Poetry
Dikter
Not translated into English
Edith Södergran · 1916
Opening lines
Jag såg ett träd som var större än alla andra
och hängde fullt av oåtkomliga kottar;
I saw a tree that was taller than all the others
and hung full of unreachable cones;
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Poems in free verse, carried by associative images, in which the consciousness of a young, modern woman speaks. A voice speaks of a tree, an old house, autumn days and the last flower of the season, the sea and the stars; in “Vierge moderne” it declares that it is not a woman but a neuter, and in “Dagen svalnar” reproaches the man who was looking for a woman for having found a soul and being disappointed by it.
Context
The collection appeared in the autumn of 1916 from Holger Schildt; its author was twenty-four years old. It brought to Finland's Swedish-language letters a free, associative verse that was then unknown, and was received with perplexity. A misprint in the first edition changed the “fragile” dreams of the poem Dagen svalnar into “pink” ones. It was the following collection, two years later, that set off a debate in the press about the author's mental health. She published four more books up to 1920; a last one appeared after her death.
Who it is for
A slim collection of short poems, in Swedish, in free verse; readable in French and, in English, in David McDuff's Complete Poems.
Prizes and reception
The book that opens modernism in Swedish-language poetry; “Dagen svalnar” and “Vierge moderne” remain among the most widely read poems in that language.