Poetry
Aftnar i Tavastland
Not translated into English
Bertel Gripenberg · 1911
Opening lines
Du land som mig skänkte i lifvet
den ro som jag drömde om,
när med hjärtat i stycken rifvet
till dig jag flyende kom,
O land that gave me in life
the peace I dreamed of,
when with my heart torn to pieces
I came to you in flight,
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
A sequence of poems born of the poet's solitary life in the countryside of inland Finland: autumn evenings and winter mists, a pale or blazing sun over a world that grows dark and withers. Here we meet a June night, hunting, which turns every life into a struggle against the storm, and the track of a lone skier in the snow, in which an entire human existence is contained.
Context
The collection belongs to what is called its author's ethical period, from 1908 to 1917. The poems were written at the Krissi estate, in the parish of Nurmijärvi, where he worked as a steward; Rolf Nordenstreng noted that the title is somewhat misleading, since Nurmijärvi lies in northern Uusimaa and not in Tavastland. Olof Rabenius, in Ord och Bild, and Fredrik Wetterlund, in the Hufvudstadsbladet of 17 December 1911, praised the simplicity and personal tone of these landscapes of the North. The book was reissued in 1918, then in 1921 together with the following collection.
Who it is for
A collection of about one hundred and twenty pages, in Swedish; poems of landscape and mood, in a form that has remained classical.
Prizes and reception
The Tavastland poems have at times been regarded as the most accomplished of what he wrote, and his ethical period as the strongest of his work.