A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi

by Göran Sonnevi

Overview

Göran Sonnevi is one of Sweden's most celebrated, respected, and prolific poets. For this first book-length selection of Sonnevi to appear in English, Rika Lesser has chosen works written between 1971 and 1989—although most of the poems come from the last decade and from Sonnevi's last three books, which form part of the single oändlig [unending/infinite/interminable] poem that he continues to write from book to book. Of Lesser's introduction to the work, Richard Howard writes, "Lesser's wonderful prose texts at the outset provide not only an ingress into complex and baffling matter but one of the most determined statements of the translator's text since Walter Benjamin."

From "Åby, Öland; 1982"

We are here in the ultimate lives of our bodies negations of the ultimate negation
We are complete parts of the world
We rise up out of infinity like the limestone flats from the sea Like the stars
We are denials of infinity
One day we shall reach all the way there

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691015439
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/14/1993
Series:	The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation , #41
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Göran Sonnevi has written twelve books of poems and assembled and revised collections of his poems (most of which are in print in Sweden in mass-market paperback editions). Rika Lesser is a poet and has translated numerous works of poetry, including a selection of the poems of Rilke, Rilke: Between Roots (Princeton). For a group of poems from A Child Is Not a Knife, she received the Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award in 1992 and the American Scandinavian Foundation's

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Goran Sonnevi: An Introduction
Sonnevi: A Translator's Retrospective Montage
Koster, 1973	3
Whose life? you asked	15
the hyacinth	17
Dyron; 1981	18
Summer has turned now And I go	21
Seeing your smile	23
Mourning Cloak	25
Words have no limits	30
I said to you	33
The twilight of spring rain	37
You say I'm naive	38
You, who say yes to	39
Demon colors	40
For S***, 1971	43
There is life that / will not give up	45
You sense the light's fragrance	46
The wound bleeding	48
A Child Is Not a Knife	49
Breaking up: that large feeling	52
in the meadow by the shore	57
Incalculable: the heart	59
Death is no more	60
The narrow shaft	61
Fagerfjall, Tjorn, 1986; For Pentti	62
Aby, Oland; 1982	64
what / do I find / then	67
From the cliff at the foot of Skull Mountain	70
New Year's 1986	73
The center of unheard-of, of enormous hopes	75
Burge, Oja; 1989	79
Notes	87
Swedish Contents and Bibliographical Citations	93

What People are Saying About This

Lawrence Joseph

Through the power of Rika Lesser's brilliant translations, Göran Sonnevi's poetry is shown to be what it is: the work of one of the world's major poets.

From the Publisher

"Through the power of Rika Lesser's brilliant translations, Göran Sonnevi's poetry is shown to be what it is: the work of one of the world's major poets."—Lawrence Joseph

Robert Bly

Göran Sonnevi's presence in Swedish poetry of this century is a powerful one. He holds to creatures such as birds and worms and to the patterns of politics with the same passion. He won't turn his eyes away from the delights of sensual married life or the horror of capitalism. At his best, he is a sensuous, ethical poet, a surprising union. Rika Lesser's translations are skillful and true.

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 1993 Translation Prize, American-Scandinavian Foundation

From the Publisher