A Reflection

Something that occurred to me a few years ago when working on my new translation of Karin Boye’s 1940 novel Kallocain (Penguin Classics, 2019) was how essential a number of comparatively neglected books are to the formation of a picture of the rise of literary modernism in Sweden. For example, Margit Abenius’s extensive biography of her close friend Karin Boye, Drabbad av renhet (1950), has now effectively been replaced by a new account of the poet’s life which appeared in 2017 – yet in spite of its undoubted defects, Abenius’s work gives a truer and more existential portrayal of its subject, and is saturated in the literary, philosophical and psychological movements of its era. Another such book is Gunnar Ekelöf’s Blandade kort (1957), which in addition to being a kind of fragmented autobiography and self-analysis (with a heartfelt essay on Boye and Kallocain) is also an aesthetic and artistic manifesto. Neither work has yet appeared in English translation.

Bloodaxe Nordic Poetry Reissues

 Bloodaxe are reissuing a range of European poetry classics, including three Nordic titles in my translation:

- Edith Södergran, Complete Poems

- Karin Boye, Complete Poems

- Mirjam Tuominen, Selected Writings

Kallocain Audiobook

The audiobook of my translation of Kallocain is now available from Audible, in a reading by Danish actor Claes Bang. 

Also from Amazon.

Kallocain Audiobook

News from Penguin that there's to be an audiobook recording of my translation of Karin Boye's KALLOCAIN, scheduled for release in July.

Classics

Norvik Press has some excerpts from new translations of Hagar Olsson's Chitambo (tr. Sarah Death) and Karin Boye's Crisis (tr. Amanda Doxtater)

The publisher notes:

In many countries, the lockdown continues. We are thinking of you all.

Kallocain

There's an interesting review of my Penguin Classics translation of Karin Boye's dystopian novel Kallocain with a number of perceptive comments on the book itself, at Shiny New Books:

The slightly ambiguous ending did leave me wondering what future there was for humanity and whether the race would escape from its claustrophobic control; I guess only time would tell, in the same way as it’s hard to tell know how we will come through the present difficult phase of our planet’s history where certain elements are so busy dehumanising those whom they perceive to be different.

Kallocain

My translation of Karin Boye's novel Kallocain is now published in Penguin Classics.

The Letter

Sunniva Brynnel Group continues to develop and evolve, with a new album that marks a further step along the road from the Blue Ejder album and its settings of poems by Karin Boye. The album was recorded in NYC and features jazz musicians from Canada and the U.S., including Nathan Reising on alto sax. There are a couple of new Boye settings here, in my translation. In general the tracks in the album present an interesting blend of folk style and post-Coltrane improvisation and harmony, where voice and lyrics are fused with the work of the instrumental ensemble.

Kallocain

The cover of my forthcoming new Penguin Classics translation of Karin Boye's dystopian novel Kallocain. It's a work by Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), a Swedish artist who created some of the very first purely abstract paintings - before Kandinsky.

Priorities

It’s remarkable that although two full-length biographies of Karin Boye now exist (Margit Abenius --Drabbad av renhet [1950) and Johan Svedjedal -- Den nya dagen gryr [2017]), neither has yet been published in English translation. It often increasingly seems that when it comes to the Nordic countries the interest of UK/US publishers lies almost exclusively in the direction of light fiction and fantasy, with much less attention given to the skönlitteratur that is the primary token of the Nordic presence in the European cultural heritage.

Connecting Paths

Some time ago I mentioned two new biographies - one of Peter Weiss and another of Karin Boye - and said that I hoped to post a discussion of them here. Having read both, I find that I'm in something of a quandary: for one thing, Werner Schmidt's book is not really a biography in the traditional sense at all, more a critical appraisal of Peter Weiss's work during various periods of that author's career. For another, Johan Svedjedal's study of Karin Boye is in one important sense a polemic with Margit Abenius, the author of the only previous full-length biography of Boye, first published back in the early 1950s. This makes it hard to form a balanced assessment of these two new studies - they lead one too easily into metacritical terrain, where points of interpretation and biographical detail tend to overshadow the subjects themselves. Thus, Svedjedal writes in a somewhat laconic aside towards the very end of his book:

Störst genomslag har sannolikt skildringen av hennes sista tid i Alingsås i Peter Weiss Motståndets estetik (3, 1981) (som rätt ensidigt bygger på Margit Abenius tolkning)

Svedjedal is at pains to free Karin Boye from the aura that he feels has dogged the proper appreciation of her life and work over the decades, and that he attributes largely to the influence of Margit Abenius's portrayal. His emphasis is on the everyday aspects of the poet's life, and in general the book attempts to root her and locate her in her changing environments, whether in Sweden or in Germany. In doing so, however, it may be losing sight of the central meaning and message of her life and work, as outlined by Weiss's narrator in Werner Schmidt's retelling of the story:

Ausgehend von der Position des Erzählers wäre das Scheitern Boyes nicht mit dem Druck zu erklären, den die äuβeren Verhältnisse auf sie als Künstlerin ausgeübt hatten, sondern mit ihrem beeinträchtigten Vermögen, mit »der Kunst, also dem selbstständigen Denken«, einzuwirken auf die nur »scheinbar unerschütterliche Realität«.

