Poetry
mannen utan väg
Not translated into English
Erik Lindegren · 1942
Synopsis
Forty untitled poems, numbered in Roman numerals, preceded by a short prologue. Each keeps the framework of the sonnet, fourteen lines, but arranged in seven two-line stanzas, without capital letters and almost without punctuation. The images collide and cancel one another out in fragments, in a world where, as the title announces, no road leads anywhere any more. Behind them one can make out what was happening in Europe between the autumn of 1939 and the summer of 1940, when the poems were written.
Context
Rejected by Bonnier and other publishers, the book appeared in 1942 at the author's own expense, in two hundred copies, on borrowed money; a selection of poems had appeared in 1941 in the journal Horisont under the title Limbo. The form of the “exploded sonnets” comes from a sequence by Lawrence Durrell, The Sonnets of Hamlet (1939). Having gone almost unnoticed, the book was reissued by Bonnier in 1945 and then became one of the centres of the quarrel over the obscurity of modern poetry. The title is written without a capital letter, and so are the poems, which is deliberate. Karl-Birger Blomdahl set nine of them to music for soloists, choir and orchestra.
Who it is for
Forty short poems, in Swedish, with no published French or English translation. One must be willing to be carried by the clash of images rather than by meaning.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the central work of the forties movement; it appears on the list of the fifty best poetry collections drawn up in 1990 for the Världsbiblioteket.
Sources for this page 11
The pages consulted to check this page.