Edith Södergran
Complete
Poems
Translated by David McDuff
Bloodaxe Books
1984
_________________________________________________________________________
Recovered by Johannes Goransson
We may expect a poet like Edith Södergran to write harrowing poetry of witness. Her father
died from TB when she was a child, but not before passing it on to his
daughter. As a child she witnessed the turmoil of Russian uprisings against the
tsar. The great massacre of workers in 1905 caused her school –located one
block away – to close down for the day. After she and her mother retreated to
their country home Raivola on the border between
Knowing just that legendary story of her
life, you may be surprised to come upon the following in an uncollected poem
called “Moment Image,” written during the melee of the revolution:
The
Bolsheviks’ victory is very fast,
but
we will get there before them, for this is the last one.
The
reins we will loosen from life,
the
muzzle we will remove from humanity.
Magnificent
beast, you have come of age. (my trans.)
I choose to begin with this quote even
though it is not included in most collections of Södergran’s
poetry, including David McDuff’s 1984 Collected Poems of Edith Södergran,
because it is the only instance where she mentions the Bolsheviks explicitly.
However, her poetry is full of messianic rants about the gloriously violent end
of the old age and the dawning of a new age that could be read as references
the Russian Revolution or any number of other social upheavals taking place all
around her:
The Armored Train
Fifty wagons full
of hopes I had loaded to you,
They came back
empty…
Freight of
deception…
Now I send armoured trains with stone-hard masks in
menacing embrasures:
they come home with
thousandfold wagons of fulfillment.
Throughout her books, violence is a form of
purity and beauty. Tenderness, pity and romance end in sorrow or
disappointment, but violence leads to renewal. In “The Moon’s Secret,” the
speaker notes that “The moon knows… that blood will be shed here tonight,” and
goes on to describe how “corpses shall lie amidst the alders on a wonderfully
beautiful shore.” The poem ends: “How beautiful is the earth in this lonely
hour.” In “The Trains of the Future,” she writes:
Tear down all the
triumphal arches –
the triumphal
arches are too low.
Make room for our
fantastic train!
Written in 1917, this sounds unmistakably
like a metaphor advocating the Bolshevik Revolution with its devotion to
modernization.
Yet Södergran’s
poems are not advocating Bolshevism or any specific political revolution as
much as portraying the Bolsheviks as part of an eschatological worldview. Her
poems are part of a tradition of messianic-apocalyptic Russian poetry, which
was very popular at the time. Her frequent invocation of the wonder of the
violent times has much in common with a Symbolist poet like Alexander Blok, who welcomed the Russian Revolution in his famous
poem “The Twelve.” Like Blok, Södergran
sees the revolution in mystical terms: the Bolsheviks are a symptom of a
greater metaphysical revolution. As she writes in “The World is Bathing in
Blood”: “The world is bathing in blood because God had to live./In order that
his glory may persist, all others must perish.” In “The Spirit of the
Apocalypse,” Södergran writes:
Out of the war I
have come – risen out of chaos –
I am the elements –
biblically riding – the apocalypse.
I look around
across life – it is godlike.
The poems ends with the line: “The spirit
of the song is the war.” This nexus of “song,” “spirit” and “war” goes a long
way to explain Södergran’s war-like zeal. She has a
highly aestheticized view of history (like Yeats for
example). In “The Storm,” she compares history to “a ghostly dance” in which
“the world has no control over itself. One part of it will collapse like a
burning house, like a worm-eaten tree…”
This aestheticized
worldview is a major principle of her poetry. The poems are charged by a
speaker who promotes violence and worships action, but whose actions are mostly
overwhelmed by brilliant, Expressionist imagery. One of her most famous poems
is “On Foot I Had to Cross the Solar System”:
On
foot
I had
to cross the solar system
before
I found the first thread of my red dress.
I
sense myself already.
Somewhere
in space hangs my heart,
shaking
in the void, from it stream sparks
into
other intemperate hearts.
The poem may be about a search, but the
bright iconic red heart/dress – functioning as a kind of vibrant double
exposure – more or less blots out the speaker’s actual journeying.
Södergran utilizes the
colors red and white throughout her body of work. Although some have suggested
that this ties in with the Russian Revolution, it seems likely that Södergran’s continual emphasis on the colors red and white
is more traditional: red as passionate, white as cold, both perhaps even
carrying the religions denotations of the Virgin Mary. As Ebba
Witt-Brattström has shown in her exemplary study Ediths jag, one big influence on Södergran’s work is Russian folk songs and folktales. To
make a cross-cultural connection, her poetry often borders on the kind of
imagery we find in American folks songs: “John Hardy had another little girl.
The dress that she wore was red.” (Carter Family). “I saw a black branch with
blood that kept dripping.” (Bob Dylan.).
The double exposure of the red heart and
the red dress leads to another critical facet of Södergran,
her Nietschean feminism. While recuperating in
Strange father!
