Poetry
Helicons Blomster
Not translated into English
Lars Johansson (Lucidor) · 1689
Synopsis
Everything the poet had written, gathered fifteen years after his death by Johan Andersin, “not without difficulty”. It contains what he lived on: wedding and funeral poems, written on commission, in which the rules of the genre are sometimes respected and sometimes broken; his drinking songs, the boldest of which is “Nyss när Frigga satt i badet”; his spiritual songs, songs of repentance, three of which entered the hymnal of 1695; and a long translation of a poem by the Dutchman Cats, left unfinished and completed by his friend Nils Keder.
Context
The book is posthumous: in his lifetime, the author's occasional poems appeared one by one, often under a pseudonym, and his songs circulated on broadsheets. Johan Andersin gathered them and had them printed in Stockholm; the volume bears the date 1688 and appeared in 1689. Despite a royal privilege and a dedication to two great lords, the governor of the city, Christoffer Gyllenstierna, had its sale banned after a few days, and one gathering was confiscated. Atterbom would later see in it a model of negligence in everything. The collection was reprinted in 1835, expanded in 1865, and reworked in the scholarly editions of Fredrik Sandwall, published from 1914 to 1930, then of Stina Hansson, in 1997.
Who it is for
In seventeenth-century Swedish, untranslated. One can read only the songs, about twenty of which have regained a melody thanks to the research of Martin Bagge.
Prizes and reception
The book that saved this body of work; according to Olle Holmberg, the youth of the seventeenth century regarded it as the most indecent collection of its time.
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