid eroto-poetics envisages a sensorially acute reimagining of difference, not only in terms of linguistic orders and borders, but also through the enactment of the malleability of the border between language and noise.