In this respect I feel that Margit Abenius was more on target. While it's useful to remember that Weiss's Karin Boye as she appears in his novel is a reconstruction and re-characterisation of her personality, there can also be little doubt that his portrayal of her is an accurate one, based on his own acquaintance and friendship with her - even though the details of that friendship are not documented anywhere, and the evidence is purely and convincingly circumstantial and psychological. Karin Boye and Peter Weiss meet in these books, as they do in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands - but while in Schmidt's biography the encounter is acknowledged in terms of the aesthetic dialogue between the two writers, and its philosophical and historical meaning, in Svedjedal's book the meeting is only a brief one, and the opportunity of understanding it is unfortunately missed.

Karin Boye Biography

Another book for my reading list - a new biography of Karin Boye that appeared, ironically, almost at the same time as the Peter Weiss biography I mentioned earlier. I'll hope to write about both of these books, and the themes that connect them, in a future post.

Peter Weiss Biography

I'm looking forward to reading Werner Schmidt's biography of Peter Weiss, which appeared almost a year ago.

Blue Ejder - Karin Boye

Some of my translations of poems by Karin Boye have been set to music by the Swedish/English duo Blue Ejder, in a CD album featuring Sunniva Brynnel (voice, piano, kalimba), Aubin Vanns (guitars) and Neil Yates (flugelhorn, voice).

Karin Boye ebook

Just a reminder that my translations of Karin Boye's poetry (Complete Poems) are now available as a Kindle ebook, here (UK) and here (US).

Peter Weiss: Letters - 2

I’ve now finished reading the book* – it’s a fairly short work, and includes the text of 21 letters, with notes and bibliography. The letters themselves give a fascinating snapshot of the 24 year-old Weiss’s psychological, emotional and artistic situation in Alingsås, western Sweden, during the summer of 1941. In April of the same year, the Swedish poet Karin Boye, who also lived in Alingsås, and with whom Weiss may have had personal contact, committed suicide. It seems that this event drove him to seek psychoanalytic treatment, though it was some time before he could afford to undertake a proper analysis. In the letters there are references to an aborted analysis with a local doctor, Iwan Bratt, and a self-analysis conducted afterwards during a time when Weiss was still working as a darkroom technician in his father’s factory.

Henriette Itta Blumenthal, like several other of Weiss’s close friends during this period, was considerably older than him, and had also trained as an analyst. Unlike Weiss, she emigrated to the United States. Weiss’s letters to her bear the character of a personal confession, and reveal much about his troubled sense of personal, ethnic and national identity, his relation to his parents, his affairs with women, his attitude towards homosexuality, his increasingly political interpretation of the role of resistance in psychoanalysis, and many other themes which eventually became merged into his later literary works, especially the "Erzählung” Abschied von den Eltern (1960), and the novels Fluchtpunkt (1961) and Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975-1981) There is also a good deal of detail about his activity and aspirations as a painter and visual artist, and the book gives an insight into his concept of “world theatre” (Welttheater) as a meeting-place of the personal and the public, which would later become important in his work for the stage and screen. The descriptions of life in a small Swedish town during wartime, with its gossip, its hostility to foreigners and its undisguised anti-Semitism, are sharply and vividly drawn.

In their notes, the editors of the volume have tried to be as precise, inclusive and informative as possible, and this is very welcome. Their introductory essay also serves as a useful summary of the rest of the text. One has the impression, however, that the editors are not quite at home in Swedish, and this is a pity, as the letters are written in a curious linguistic style that hovers somewhere between German and Swedish, occasionally producing some strange and subtle shifts, not all of which are literary, and which require some detective work on the part of the reader.  In one case when Weiss writes that he has been out with friends picking rosehips, and uses a “Germanized” form (Nippon) of the Swedish word nypon, the notes flag this as “Unklar: Es gibt eine Pfingstrose namens »Nippon Beauty«. Möglicherweise auch ein Übertragungsfehler.“ (p. 151) Where Weiss spells the name of the journal Månadstidningen in a mixture of German and Swedish which probably reflects his state of mind in exile, as "Monatstidningen", in one instance the notes go even further, and reproduce the title as Månatsdidningen (p.71). On a more general level, many readers could probably dispense with notes that inform them that Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch painter, or that Diego Rivera was a Mexican one.

But these are minor matters, and ones which it would perhaps not be hard to set right for a second edition. Readers who are familiar with Weiss's prose work, especially the Ästhetik, will find much of interest in this book as it provides documentary background material and in some cases a confirmation of certain themes and facts that are only hinted at in the prose fiction. It is also a highly enjoyable read, and a worthy addition to the volumes of Weiss's letters that have already been published (most recently his correspondence with Hermann Hesse and Siegfried Unseld, the late head of Suhrkamp.)

* Peter Weiss: Briefe an Henriette Itta Blumenthal, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin, 2011. 175pp.

Nordic Voices in Print - latest additions

Nordic Voices in Print now has complete texts of my translations of collections by Karin Boye and Gösta Ågren, as well as selections of poetry by Bertel Gripenberg, Arvid Mörne and Elmer Diktonius.

