Translator and author Stina Katchadourian discusses the work of Edith Irene Södergran (1892–1923), a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet and one of the first modernists within Swedish language literature.
Edith Södergran’s poems have been translated into some forty languages, delighting readers and inspiring poets world-wide. The newest English-language volume of Södergran’s poetry is Love, Solitude and the Face of Death (Fithian Press, March 2017), translated by Katchadourian. The collection includes poems from each of the five Södergran collections. These collections are represented in this translation in the order they were originally published.
Following the discussion, copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.
Author Bio
Born in cosmopolitan St. Petersburg to middle-class Swedish-speaking Finns and educated at the famous St. Petrischule, Edith Södergran’s first languages were Swedish and German. By age 14, she was also fluent in French, English, and Russian, and could speak some Finnish as well. In 1916 Edith was diagnosed with tuberculosis, one year after her father had succumbed to the same disease. Having this disease influenced her poetry, but did not silence her. In 1916, she approached the Finland Swedish publisher Schildts with a collection of her poems, and her first book, Dikter (Poems) was published that year. The book’s free verse, made no great impression on the critics, but, undaunted, she published another collection, Septemberlyran (The September Lyre) in 1918. It was met with harsh criticism—some critics even suggesting that Edith Södergran was insane. But her poems also garnered some praise, including kind words from the literary critic Hagar Olsson. The two women formed a close and complicated friendship.
More books followed. Rosenaltaret (The Rose Altar), 1919, was well received, as was her collection Framtidens skugga (Future’s Shadow), 1920, poems about the power of Eros and the fragility of life. In 1923 Södergran died in Raivola, Finland where she and her mother had lived in poverty after the Russian revolution, at the age of thirty-one. Her last poems were published posthumously in Landet som icke är (The Land That Is Not), 1925. Her words, however, live on.
1510686000
1510693200
Image by Linda Haglund/ASF
TUE—11-14-2017—7 PM, free