When she died in poverty at 31, Edith Södergran had been dismissed as a mad, megalomaniac aristocrat by most of her Finnish contemporaries.
Bloodaxe published David McDuff\'s translation of her Complete Poems in 1984..
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.
But her voice is subtle and wholly original.
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 finally of Christ.
Her last years were spent amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and in desperate poverty in Raivola, where she died in 1923.
For much of her short life she was a semi-invalid in sanatoria in Finland and Switzerland.
The driving force of Edith Södergran \'s mature Swedish poetry was her struggle against TB, which she contracted in 1908.
Her early influences were Goethe and Heine, and she wrote first in German.
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 Poems - written in Swedish - are intensely visionary, and have been compared with Rimbaud\'s, yet they also show deep affinities with Russian poetry, with the work of Blok, Mayakovsky and Severyanin in particular.
Today she is regarded as Finland\'s greatest modern poet.
About author(s): When she died in poverty at 31, Edith Södergran had been dismissed as a mad, megalomaniac aristocrat by most of her Finnish contemporaries.
In his introductory essay David McDuff gives a comprehensive and illuminating account of Edith Södergran \'s life and work.
His versions adhere as closely as possible to the spirit and the letter of the Swedish original.
David McDuff\'s edition is the first Complete translation into English of Edith Södergran \'s Swedish poetry.
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.
But her voice is subtle and wholly original.
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 finally of Christ.
Her last years were spent amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and in desperate poverty in Raivola, where she died in 1923.
For much of her short life she was a semi-invalid in sanatoria in Finland and Switzerland.
The driving force of Edith Södergran \'s mature Swedish poetry was her struggle against TB, which she contracted in 1908.
Her early influences were Goethe and Heine, and she wrote first in German.
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 Poems - written in Swedish - are intensely visionary, and have been compared with Rimbaud\'s, yet they also show deep affinities with Russian poetry, with the work of Blok, Mayakovsky and Severyanin in particular.
Today she is regarded as Finland\'s greatest modern poet.
When she died in poverty at 31, Edith Södergran had been dismissed as a mad, megalomaniac aristocrat by most of her Finnish contemporaries
