Edith Södergran

Samlingen rymmer Edith Södergrans (1892-1923) efterlämnade dikter från skilda perioder. Denna tidiga banbrytare inom den finlanssvenska poesin insjuknade vid 16 års ålder i lungtuberkulos och dog endast 31 år gammal. För Södergran som tvingades leva i sjukdomens, ensamhetens och lidandets land var dikterna visioner av drömland, själens landskap "landet som icke är". Södergrans text är som bildspråk som har kristalliserats till sanningens strålande gnistor. Boken är en faksimilutgåva av 1925 års utgåva på Holger Schildts förlag i Helsingfors. Förord av Hagar Olsson. I landet som icke är där går min älskade med gnistrande krona. Vem är min älskade? Natten är mörk och stjärnorna dallra till svar. Vem är min älskade? Vad är hans namn? Himlarna välva sig högre och högre, och ett människobarn drunknar i ändlösa dimmor och vet intet svar. Men ett människobarn är ingenting annat än visshet. Och det sträcker ut sina armar högre än alla himlar. Och det kommer ett svar: Jag är den du älskar och alltid skall älska.

When she died in poverty at 31, Edith Södergran had been dismissed as a mad, megalomaniac aristocrat by most of her Finnish contemporaries. Today she is regarded as Finland’s greatest modern poet. Her poems – written in Swedish – are intensely visionary, and have been compared with Rimbaud’s, yet they also show deep af?nities with Russian poetry, with the work of Blok, Mayakovsky and Severyanin in particular. Born in 1892 of a Finno-Swedish family, Edith Södergran grew up in Raivola, a village on the Russian border, but was educated at a German school in St Petersburg. Her early in?uences were Goethe and Heine, and she wrote ?rst in German. The driving force of Edith Södergran’s mature Swedish poetry was her struggle against TB, which she contracted in 1908. For much of her short life she was a semi-invalid in sanatoria in Finland and Switzerland. Her last years were spent amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and in desperate poverty in Raivola, where she died in 1923. Edith Södergran saw herself as an inspired free spirit of a new order, a disciple on her own terms of Nietzsche, then of the nature mystic Rudolf Steiner, and ?nally of Christ. But her voice is subtle and wholly original. It transcends the limits imposed by her illness to make lyrical statements about the violence and darkness of the modern world – imagistic poems that are alarming in the surreal beauty of their fragmentary diction. David McDuff’s edition is the ?rst complete translation into English of Edith Södergran’s Swedish poetry. His versions adhere as closely as possible to the spirit and the letter of the Swedish original. In his introductory essay David McDuff gives a comprehensive and illuminating account of Edith Södergran’s life and work.