Review of Modern utländsk lyrik (1975/1985)

Text

Sverker Göransson (writer), Börje Räftegård (writer).

Read in 2022.

A collection of American and non-Swedish European poetry from the mid-19th century to the 1960s, with author bios, literal translations to Swedish, and factual aids to hermeneutics.

The collection contains the following complete poems in French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese:

The Russian texts are transliterated to the Latin alphabet. The collection also contains the following, in English:

I read parts of this book in its intended usage as a textbook in a 2002 course, and finished it in 2022, when I was twice as old. Even in 2002, the book was showing its age as a sausage fest, but it is carefully curated, usually providing a bare minimum of context for the reader’s own interpretation.

Some poems I regard as excerpts, and these I have not reviewed. The Paul Simon song also falls outside my editorial policy. In 2022, it reminds me of the bathetic decision to award 2016’s Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan because the committee happened to belong to the right generation for it.

text non-fiction