Although Pär Lagerkvist will no doubt remain best-known for his fable-like fictions, his poetry is an important part of his output and it is a pity so little has been done to make it accessible to English readers. To that extent we should welcome the British edition of Aftonland [Evening Land]…. As the title suggests, the awareness of approaching age is present (Lagerkvist was sixty-two) but this should not lead us to expect any simple form of resignation, for his exploration of the enigmas of God, eternity, human fate and loneliness is as probing and kaleidoscopic here as it was throughout his writing life. As Östen Sjöstrand stressed in his inaugural address as Lagerkvist's successor in the Swedish Academy, a certain inner dynamism characterizes all of Lagerkvist's work: it can be sensed behind the quietest tones and at times it can break through the wrought surface….
Lagerkvist's poetry, often because of its surface simplicity, can be very resistant to translation. The worst we can do to Lagerkvist is make him appear banal—yet, given his life-long probing of "timeless" enigmas, given his fine ear for the musicality of certain unexportable Swedish cadences, and given his reliance, in his earlier work especially, on relatively simple and at times rather four-square literary models inherited from his early pietistic environment, the trap of banality yawns wide for the unwary translator….
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