Poetry
Legender och visor
Not translated into English
Oscar Ivar Levertin · 1891
Opening lines
Ballad, flyg ut som vårens första svala
i nattblå luft mot en osynlig rymd,
Ballad, fly out like spring's first swallow
in night-blue air towards an unseen space,
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
A collection of ballads and songs nourished by medieval legends and by European and Near Eastern motifs. On New Year's Eve, Staffan the stable boy waters the five horses that Jesus has entrusted to him, among them those of love, luck, misery and sorrow. Florez and Blanzeflor, the lovers of the medieval romance, are first of all two children playing together. One poem is set in the old Jewish cemetery of Prague, another gives a voice to Shylock, the usurer, who receives death without fear, and the epilogue speaks of a poetry that is “black, sewn with purple”.
Context
This first collection was written largely in a sanatorium in Davos, where the author was being treated for tuberculosis, and it mourns his first wife, who had died shortly before. The year before, Levertin had co-signed with Heidenstam a pamphlet against naturalism; together with the latter's work, the book launched the medieval fashion of the 1890s, but without any of the Swedish nationalism. Bo Bergman and Hjalmar Söderberg, then students, immediately recognised a great poet in it; Stenhammar set Florez och Blanzeflor to music as early as 1891, and his poems remained on the school curriculum until the 1970s.
Who it is for
A short collection, in Swedish; a selection of the author's poems exists in French, D'or, d'ombre et de pourpre.
Prizes and reception
The collection that launched the Swedish Romantic revival of the 1890s; it is still held in high esteem.
Sources for this page 8
The pages consulted to check this page.