Poetry
Kärlek i tjugonde seklet
Not translated into English
Hjalmar Gullberg · 1933
Synopsis
The book opens with a long sequence, Kärleksroman, in which the old romantic way of loving is set against the new, rational way, which demands its freedom and says: I love you for as long as I feel like it. Love poems follow, including Kyssande vind, and pieces that draw their figures from Antiquity. Another sequence, Förklädd gud, takes its motif from Euripides: Apollo, condemned to live for a year in the form of a man, serves as a farmhand at the house of King Admetus, in Thessaly, and no one around him recognises the god.
Context
The poet's fourth collection, the book appeared at Norstedt in 1933, in one hundred and eleven pages. Carl Fehrman sees in it a turning point: the poet for whom hardly anything but the invisible world existed becomes the poet of the visible and sensible world. Förklädd gud takes up the prologue of Euripides' Alcestis, mixing in traits of Orpheus and of Christ. Lars-Erik Larsson set it to music for reciter, soloists, choir and orchestra; the two men were then working at the radio, where the work was first performed on 1 April 1940, and in 2025 it entered the Swedish cultural canon.
Who it is for
A short book of poems, in Swedish, with no French or English translation. It is worth knowing that Apollo was condemned to serve a year with a mortal, as Euripides recounts at the beginning of Alcestis.
Prizes and reception
The book that established its author's popularity; it appears on the list of the fifty best poetry collections drawn up in 1990 for the Världsbiblioteket.
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