The Poet Who Created Herself: The Selected Letters

by Edith Södergran, Silvester Mazzarella (Translator)

"Edith Sodergran's vital, compelling and very personal poems have been translated in many languages, and several times into English. Written for the most part when she was dying of tuberculosis in a remote Finnish frontier village only a short train journey away from revolutionary Petrograd, they are a major contribution to European modernism. These letters are almost all the remains to us of her work, apart from the poetry. The most personal of them were written between 1919 and 1923 to two like-minded young Finland-Swedish writers, Hagar Olsson and Elmer Diktonius. They are unusually spontaneous and show Sodergran in many moods, passionate and caring, intransigent, desperate for human contact, and racked by religious doubts that threaten to stifle the very poetry for which she lived. The collection is accompanied by an introduction and notes which both contextualize the letters and greatly enhance our understanding of Sodergran's life and poetry."--BOOK JACKET.

240 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2000

About the author

Edith Irene Södergran was a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet.

Södergran was born in St Petersburg in 1892. In 1907 Edith's father died from tuberculosis, and in the following year Edith was also diagnosed with the disease. She was sent to a sanatorium, but did not feel at ease there. The feelings of captivity caused by the disease and the sanatorium are a recurring theme in her poetry.

In October 1911, Edith and her mother traveled to Arosa in Switzerland where Edith was examined by different doctors. After a few months, she was transferred to the Davos-Dorf sanatorium. In May 1912, her condition had improved enough for her to return home. Eventually, the disease returned and Edith Södergran died in 1923 in her home in Raivola. She was 31 years old.