The Star By My Head: Poets from Sweden

by Malena Mörling (Translator), Jonas Ellerström (Editor)

Published in partnership with the Poetry Foundation, this breathtaking anthology features eight of Sweden’s most highly regarded poets. From Edith Södergran to Gunnar Ekelöf to Nobel Prize-winning Tomas Tranströmer, Sweden has long been home to a rich and luminous poetic tradition, notable for refreshing openness, striking honesty, and a rare transcendence that often springs from a keen attention to the natural world. In the poems of The Star by My Head , which begin in the early twentieth century and come up to the present day, pinecones cluster out of reach and lilacs attempt their tentative rebirth each year. A bee makes a face like a newborn’s. A name etched in vapor on a windowpane, and its erasure, brings happiness. With exquisite translations by internationally acclaimed poets and translators Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström offered alongside the Swedish originals, The Star by My Head is an essential bilingual volume and the premiere American anthology of its kind.

Genres: Poetry, Swedish Literature, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published November 18, 2013

About the author

Malena Mörling, born 1965, is a Swedish-American poet and translator. She is the author of two books of poetry, Ocean Avenue, which won the New Issues Press Poetry Prize in 1998 and Astoria, published by Pittsburgh Press in 2006. She has translated works by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, the Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran and numerous other Swedish poets as well as the American poet Philip Levine into Swedish. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2007 and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship in 2010. She is a Research Associate at the School For Advanced Research on the Human Experience in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Mörling has received exceptional praise for both "Ocean Avenue" and "Astoria" by editors and poets. Ed Ochester, for The Best American Poetry wrote: "MALENA MÖRLING's poems are low-key, minimalist, utterly unpretentious and yet--how does she do it?--they speak about the central conditions of our lives as few poems do." Gerald Stern wrote: "Malena Mörling's passion is for observing. She sees everything--victims, suicides, lost mothers, compulsive counters, blind women in buses--with a penetrating eye. She is deeply aware of the moment of 'passing through' and it informs her poetry. "Ocean Avenue" is subtle, lovely, and original."

Mörling was born in Stockholm, Sweden 1965. She was raised in southern Sweden. She is currently Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington[1] and Core Faculty in The Low Residency MFA program at New England College.[2]

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is a poem? How do you translate poetry? Nobel Laureate and Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer once wrote:
A poem is a manifestation of an invisible poem that exists beyond the conventional languages. Therefore, a translation of a poem into a new language is an opportunity to attempt to realize the original (invisible) poem.

In this regard, poems are not static, final entities; rather, they are made up of possibilities and transformations and, like a person who travels, they are inevitably changed by the journey.

— Malena Mörling
*
And on late autumn nights
the moon’s scythe cuts flowers,
and in endless longing all flowers are waiting
for the moon’s kiss.

— Edith Södergran
*
Yes, to be one with the night, one with myself, with the flame
that looks me calmly in the eye, calmly and inscrutably,
one with the aspen that shivers and whispers,
one with the multitude of flowers that lean out of the dark
and listen
to something I had on the tip of my tongue but never uttered
something I did not want to reveal even if I could.

— Gunnar Ekelöf
*
The summer grows old and everything flows together into a single melancholy whisper. Cuculus canorus returns to the tropics. Its time in Sweden is over. It wasn’t long! As a matter of fact the cuckoo is a citizen of Zaire . . . I am no longer so fond of traveling. But the journey visits me. Now that I am being pushed further into a corner, now that the annual rings widen and I need reading glasses. Always what happens is more than we can carry! There is nothing to be astonished about. These thoughts carry me just as loyally as Susi and Chuma carried Livingstone’s mummified body straight through Africa.

— Tomas Tranströmer

[Jerome Berglund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous, simply marvelous. Scandinavian poetry, past and present, begs to be experienced, and needs to be to get properly understood for it defies easy characterization but is every bit as distinctive and captivating as more familiar regional varieties, the English sonnet or the symbolist French verse or the Chinese tanka. The Swedish prose poem is every bit as meaningful and potent a creature, which deserves additional recognition for their modern mastery of a form which has proved among the most difficult in every language which has strove to excel at it. Of the eight poets and poetesses showcased within this breathtaking collection there is not a single dud in the bunch, every one of them represents a veritable diamond in their (chronologically progressing) day. Considering how relatively underrepresented in the West female names historically are in the most hallowed halls of poesy, the bold and provocative women displayed within here are additionally a fantastic resource and gift to readers by so welcomely introducing us to their wonders, whom English speakers will no doubt find much synergy with and valuable insights articulated from. It’s something of an outrage and affront tantamount to flagrant ethnocentricity that Nordic countries have been perceived as cultural backwaters by Anglo-preferencing educators until recently, and these works are not more generally known to the average laymen. (Though at least the Nobel Literature Prize was awarded to one of the included personages, apparently the first Swede to be graced with the honor in nearly fifty years…) I have a mind to try to immerse myself in whatever work is available from all assembled, though I fear it will be far from comprehensive. Gives a person much incentive to stop slacking and dust off the old neglected Duolingo account… <_<

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The collection is beautifully translated by Malena Morling, a notable American poet in her own right. The great discovery I made was Edith Sodergran, a kind of Swedish Finnish early feminist Emily Dickinson. This line sums up much of what is so quietly powerful about her work: “It doesn’t suit me to make myself smaller than I am.” I was glad to read Transtormer and The other male poets in the collection but they tend to be too abstract and surreal for my taste.

[Shen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautiful collections of poetry I have read. I love how one page is Swedish and the opposing page English. I can try reading both languages though I don't understand Swedish.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful. Heard the translators talking about this book in a podcast by the poetry foundation. So nice to have so many selections from so many voices and years. Also nice to have this come from artists sensitive to surrealism and living in a culture that expects to address challenges nonviolently and doesn't expect as we do in the United States to always be expanding.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Already familiar with Tomas Tranströmer, this collection is a taster for other Swedish poets to discover, particurlarly, for me, Edith Södergran and Werner Aspenström.

[Bethany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe it lost some of the vividness in translation, or maybe it just wasn’t for me.