Your children will
not let you down,
they are coming
across the earth with the footsteps of gods,
rubbing their eyes:
where am I?
As in many other female writers from this
period, Södergran melds Nietzsche with feminism,
creating a vision of “The New Woman,” a powerful, chaste woman who does not
need men.[1]
Södergran tends to idealize
female-female relationships. Many of these appear to be references to the
real-life relationship between Södergran and
Finland-Swedish novelist and critic Hagar Olsson, her first and most important
booster. Although they wrote many letters to each other and engaged in a stormy
intellectual relationship, they did not actually spend much time in each
other’s company. Perhaps that is why the relationship is depicted in such
ludicrously fantastic terms. Seemingly
aware of her unrealistic hopes for female sisterhood, Södergran
entitled the second section of Södergran’s 1919 book Rosenaltaret (The Rose Altar) “Fantastique.”
This section is full of manic-depressive moodswings
as the speaker alternatively praises her “sister” and fears that she will die
or end up in a romantic relationship with a man. In “I Believe in My Sister,”
she writes about the sister: “The elves wove her clothes of silk/the
moon-maiden sprinkled dew on her breasts…” But two stanzas later, the speaker
asks “My sister…/Has she betrayed me?” The other poems in this section follow the
same shifts between joy and paranoia.
Södergran portays male-female relationships as inevitably leading to
death and disappointment. In “Do Not Let Your Pride Fall,” the speaker urges a
female addressee:
Do not let your
pride fall,
do not glide naked
into his arms
tenderly,
rather go away in
tears…
In the end of the poem she advocates
“freezing hotly to death” rather than partaking in “joy’s brief spring.” The
paradox of being passionate and pure versus cold and earthly reappears
throughout Södergran’s work. In some of the eeriest
lines I’ve ever read she describes a failed love affair (“We Women):
Once I loved a man,
he believed in nothing…
He came one cold
day with empty eyes,
he went one heavy
day with forgetfulness on his brow.
If my child does
not live, it is his…
Södergran repeatedly uses
metaphors of captivity and exile to describe her feelings of estrangement. This
may also have a biographical basis. She was a Finland-Swede (meaning her mother
tongue was Swedish) who grew up in
I am
a stranger in his land
that
lies deep under the pressing sea,
the
sun looks in with curling beams
and
the air floats between my hands.
They
told me that I was born in captivity –
here
is no face that is known to me.
Am I
a stone someone threw to the bottom?
Am I
a fruit that was too heavy for its branch?
Here
I lurk at the foot of the murmuring tree,
how
will I get up the slippery stems?
Up
there the tottering treetops meet,
there I will sit and spy out
the
smoke from my homeland’s chimneys…
While her biography lends itself to these
kinds of readings, they do not entirely explain a person who – in a poem
entitled “Life” – writes: “Life is to despise oneself/and to lie motionless on
the bottom of a well.” Perhaps a broader interpretation is that she is captured
in a material world, struggling for a purer real. Hers is a poetry of striving
for the absolute, the pure in an unpure world, or, as
she writes in one of her last poems, “The Land That Is Not.” In this poem, she
sums up the seemingly contradictory beliefs that runs throughout her oeuvre:
She wants to go to a land “that is not” because she is “weary of all things
that are.” Contrary to what an American reader in 2005 might assume,
transcending from worldly needs and desires is not escapism for Södergran. She believes that life, with all of its material
desires is but “a hot delusion.” So what is this land that both is and is not?
Paradoxically, the way she describes this transcendent state is by invoking her
“beloved.” Who is this beloved who walks with a “sparkling crown” through the
night? After a strong delay in the “mists” we find out that it is “the human
child” “certainty.” Certainty is a complex but perhaps only possible answer to
a poetic search that is contorted with paradoxes and doubt.
Perhaps a more satisfactory, if melancholy,
summation of her poetic output can be found in the stark poem “My Artificial
Flowers”:
My
artificial flowers
I
will send home to you.
My
small bronze lions
I
will set up by your door.
Myself
I will sit down here on the stairway –
a
lost pearl of the orient
in
the big city’s roaring sea.
In this brief shard of a love poem, Södergran seems to ruminate on her own poetic ouevre. She is helplessly separated from her
addressee/audience. Her poems are artificial, aestheticized
depictions, and her megalomania is decorative lion statues set up at an ominous
door as a kind of bartering for something we are not entirely certain is love.
The speaker is herself part of this campy collection of objects, an orientalist pearl in the “roaring sea” of a tumultuous time
period which she – despite her Nietzschean bravado –
could only impotently witness.
*
The Finland-Swedish public’s reaction to Södergran’s first book, Dikter, was mixed. Although much
has been made of the negativity of the reception, playing into the myth of Södergran as a suffering artist, the reaction was not
altogether negative. The provincial papers were very critical – one of them
referring to the poem as “Dårdikter” (lunatic poems)
– especially of her use of free verse.[2] However, the urban
papers, such as the central Hufvudstadsbladet,
defended Södergran as a promising young poet. The
debate in these reviews seems mainly to focus on the extent to which she writes
“formless” verse versus poetry that is part of the Swedish cultural tradition.
