Blinded by death and love

https://swedishbookreview.org/130-years-and-counting-finland-swedish-poetry

Caspar Eric

http://bukdahl.blogspot.com/2016/06/exklusivt-strunge-tale-i-mai-for-caspar.html

https://litteratursiden.dk/artikler/tale-til-caspar-eric

https://www.avkvalves.com/en/news/get-to-know-us/the-prince-henrik-prize-2023

The elf and the Erdgeist

Älvan och jordanden. En biografi om Mirjam Tuominen och Torsten Korsström

Tuva Korsström

Schildts & Söderströms 2018

Tuva Korsström’s loving yet hyper-aware analysis of her parents, their work and their marriage combines several literary genres. In essence the volume is an autobiographical essay that expands into a double biography. While the story contains a wealth of psychological and material detail concerning its protagonists, it is dominated by a central perspective: the third view provided by its author, the quiet observer who emerged from it and who later researched and recorded it all, both from documents and from personal memory. 

As one critic has noted, the marriage of Mirjam Tuominen (1913-1967) and Torsten Korsström (1909-1964) ‘lasted [in practice] only a little longer than the Winter and Continuation War. In it, the daughters Kyra and Tuva were born.’ The marriage reflects the social turmoil and political contradictions of the war years in Finland, a state pf dissension that official Finland later tried to suppress and was clearly a major factor contributing to  Mirjam Tuominen’s existential and personal torment. The book’s calm exploration makes sense of the internal and external conflicts, and the reader gains a unique acquaintance with Mirjam Tuominen’s writing – a body of work that vividly and painfully forms an essential part not only of Finland’s literature, but also of its history. 

The voice of twilight

Skymningens röst: dikter av Stagnelius, Lenngren och Bremer 

Listen to the album on your preferred music service  

 Today, the internationally hailed Swedish trio ro.t releases their second album Skymningens röst: dikter av Stagnelius, Lenngren och Bremer. After debuting in 2020 with Drömmarnas garn: dikter av Harriet Löwenhjelm, from which the songs Dalens dimmor, Nu så dansa denna världens barn and Beatrice-Aurore reached far beyond Sweden's borders, in the past year ro.t has drawn attention to, among other things, their song based on the Swedish nineteenth-century poet Emilie Björkstén's poem Allt har sin tid, which in November was picked up by Spotify's playlist Classical New Releases with 674,000 followers around the world.

 On the new album Skymningens röst: dikter av Stagnelius, Lenngren och Bremer, ro.t successfully continues their work in the musical borderland between classical music and folk presenting songs, composed by the singer Rebecka O'Nils, based on poetry mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries. Even though ro.t works with poems that they perform in the original language of Swedish, they have been especially noticed abroad, where they today have a growing audience on several continents. In addition to their own productions, ro.t also participates in the international project Nordic Source, to which they have contributed an English version of the poet Karin Boye's Yes, Of Course It Hurts. 

 On their new album, ro.t focuses on older Swedish poetry. The latest single I blomman, i solen, Amanda jag ser is, for example, based on a poem by the poet and writer Erik Johan Stagnelius, who died 200 years ago. Several poets who have contributed lyrics to the album are forgotten, female poets who are getting a chance to be rediscovered. In addition to two poems by Anna Maria Lenngren (one of the most famous poets in the history of Sweden and one of the few 18th-century Swedish poets who are still commonly read), there are also texts by Emilie Björkstén, Thekla Knös and Ulrica Carolina Widström as well as a poem by the famous Swedish women's rights activist Fredrika Bremer. 

 “I started composing when William and I were invited to perform an interpretation of Gustaf Fröding at William's grandfather's funeral,” says Rebecka. “I started by setting lyrics by the poet and prose writer Dan Andersson to music, but was very quickly drawn to poems by Stagnelius and Anna Maria Lenngren. Partly because they are both so rhythmic and bound in their way of dictating, which lends itself to setting music, but I was also drawn to them because of their content.” 

“Lenngren has a sour, intelligent tone in her poetry that I thought stood out very much when I read anthologies of Swedish poetry. Stagnelius has a purely ingenious way of expressing interesting themes such as mythology and the longing for death. In connection with setting them to music, I also discovered Emilie Björkstén, Finland’s national poet Runeberg's mistress, the upper-class lady Thekla Knös, and Ulrica Carolina Widström's Erotic Songs, whose poem Sång till natten I had read already in junior high school. I thought Oscar Levertin's poem Maj had a wonderful dreamy content and a rhythmic tone, almost like an old Swedish schlager. I then found Fredrika Bremer's fantastic poem Jag känner dig when I was looking for older poetry about love.” “All these compositions feel connected through the time in which they were written, during the 18th and 19th centuries, but also in a tonal language.” 

 ro.t Rebecka O'Nils (vocals) Jenny Klefbom (vocals, flute) William Bülow O'Nils (guitar, vocals). 

The album also features Hubert Hjertling (double bass) and Henry Klefbom (tramp organ, Hammond organ and piano) Music: Rebecca O'Nils Producer: Henry Klefbom ro.t Skymningens röst: dikter av Stagnelius, Lenngren och Bremer [COMEDIA] Distribution: The Orchard

Anteckningar

Edmund Prestwich has reviewed my translation of Tua Forsström's Anteckningar. Among other things he writes:

Memories and images are presented in a way that’s both vivid and spare, with an emphasis on elemental or elementary natural phenomena that can be evoked in very few words... Each image or memory fragment shines both in its own light and in the shifting play of light from those around it. As the book proceeds, the focus of attention broadens to include more generalised meditations on love and loss, the beauty and fragility of life and our relations to the natural world, but Vanessa’s death remains at its heart.

Swedish books online

As a side note on the accessibility of Swedish texts, I have found that it's possible to download Swedish ebooks from Adlibris via Google Books/ My Library. For example, both of the titles mentioned in my previous post (Drabbad av renhet and Blandade kort) can be purchased this way for a very reasonable price in GBP. 

And of course, there is always the excellent Litteraturbanken. 

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.