Swedish Poetry 1
From the man without a way V the hand trembles in
dizziness on the strangers’ ladder miserly tears rustle in the nightingale’s empty cage mourning itself claims more death even a railroad accident stammers for forgiveness a peeled eye burns: short-circuit and loneliness and fate photographs still another surprised corpse fire ravages even the uninsured heart and suffering’s guardian flees towards a background of belief anonymous thorns dream their way to reality rocking themselves to thorns on reality’s slope but a cry of pain rolls up a mountain and throws itself from a cliff to crush the flight of pain rests grandly on the cloth of the eagles while the wind shuffles the pack of polite faces Erik Lindegren, from mannen utan väg (the man without a way), 1942 Translated by Frederic Fleisher Erik Lindegren (1910-1968) mannen utan väg (the man without a way, 1942) With the “exploded sonnets” in his book mannen utan väg, Erik Lindegren made a remarkable contribution to increasing Swedish poetic awareness of the ideas of Modernism. What characterises the poems so powerfully are bold combinations of words and unexpected imagery. The phases of the Second World War are portrayed both linguistically, in the intervals formed within the sonnets, and thematically, with explicit references to the course of the war. Classical learning is coupled with observations of the contemporary. The poem can be read as one long appeal to that which is human within us: not to give in to the forces of destruction. The anguish is given a specific form and its intrusive effects have retained their capacity to affect the reader. There is a musicality in these poems–the poet was also an opera critic–and a linguistic finesse that combines the spontaneous with the intentional. In addition to the musical aspects, close ties to 17 the visual arts make this collection one of the Gesamtkunstwerke of twentieth-century Swedish literature. Selected Collections of Poetry: Posthum ungdom (1935) mannen utan väg (1942) Sviter (1947) Vinteroffer (1954) SWEDISH POETRY