The reviewers seem to not to make the connection between Expressionism and the
other modern movements of
There was no mention of her affiliation to
the larger Modernist movement until her second book, Septemberlyran (The September
Lyre) in 1918. And in this case, it was not as much the poetry itself as the
letters she wrote to the daily Dagens Press. In the
letter the paper published on December 31, Södergran
voiced strong Modernist rhetoric, proclaiming that her book “is not intended
for the public, scarcely even for higher intellectual circles, only for a few
individuals who stand closer to the boundary of the future.”[3] She defines her
work for the critics, saying that she is a new kind of person: “I live the life
of a saint, I lose myself in the highest production of the human spirit, I
avoid all influences of a baser kind. I regard the old society as a mother cell
which ought to be sustained until the individuals erect the new world.”
In setting herself apart from tradition,
she helped the critic notice how different her poetry was, that it was in fact
neither “formless” nor conventional, but Modernist. The reaction to the letter
was much stronger, much more ferociously negative than that to the previous
book. The critics’ reactions were highly informed by the anxieties of the age,
the threat of communist revolutionaries.[4] One critic warned
against “Nietzsche-crazed woman folk.” In a typical response, another critic
wrote that Södergran was “infected by the same
intellectual disease which in the political field is called Bolshevism.” This merging of political and artistic
attacks on tradition continued to exert a strong influence on the public’s view
of Modernism for many years.
Södergran published three
more collections during her lifetime and one posthumously in 1925, but received
less attention as the public had tired of her outrageous behavior. Although it
received less press, her next book Rosenaltaret, did receive the strong approval of the central
Finland-Swedish poet Arvid Mörne
who wrote that it was “among the strongest (poetry) written in Swedish during
recent times.”[5] Perhaps more
importantly, it was in a review of this book a critic first referred to her as
an “expressionist,” connecting her to the wider intellectual movements in
Södergran died from TB in
1922, penniless from the Russian Revolution and vacillating between Nietzscheanism and newfound Christianity. Although not
noticed immediately, her influence on Finland-Swedish and Swedish culture has
been enormous. The second wave of Finland-Swedish Modernists –including Elmer Diktonius and Gunnar Björling – are to a very large extent the direct result of
her work. With Swedish Modernist poet Gunnar Ekelöf her influence spread to Swedish Modernism as well.
Ultimately it is impossible to speak of Swedish or Finland-Swedish Modernist
poetry without Södergran.
*
The translations in this essay, except for
the first quoted passage, come from David McDuff’s
1984 Complete Poems, which includes
the poems published during her life and the immediately posthumous The Land That Is Not. However, it does
not include poems excluded from these collections, such as her hundreds of
blustery schoolgirl poems (mostly written in German and in form, often
addressing her French teacher).
McDuff does an good job
of evoking the fascinating mixture of Modernist brutality and Romantic diction.
One essential facet of Södergran’s poetry is her
awkwardness. There is a sense that she is not entirely natural in writing in
Swedish, that she is a foreigner in her own language. At times McDuff is able to capture this awkwardness, for example in
“Evening Walk” (“Aftonvandring”):
Is there for me a
death, annihilation? – no.
Death is in
he catches the
sparks on the roofs.
In lines like this, a translator may feel
the urge to naturalize the sentence into
“Is there death, annihilation for me?” But Södergran’s
original sentence is a bit off: “Finnes för mig död,
förintelse – nej.” Were
this my translation, I might have emphasized this foreignness a bit more by
retaining Södergran’s use of “Helsingfors”
rather than “Helsinki.” I might also have called it an “Evening Wandering,” not
only because it is the same word as “vandring,” but
also to maintain the Romantic phrasing of the original.
McDuff’s book has a number
of other relevant features. It includes a solid introduction as well as Södergran’s own photographs from Raivolo.
At one point during the end of her life she planned to become a professional
photographer, making money from doing portraits of soldiers. McDuff’s book does not include any soldier portraits; it
does include several self-portraits, including a handful together with her
beloved cats. More interestingly perhaps, it includes a few photographs of the
city itself, in which the Russian-style architecture of the Södergran’s
dacha and the rest of the town is apparent, visually representing the
fascinating intersection of different cultures that shaped Södergran’s
poetic vision.
_________________________________________________________________________
Works
Cited
Schoolfield, George. Edith Södergran: Modernist Poet in
1984.
Södergran, Edith. Samlade Dikter. Ed Tideström, Gunnar.
Witt-Brattström, Ebba. Ediths jag –
Edith Södergran och modernismens födelse.
Wrede, Johan. “Den finlandssvenska modernismens genombrott – En studie i ideernas
sociala dynamik.” Från Dagdrivare till Feminister:
Studier i Finlandssvenk
1900-
talslitteratur. Ed Linnér, Sven.
1986.