Letters of Blood and Other Works in English by Göran Printz-Påhlson (review)

This volume is an obvious candidate for a Comparative Literature Studies review. As editor Robert Archambeau points out, Göran Printz-Påhlson’s (1931–2006) artistic and intellectual résumé epitomizes inbetweenness. Born and educated in Sweden, he was a precocious poet, student, and critic of literature in his native country and tongue before personal and professional inclinations led him to embark on an academic career abroad. A scholar of Scandinavian studies, the young humanist left his home turf for teaching posts at Harvard and Berkeley in the early 1960s, before returning to Europe as a lecturer at Cambridge, where he also acted as head of Scandinavian Studies from 1982 until his retirement in 1989, three years before this department ceased to exist.

No fewer than three opening essays, one by the American editor, another by a former Cambridge colleague, and yet a third by a Swedish academic, testify to different aspects of Printz-Påhlson’s composite profile, and how its characteristic inbetweenness borders on exile as well as hybridity, on the roles of both border-crosser and go-between. These extraterritorial aspects, moreover, encompass significant writerly dimensions. Printz-Påhlson sought throughout his career—for better or worse—to negotiate an unusual number of textual and linguistic affiliations and commitments. Scholarly works of literary history issued from his pen alongside more critical manifestations, usually in the form of essays spirited by erudition (or burdened by name-dropping, as the case may be). At the same time his poetic vein proved quite irrepressible—its diction spanning from learned exclusivity to subtle takes on popular culture, initially in Swedish but eventually also in English.

Collisions between these textual trajectories resulted in many “letters of blood,” as the title reads. A congested site of production for untranslatable poems as well as truly original poetic translations, both emphasizing the poet’s overall concern with poetry of place, it was also the intersection where modernist and postmodern idioms (computer language included), meta-poetic and meta-meta-poetic voices, and sensations of intimacy and distance, could cross-pollinate, and where the author most frequently ventured a risky balance between poetic and critical moments of both theoretical and practical import.

The volume’s three introductory pieces all seek to come to terms with this scenario in their titles: “A Life in and Beyond Letters” (Schaffer); [End Page e-7] “Inbetween: Locating Göran Printz-Påhlson” (Archambeau); and “The Overall Wandering of Mirroring Mind” (Svensson). Among the benefits they actually offer the reader are some factual information and hints at interpretation, but no compelling rationale for the selection of texts at hand. True enough, these are works the author “wrote in English” plus a few he wished “to see presented in English” (xxiii), mostly “made up of manuscripts now in the care of Lund University Library” and compiled from “a number of projects” on which he worked “during the last fifteen years of his life” (xxxiv). But why, for instance, some pieces that are listed under “major articles” in the book’s “select bibliography” have been reissued between its covers, while others have not—and why some titles not listed in the bibliography (because previously unpublished or published but not qualified as major) have been chosen instead—remains unexplained. This is a fairly broad selection, to be sure, but a compositional hodgepodge nonetheless. Hence the question: which and where are the book’s points of gravity?

One such point is clearly the opening section of criticism, “The Words of the Tribe: Primitivism, Reductionism, and Materialism in Modern Poetics.” Initially delivered as the Ward-Phillips Lectures at Notre Dame in 1985, this wide-ranging meta-critical study pivots, in the editor’s words, on a dialogue, both historical and synthetic, within poetics: between a “plain, discursive style, and a style more mysterious, even impenetrable.” On the one hand a sermo humilis, “the humble and earth-like language . . . in...