The blog can also be accessed at

http://nordicvoices.xtreemhost.com/

A view of The Magic Mountain

Karin Boye, talking to the narrator in volume 3 of Die Ästhetik des Widerstands:

Neunzehnhundert Achtundzwanzig, Neunundzwanzig, sagte sie, habe sie den Zauberberg übersetzt, zuerst sei sie von diesem Buch mit der denkwürdigen Liebesgeschichte ergriffen, dann aber, beim eingehenden Studium der Sätze auf ihren letzten Gehalt, von Abscheu erfüllt vvorden. Wieder werden die Funktionen der Liebe einzig vom Gesichtspunkt des Mannes aus dargestellt, und dazu noch in einem plötzlichen Umschlagen der Zärtlichkeit und des Begehrens zur Herabwürdigung, zur Verächtlichmachung der Frau. Gegen Ende des Romans finden sich der junge und der alte Liebhaber zusammen, in der Verurteilung des Objekts ihrer Liebe, im eignen Versagen ihre mannliche Dominanz dennoch aufrechterhaltend, schreiben sie der Frau zu, was sie gemeinsam ausgebrütet haben, daß sie sich als reaktives Geschöpf, ohne Initiative, eben nur als Objekt empfinde und sich, durch weibliche Bestechlichkeit, der primären Wahl des Mannes überlasse.

Boye

The third volume of Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance opens with a tribute to the narrator's parents, who have succeeded in fleeing to Sweden. The tribute is also one of mourning for his mother - though still alive, she is ill and has withdrawn into a silence from which she cannot be recalled.

Imperceptibly, the image of the mother merges with the image and memory of another female character, that of her friend and colleague, the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye, who like other women in the novel is referred to solely by her last name. Boye's suicide, and her own rationale and explanation for it, form the subject of the early part of volume 3.

The novel's sharp focus on the life and work of Boye and the acute attention the narrator devotes to her indicate that for Weiss this author and poet had a more personal significance for Weiss than was the case with Brecht, for example. One wonders if Weiss had met Boye in Sweden - after all, in 1938 his family took up residence in Alingsås, West Gotland, where Boye herself moved in the following year in order to be close to Anita Nathorst. A meeting does not seem improbable.

Some of Weiss's account of Boye's life and of her final months appears to be drawn at least in part from the biography by Margit Abenius (Drabbad av renhet, 1950)- yet there are also some details that may derive from actual contacts with the poet. In particular, Weiss is at pains to analyse Karin Boye's existential, political, artistic, sexual and personal situation in 1941, describing it through the words of the psychoanalytically-trained doctor Max Hodann. Hodann says that in her moment of surrender to Goering at a mass rally in 1932, Boye had made it impossible for her to forgive herself or receive forgiveness, and had consciously and unconsciously abandoned hope. Her novel Kallocain (1940), which depicts the merciless and inhuman conflict in a world that is divided into two opposing blocks, is the testament not only to her own despair but to the despair of a generation. Hodann sees a continuation of Boye's fatal inner and outer dilemma in the inability of the radical German youth of the 1930s and 40s to avoid either a collapse into Nazism or an embrace of Stalinist Communism:

Ich gab Boyes Schilderung wieder, wie sie sich hatte betören lassen dem Mann mit dem bleichen Hysterikergesicht auf der Tribüne in der überfüllten Sporthalle, und wie sie zu spät erst das Ruchlose seiner Reden begriffen habe. Viele von uns, sagte Hodann, immer noch, und oft grade, wenn es um Entscheidendes gehe, wie Kinder, wir ließen uns beherrschen von Hoffnungen, deren Ursprung eingebettet sei in der Erinnrung an das Ertasten der Mutterbrust, im Aufgehn in einer Harmonie, die es für uns nicht mehr gebe. Auch Boye müsse, wie wir alle, nach der Mutter, dem Vater in sich gesucht, und diese, in wachsendem Maß, und durch andre Gestalten ersetzt haben... Ich möchte behaupten, sagte er, daß unsre Generation mehr gezeichnet ist von dem Unheil, das die Sowjetunion ergriff, als von den Verheerungen durch den Faschismus, denn an dem Arbeiterstaat hingen wir mit unserm ganzen kindlichen Glauben, während uns von Anfang an bekannt war, was in Deutschland aufkam.

I'll return to this subject in another post.

The Best

By Karin Boye


The best that we possess,
we cannot give away.
we cannot write it either.
and neither can we say.

The best that is in your mind
no one can make unclean.
It shines there deep inside
for you and God alone.

It is the glory of our wealth
that no one else can gain it.
It is the torment of our poverty
that no one else can attain it.


Det bästa


Det bästa som vi äga,
det kan man inte giva,
det kan man inte säga
och inte heller skriva.


Det bästa i ditt sinne
kan intet förorena.
Det lyser djupt där inne
för dig och Gud allena.


Det är vår rikdoms råga
att ingen ann kan nå det.
Det är vårt armods plåga
att ingen ann kan få det.


translation from Swedish by David McDuff