Poetry
Färjesång
Gunnar Ekelöf · 1941
Synopsis
Poems that reason as much as they sing, and that review what counts in a life. One reads there the sequence “Tag och skriv” (“Take and write”), the brief “Jag tror på den ensamma människan” (“I believe in the solitary man”), “En värld är varje människa” (“Every man is a world”); the collection closes with a fugue for two voices, “Melancholia”, in which one drifts away until the shores are lost from sight, and “Eufori”, in which a man sitting outside on a summer night drinks, smokes his pipe, writes a line or two and feels all around him the whole of nature, strong with love and death.
Context
The book appeared from Bonnier in September 1941, in the middle of the war, and was received with respect but without enthusiasm: several critics reproached the volume for its intellectual dryness and regretted that lyricism had given way to a poetry of thought; Karl Ragnar Gierow saw in it aphorisms and paradoxes rather than poems. One senses in it the Eliot whose East Coker the author had translated, and the poetry of the East. The title, the ferryman's song, refers to Charon, and the poems are grouped like pieces of music. Selections of these poems exist in English; the whole collection has not been translated into French.
Who it is for
A brief and demanding book, in Swedish. It can be opened anywhere: several pieces have become texts that Swedes know by heart.
Prizes and reception
The collection of his breakthrough, counted among the fifty best Swedish collections; “Eufori” entered the Swedish cultural canon in 2025.
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