Saturday 6 June 2009

Bodil Zalesky's literary blog

Bodil Zalesky, one of the founder members of the Salongen literary blog, also has her own literary blog. The latest entry discusses Mikael Enckell's recent book about the German poet Hölderlin.

Zalesky's weblog contains more art and large photographs than Salongen, but there are also Swedish translations of poetry by Paul Celan, Georg Trakl, Elfriede Gerstl, Franz Werfel, Else Lasker-Schüler (there's a lot about her) and other German-language poets. Also reviews of German-language literature and Italian poetry by Ungaretti, Pasolini, etc., and poetry by the Estonian Doris Kareva, translated into Swedish by Peeter Puide. There's even a discussion of an essay by Mikael Enckell about the Jewish dimension of the work of George Eliot (i.e. in Daniel Deronda). Other authors and topics discussed include Simone Weil, Pia Tafdrup, Cesare Pavese, Yiddish poetry, Nina Cassian, Italo Svevo, Erik Blomberg, Janina Degutyte, Viivi Luik, Knuts Skujenieks, Romanian literature, George Steiner, Daniel Hjorth, etc.

4 comments:

David McDuff said...

I've added these blogs to the Blog List.

Eric Dickens said...

That's a good idea. I think the two Zalesky set-ups deserve a broad readership among Scandinavianists, so as to widen horizons. This is accessing European literature via one prism - i.e. the tastes of a Swedish woman - but she will alight on different authors than the ones you would discover by only reading British book pages.

David McDuff said...

>> This is accessing European literature via one prism - i.e. the tastes of a Swedish woman the tastes of a Swedish woman >>

Would the tastes of a Swedish man be any more representative, I wonder?

Eric Dickens said...

I'm not talking gender here; I just didn't use the word "Swede", which always seems like a male appellation, or a vegetable one. But you have to admit that a Swede, of whichever gender, who lives in Berlin and focusses quite a lot on authors of Jewish provenance is a bit special.

Incidentally, the Goethe-Institut has a page of German-language literature translated recently into Swedish.