Johan Öberg
Johan Öberg, born 1954, is a Cand. Hum. with literary studies, Russian, social anthropology and an unfinished thesis on the French author Raymond Queneau. He would prefer to describe himself as an essayist and translator from Russian, French and English. His translations include philosophy, poetry, art theory and prose (mainly from Russian and French). In the 1980’s he published a commented anthology with some of the key works of Mikhail Bakhtin’s works in Swedish. Bakhtin’s works have ever since been a source of inspiration. Johan Öberg was the editor of the cultural magazine Ord&Bild from 1989 to 1994. From 1994 to 2000 he was cultural counselor at the Swedish embassy in Moscow, where he ran, among many other things, a very active translators’ seminar for Swedish literature into Russian in collaboration with the Russian translator Yuliana Yakhnina. In 1997 he authored a travelogue-essay on a long and slow travel to Kyiv and Odesa for Ord&Bild (‘En vinterresa till Kiev och Odessa’, Ord&Bild 1:1997).
Until 2019, he was active at the University of Gothenburg as an advisor in the artistic fields and participated in the development of ‘artistic research’ a research journal – ArtMonitor – but also by way of conferences, seminars and publications (e.g. ‘Difference or Différance’, for an overview, see Art and Artistic Research: Music, Visual Arts, Design, Literature, Dance, edited by Corina Caduff, Fiona Siegenthaler and Tan Wälchli, Zurich 2010 and a methodological review of education and research in the subject of literary composition / poetics in the book Schreiben lernen – Schreiben lehren, published by Josef Haslinger and Hans Ulrich Treichel (Fischer Taschenbuch, 2006). Johan Öberg led the work in the Department of Literary Composition at Valand Academy from 2012 to 2015 where he founded a master’s degree program in literary translation that has gained a very good reputation.
During the years 2015-2017, Johan Öberg, on behalf of the Vice-Chancellor led the development work on a new integrated university campus in Gothenburg (Näckrosen). Johan Öberg has translated texts by Lev Rubinstein (Ryska dagsedlar, Ersatz 2015, coll. of essays), the essay book Gruvgas (‘Sentir le Grisou’, Daidalos, 2015) by French art theorist Georges Didi-Huberman, and Mikhail Yampolsky’s Förlusten av framtiden. En essä om kultur, tid, rytm(Bez Budushego. Kultura i vremja Anthropos, 2020). In 2021, a collection of Lev Rubinstein’s poems was published in translation by Johan Öberg, Kajsa Öberg Lindsten and Lars Kleberg (Ersatz). In 2023, he and Kajsa Öberg Lindsten translated Rubinstein’s conceptualist memoir book Mor var rar (Mama myla ramu, Ersatz). He recently contributed translations and an essay to an anthology on Ukraine (‘Poems. A book for Ukraine’, Ed. Helga Krook and Karin Brygger, Korpen 2022) and an essay on the literary meeting SlovoNovo in Montenegro 2024 (journal Ord&Bild, 6:2024). In september 2025, his translations of Yuli Gugolev’s poetry – Fullständigt samlade dikter were published by Korpen Publishers in Sweden. In 2025 he coedited an important documentation on Swedish West Coast dialect and history – Ett svunnet Bohuslän (with Aslaug Ott and Jesper Saltebro) – Korpen 2026.
Recent publications: “A question of complexity and politics Olof Palme and the Soviet Union”, in Framtidsarvet, ed. Ulf Bjereld and Ulf Carmesund, Korpen 2016 and ‘58°42’4″N 11°20’8″E, Felsritzungen zwischen Ahnenerbe und Kulturtourismus‘ in Wespennest, Zeitschrift für brauchbare Texte und Bilder, Vienna, Oct. 2017 (later published in the magazine Glänta), a larger essay on Russian conceptual art in the magazine Aiolos – “The romantic Moscow conceptualism meets the 1990s”, Aiolos no. 72-73, December 2021. “The origin of the Slavs and the rise of Russia”, Dixikon October 2022, and the book Bob says: Bergsjön (a book on social and artistic protest in a Swedish suburb, Daidalos 2022, where Johan Öberg worked as co-editor and co-author).
Johan Öberg is currently working on a collection of new translations of poetry and prose by Boris Pasternak. Johan Öberg is a member of the Swedish Writers’ Association and the Swedish Pen.