5/7/2023 0 Comments Aniara martinson![]() ![]() ![]() The translators helpfully provide an explanation for the poem’s odd mixture of casual reportage (“ A man from High Command stands amid the people/in the great assembly-halls abaft./He pleads with them not to despair, but view their fate/in the clear light of science”) and formal verse (“ the photophage, with unimaginable ire/suddenly breaks down and flings the fire/of an exhausted love’s concluding blaze/into the photophage’s thankless rays”), something I’d opine was due to the translation but was apparently inherent in Martinson’s initial Swedish language inception. ![]() Brilliant it is, but dense, protracted and underplotted are also words that adequately describe ANIARA, with a perusal of the introductory plot summary required for a full understanding of a narrative that isn’t fully fleshed out in the text. It’s said to have been instrumental in winning its author Harry Martinson (1904-78) the 1974 Nobel Prize (nothing else Martinson wrote had a fraction of the impact of ANIARA, something that, as the biographical notes included here make clear, upset him greatly), and remains an undeniably impressive example of visionary space opera.Ĭomprised of 103 linked poems broken into short rhythmic stanzas that at times rhyme, it is admittedly not an easy read. The one and only science fiction epic poem, originally published in Swedish and reissued here in its second English translation by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg (the first was by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert). ![]() By HARRY MARTINSON (Story Line Press 1956/98) ![]()
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