Poetry
Tideräkning
Not translated into English
Karl Vennberg · 1945
Synopsis
Poems that unmask the deceptions of time and those that each person practises on himself, with an irony and a scepticism turned against all established doctrines and simple solutions. The questions of existence come to the fore, in a critique of the present more concentrated than in the previous collection. The poem that gives the volume its title and “Traktat” are among the most frequently reprinted; one reads in them that to live is to choose, and that this blissful choice is made between the indifferent and the impossible.
Context
The collection appeared with Bonnier in 1945, a year after Halmfackla, and these two volumes made their author's breakthrough. Together with Erik Lindegren's collections of those same years, they are regarded as the central works of the new poetry; the two poets published the anthology 40-talslyrik together in 1947. The collection has not been translated into French or English; some of its poems appear in anthologies.
Who it is for
A collection of about a hundred pages, in Swedish only. The poems are dense and ironic, and reward slow reading.
Prizes and reception
Placed, together with the preceding collection, at the heart of the new poetry of the forties, and welcomed by the critics almost with one voice.
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