Author Description

Product Description Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson. Born in Russia to German-Baltic parents, Henry Parland (1908-1930) grew up in Finland and joined up with the Finland-Swedish Modernists as a teenager. Out of these linguistic and cultural convergences and displacements, Parland created a highly cosmopolitan poetry--influenced by avant-gardes from many corners of Europe and America, as well as jazz and Charlie Chaplin--that remains a powerful presence in modern Scandinavian literature. "Just when you thought there were no more discoveries to be made in modernist poetry, along comes a Finno-Swedish Russian German Lithuanian teen prodigy from the 1920's, Henry Parland, in Johannes Goransson's zippy translation. Did anyone ever pack so much delightful weirdness into so few lines?"--Eliot Weinberg. About the Author Henry Parland's (1908-1930) brief but prolific and highly influential career as a poet, essayist and novelist was shaped by the tumultuous times of Russia and Europe between the two world wars. He lived in Russia, Finland and Lithuania, but his first language was German. His wide range of literary influences included Finland-Swedish Expressionism, Dada and Die Neue Sachlichkeit from Germany, Russian Futurism and Formalism, American writers Carl Sandberg, Edgar Lee Masters and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and French novelists Marcel Proust and Andre Gide, In addition, he was profoundly interested in international popular arts such as film (particularly Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin), advertisement, fashion, jazz and dancing. Rather than thinking of Parland as a Swedish or even a Finland-Swedish poet, it may be more useful to consider him a member of the cosmopolitan movement of exiles and immigrants that moved around in Europe following the collapse of the old political order and the destabilizing of borders.