A Reflection

Something that occurred to me a few years ago when working on my new translation of Karin Boye’s 1940 novel Kallocain (Penguin Classics, 2019) was how essential a number of comparatively neglected books are to the formation of a picture of the rise of literary modernism in Sweden. For example, Margit Abenius’s extensive biography of her close friend Karin Boye, Drabbad av renhet (1950), has now effectively been replaced by a new account of the poet’s life which appeared in 2017 – yet in spite of its undoubted defects, Abenius’s work gives a truer and more existential portrayal of its subject, and is saturated in the literary, philosophical and psychological movements of its era. Another such book is Gunnar Ekelöf’s Blandade kort (1957), which in addition to being a kind of fragmented autobiography and self-analysis (with a heartfelt essay on Boye and Kallocain) is also an aesthetic and artistic manifesto. Neither work has yet appeared in English translation.

Away from introspection

An interesting and thought-provoking interview with Estonian poet Elo Viiding in the current issue of ELM (Estonian Literary Magazine), with reflections on poetry and the poet's task that times have echoes of earlier Nordic voices including, perhaps, Ekelöf, and even Tranströmer:

Recently I've been distancing more and more from introspection as beneficial. Instead of psychoanalysis, I'm more interested in how a person can realistically act for the good of someone with fewer opportunities, be those spiritual, intellectual or material. Not society -- that's too narrow a concept; society is made up of kindred thinkers who generally thumb their nose at others -- but rather to do good for those who suffer from abandonment, socially in a certain sense, instead of delving into yourself (and even into ideas). I'm striving to do that in this phase of my life.

In general, a varied and colourful issue of the magazine -- it's now one of the best English-language literary journals in the Nordic region, at times reminiscent of the now sadly dormant Books from Finland, but more often with a viewpoint and energy of its own, and quite unlike anything currently around in the U.K. or America. There's also a quiet tribute to the life and work of Estonian literary translator Eric Dickens.

En värld är varje människa

En värld är varje människa, befolkad
av blinda varelser i dunkelt uppror
mot jaget konungen som härskar över dem.
I varje själ är tusen själar fångna,
i varje värld är tusen världar dolda
och dessa blinda, dessa undre världar
är verkliga och levande, fast ofullgångna,
så sant som jag är verklig. Och vi konungar
och furstar av de tusen möjliga inom oss
är själva undersåtar, fångna själva
i någon större varelse, vars jag och väsen
vi lika litet fattar som vår överman
sin överman. Av deras död och kärlek
har våra egna känslor fått en färgton.

Som när en väldig ångare passerar
långt ute, under horisonten, där den ligger
så aftonblank. – Och vi vet inte om den
förrän en svallvåg når till oss på stranden,
först en, så ännu en och många flera
som slår och brusar till dess allt har blivit
som förut. – Allt är ändå annorlunda.

Så grips vi skuggor av en sällsam oro
när något säger oss att folk har färdats,
att några av de möjliga befriats.

Gunnar Ekelöf

A world is each person, populated
by blind beings in obscure rebellion
against the I, the king who rules over them,
In every soul a thousand souls are captive,
in every world a thousand worlds concealed, 
and these blind, these nether worlds 
are real and living, though uncompleted,
as real as I am real. And we kings
and princes of the thousand possible within us
are ourselves subjects, caught ourselves
in some greater being, whose I and essence
we understand as little as our superior
his superior. Of their death and love
our own emotions have acquired a tint.

As when a mighty steamer passes,
far out below the horizon where it lies,
so evening-shiny. -- And we know not of it 
until a swell wave reaches us along the shore,
first one, then one more and many more
breaking and crashing until all is
as before. -- Yet all is different.   

Then we shadows are gripped by a strange unease,
when something tells us that people have travelled,
that some of the possible have been set free.  

translated from Swedish by David McDuff