Poetry
Svarta ballader
Not translated into English
Dan Andersson · 1917
Opening lines
Omkring tiggarn från Luossa satt allt folket i en ring,
och vid lägerelden hörde de hans sång.
Around the beggar from Luossa all the people sat in a ring,
and by the campfire they heard his song.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
Dark ballads, rooted in the wild nature of Dalarna, that tell of life's struggles, love and hatred, suffering and death. Several place at their centre a musician, very close to the one who writes; one follows the burial of a fiddler. Others stand beside beggars and outcasts. The best known of these poems, in nine quatrains, centres on a beggar from Luossa and tells of a longing for somewhere else beyond the visible world.
Context
The author's third collection and the last published in his lifetime, the book came out with Bonnier in 1917; the publisher paid no fee, only twenty-five free copies. Some of the poems were written in a room fitted out under the roof of the family house at Gräsberg. His verses are sung: the poem of the beggar of Luossa has at least thirty musical versions, although the author wanted it recited to Chopin's funeral march. Sofia Karlsson's album of the same title, in 2005, sets five of his poems among eleven songs and has sold more than sixty thousand copies.
Who it is for
A short collection of poems, in Swedish, which can also be heard sung; it has been translated neither into French nor into English.
Prizes and reception
The most enduring work of its author, which has become one of the major texts of twentieth-century Swedish literature.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.