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     Gunnar Ekelöf (1907-1968) is one of the inescapable figures of twentieth century Swedish Literature and it is surprising that his work has been so slow in reaching the English-speaking world. Earlier selections have been made by Robert Bly and Christina Paulston (Late Arrival on Earth, Rapp and Carroll, London 1967), by Muriel Rukeyser and Leif Sjöberg (Selected Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf, Twayne, NY 1968), again by Robert Bly (I do best alone at night, Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf, Washington 1968) and finally by Auden & Sjöberg (Selected Poems: Gunnar Ekelöf, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1971). As for criticism, valuable work has been done in Swedish by Reidar Ekner (whose bibliography of Ekelöf appeared in 1970), by Kjell Espmark, Staffan Bergsten and others: some of this ought to be made available in due course. In the meantime a substantial English study is Sjöberg’s A Reader’s Guide to Gunnar Ekeflöf’s A Mölna Elegy (Twayne, NY 1973).

     The present selection is limited to Ekelöf’s later work. His last main published poetry consists of a trilogy - Diwan over the Prince of Emgion (1965), The Tale of Fatumeh (1966), and Signposts to the Underworld (1967). Perhaps a brief comment on the trilogy would be helpful here, though it is difficult to comment on any one part of Ekelöf’s work without drawing upon the whole range. His interest in middle eastern thought and literature for instance was life-long and had a rich influence on the growth of his poetry: one’s response to the later poetry is thus greatly enhanced by acquaintance with the earlier. Göran Printz-Pahlson’s all-too-brief introductory remarks to the Penguin selection are worth looking out, then, so is Sjöberg’s article The Later Poems of Gunnar Ekelöf in Mosaic (Winter 1970), published by the University of Manitoba.

     Diwan was written in the spring of 1965 in the Constantinople area, and the title page of the published book does not say that these poems are “by” Ekelöf but uses the phrase “tolkad av Gunnar Ekelöf,” i.e. rendered or interpreted by Ekelöf, as if the poet had added one further layer to the “matter” of Digenis Basileios Akritas, the hero of the 11th century epic romance. What we have is a song-cycle round a fictitious prince (the Prince of Emgion) in a historical setting: yet in keeping with the evolutionary way in which he develops his source material Ekelöf draws upon different archaeological levels of the heroic cycle, and speaks both with his own voice and with the voice of the folk-singers As Ekner has suggested, one can say that in the Prince of Emgion Ekelöf has created a character of which he himself represents a reincarnation. The strange blend of impersonality and involvement in this process can be gathered from Ekelöf’s own statement that “It is my greatest poem of love and passion. I can’t touch it or see it because I grow ill when I see this blind and tortured man... As far as I can understand, someone has done the writing using me as a medium.” While the prince is sustained throughout his torture and privation by his Apprehension of a goddess like virgin figure, Fatumeh is a mortal woman whose life of physical suffering and degradation is similarly lit by an invincible spiritual aspiration. Yet her name carries an allusion to fatum and behind her loom several powerful female archetypes from religions of both east and west.

     Despite this very wide catchment area, suggesting perhaps a high degree of conceptual abstraction, it is worth stressing the particularity of certain aspects of this poetry: its wealth may be secretive but at an immediate level its imagery is crystalline. This fusion of obliquity and directness need not deter the reader who is new to Ekelöf, for although he is not easy to translate, the clarity and logic with which he marshals his imagery do mean that in many poems a relatively high percentage can be transmitted. Accessible up to a point, then, but also mysterious, for Ekelöf is one of those poets whose total work always looms bigger than the sum of what he actually wrote. Even his most completed poems give the impression of being fragments or excerpts from a continuing inner dialogue whose life was independent of paper and pencil. His collected works, in toto, are like a selection from some vaster whole.

     And any attempt to describe this poetry in a few sentences is condemned to the kind of short-hand that almost defeats its purpose. In a review of The Tale of Fatumeh (in Bonniers Litterära Magasin, 1966:10) Ekner made a stab at such a description

     It is like a perpetually shifting pattern drawn by the wings of high-flying swallows, a resonant network of arabesques against the sky over a southern city or mountain range which is still glowing with warmth and sunset. A poetry facing at the same time heavenwards and earthwards, serene and substantial, keeping itself afloat in the air-currents where the earth’s vapours and exhalations are washed clean.

     Perhaps more critically useful is his suggestion that Ekelöf is here using a “paradoxical mirror-language”. For between each poem the kaleidoscope is given a twist: in each pattern we look at, the spare luminous elements cohere with a logic that belongs individually to that pattern, and yet suggest an incompleteness, an open possibility of other relationships which point to a much more complex and shadowy pattern underneath.

     The poems presented here were published posthumously. Ekelöf’s notebook material was copious (it is now in Uppsala University Library) and Ingrid Ekelöf has edited three selections. First came Partitur (Bonniers, Stockholm, 1969), 46 poems from 1965-8, half of which were dictated in his final illness. Then An Autobiography (Bonniers (1971), was followed by A Voice (Bonniers, 1973) - selections of sketches, variants, letters, prose-pieces, poems, notes, the focus in A Voice being primarily on his art rather than on his outward life. Not every abandoned fragment is “illuminating” and these selections must remain as footnotes to his main published work - but the value of these texts lie in their usefulness as entry-points to what he himself passed for publication, and Ekelöf readers do need as many entry points as possible, not so much because of the writer’s erudition but rather because of his personality, which often seems idiosyncratic and elusive. One remarkable feature of the the early prose-pieces, for instance, is the way in which ideas and even verbal formulations in them can reappear decades later in poems, testifying to the patience with which Ekelöf would ruminate on a theme or an image.

     As an appendix there is also a poem by Kjell Espmark, which at one level is a tribute to Ekelöf. The poem belongs to Espmark’s highly wrought trilogy which appeared in separate parts in 1968, 1972, and 1975 and was gathered together as Sent i Sverige (Late in Sweden) (Norstedts, Stockholm, 1976). Among the figures which throng this work we find several poets - in the thirteenth poem of the first book we have Orpheus torn and scatttered; in the seventh poem of the second book we have a picture of Harry Martinson writing in the catacombs, refusing to comply with the world of persecution raging outside; then in the nineteenth poem of the second book we have Ekelöf. The title alludes to the first line of A Mölna Elegy and we see the poet in some kind of condemned cell, refusing to be silenced by the executioner’s axe (Ekelöf in fact died of cancer of the throat) and singing all the more fiercely because of his cramped and incurable plight.