Poetry
Kriser och kransar
Not translated into English
Birger Sjöberg · 1926
Opening lines
Molniga måndag räckte mig kransen.
Självtro växte, blodet steg.
Kvittrande tisdag miste jag sansen,
veks för en ordstöt, släppte balansen.
Cloudy Monday handed me the wreath.
Self-belief grew, the blood rose.
Twittering Tuesday I lost my composure,
bowed to a thrust of words, lost my balance.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
The collection opens with poems about the labour of writing: in “Skrivaredans”, the critical gaze troubles and destroys the artist; then the writer advises himself, defends sincere criticism, unmasks easy success and strikes up a praise of Unrest, which is torment and wind, spring, fire and dance. Long poems follow, such as “Konferensman”, in which a pastor, at the ecumenical congress in Uppsala in 1925, wrestles with evil, war and desire. The images, nourished by modern painting, rise to hallucination and lay bare falsehood.
Context
The volume, born of a project begun in 1925 under the working title Drömmeriidkarna, of which it kept only twelve poems out of fifty-seven, was completed in the autumn of 1926, in a state that its author described as made of melancholy and clarity of mind, and sent to two friends with these words: here is the manuscript. Bonnier published it the same year. Known until then for the songs of Frida and for a bestselling novel, the author was seeking another tone in it. Critics and public received it badly, and this reception weighed on his last years. It was reissued in 2013 with a preface by Eva Hættner Aurelius.
Who it is for
A difficult collection, in Swedish only: the poems are often long, and their images call for slow reading.
Prizes and reception
Regarded today as one of the great founding masterpieces of modern Swedish poetry.
Sources for this page 13
The pages consulted to check this page.