The Intellectual Silence

I'm sometimes drawn to speculate about why, in spite of several attempts to do so, Swedish poetry never really made the kind of breakthrough that characterized the work of Finland-Swedish and Danish poets in the twentieth century. In the pre-World War II era, only Karin Boye stands out as a poet with an identifiably modern sensibility, and even her voice spoke in a poetic language that was formally conservative, and even backward-looking. Immediately after World War II there was the "forties" movement (fyrtiotalism) represented by figures like Erik Lindegren and Karl Vennberg. Gunnar Ekelöf also belonged to this group in some respects, and probably became its internationally most recognized member, partly because of the translations of his work by W.H. Auden. Yet these "Swedish modernists" were really picking up and continuting a modernist movement that had begun much earlier -- some three decades before -- in Finland, when Edith Södergran, Gunnar Björling, Rabbe Enckell and others conducted their startlingly original experiments in poetic form and utterance, influenced in part but not in whole by the German Expressionist poets, and also by the Russian futurists and European Dadaists.

Even today, Sweden still has a tendency to claim those unique and iconoclastic Finland-Swedish poets as its own. A recent advertisement headed "Modern Swedish Poetry in Translation" on the website of the Swedish consulate general in New York promotes U.S. poet and translator Johannes Göransson's recent anthology of modern Swedish poetry (here in magazine form) like this:

This overview of Swedish poetry emphasizes moments of internationalism and contact with U.S. literature, as well as poetry written under the influence of the original Finland-Swedish Modernists. It features the poetry of Edith Södergran, Gunnar Björling, Henry Parland, Göran Sonnevi, Gunnar Harding, Ann Jäderlund, Jacques Werup, Lars Mikael Raattamaa, Johan Jönsson, Aase Berg, Jan Sjölund and Jenny Tunedal.

Three on the list of "Swedish poets" did not write "under the influence of the original Finland-Swedish Modernists" but were the original Finland-Swedish modernists. And this is by no means the only example of such misrepresentation.

In a recent poem about what it was like to be a Swedish poet writing in the 1980s, Magnus Carlbring appeared to suggest that the sources of real depth and innovation in Nordic poetry then lay not in Sweden itself, but in Denmark. The poem is entitled Letter to Inger Christensen, and it contains these lines:

It was in Denmark
that everything happened, it was you
and your younger sister Pia Tafdrup
who wrote the poems
The direct ones, the intimate ones
the ones with the treacherously
simple rhythms and songs
Poems that dare to touch
death life
time space,
poems that dare to appeal
I don't know what it is,
a geographical difference
or a snooty Swedishness,

the intellectual
silence, that makes the difference;
Here poetry is difficult
superfluous and timid