Ideals Clearance

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.