På fria villkor: Edith Södergran studier ed. by Arne Toftegaard-Pedersen (review)

By the reviewer's very rough reckoning, the compendium contains thirteen poems, five "essays" and eight "articles": the essays are briefer, more suggestive; the articles are extended, more conclusive. Taking the poems first: they begin with Elmer Diktonius's "Stjärnfångare" (Starcatcher) of 1924, Sonja Åkesson's "E.S." (1957), in which ES is a visionary ("sierska"), and, surprisingly for Åkesson, a Euphorion (from Faust II?) whom "no one can call back." Tomas Mikael Back (1992) lets ES realize that "almost everything is adiaphora." Translator Saima Harmaja (1931), who died of tuberculosis like ES, thinks of her "lofty spirit" on rainy evenings; Elisabeth Rynell (1975) "felt a sister grasp [her] beneath Raivola's moon." Anne-Marie Berglund (2011) goes into familial-genealogical details: coming on ES by chance, "a yearning to cross the boundary burned in [her] girl's blood." For Gunnar Björling (1922), ES was a "visionary, tramped down, and in hearts shining!"; for Gunnar Ekelöf " (1941), ES was "a disguised princess in the window." For the Dane Gustaf Munch-Petersen, writing in Swedish (1935), she was "a drop in the forest" that "became truer than everything." The late Inga-Britt Wik (1998), writes sensibly about "the nails in ES's house" and paradoxically about "The Stars": "but what a lot of stars which the darkness shines in / when I go out in the garden and think of / Edith Södergran." Eva Runefelt (2007) expands the limits of synaesthesia in "High C"—from an E.T.A. Hoffmannesque "red tone" to "[t]he darkness a bitten oyster" (sic). In order to define ES, Catarina Gripenberg—not to be confused with Catri Gripenberg, Bertel Gripenberg's scribbling sister of yore—has the last word: "Edith, here we are with the pen." She never wrote a truer word.

As for "essays": Robert Åsbacka, presently at work on a book about R.R. Eklund, perceives that Eklund—a part of whose "strength" lay in a "feeling for style, sharpness of thought, and awareness of form"—saw "something in Edith he himself lacked, a freedom from self-consciousness." Åsbacka bases his cogent argument on Eklund's review of Dikter in Vasabladet and his letters to Hagar Olsson, just then his fiancée. Idar Stegane, emeritus at the University of Bergen, hooks ES up with Tarjei Vesaas in "Att jollra på skapelsens språk" (To babble in creation's tongue)—i.e. ES's famous "heavenly clarity on the child's forehead" and Vesaas's story, "Aldrig fortelje det" (Never Tell It): he follows Gunnar Tideström's lead to Luke 8:17, about receiving "the kingdom of heaven as a little child." The Swedish librarian Karl Johan Rahm travels with ES to Cambodia, where she has been translated into Khmer. Ebba Witt-Brattström returns with "Kvinnokroppens retorik" (Rhetoric of the Woman's Body): snippets of Harry James and Frank Sinatra float through the reviewer's ear: "It seems to me I've heard that song before," or, for that matter, of Bing Crosby (and Frank): "I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places." Nor does the authoress resist the chance to lambast poor Gunnar Tideström yet again: "It is high time to wave farewell to the Tideström tradition's circular tour to the erroneous research-conclusions of life to poem and vice versa." Birgitta Boucht resuscitates the Södergran cat, Tottie, and, meritoriously, remembers Mirjam Tuominen's dictum in Stadier (1949; Stages), viz. ES should be approached by those wishing to write about her either with a "very large greatness of heart" or with "a factual exactitude." Arne Toftegaard-Pedersen must not be overlooked. A wise conductor of the overture, he does not take sides, either on the split between ES's essential "Finland-Swedishness" and her "Europeanness," or in the battles raging around "male" and "female" interpretations of the texts and biographical bric-à-brac.

The "articles" start with Torsten Pettersson's panorama of "the Finland...