Gunnar Björling
Gunnar Olof Björling (born May 31, 1887 in Helsinki ; † July 11, 1960 there ) was a Finnish-Swedish poet and one of the founders of Finnish-Swedish modernism .
Life and work
Björling was the son of post office clerk and war veteran Edvard Björling. He spent his childhood in Helsinki and Vyborg , where his father was transferred in 1890. As a result of a cerebral hemorrhage , Björling's father was mute and partially paralyzed from 1896, impoverishing the family. From 1901 to 1902 Gunnar Björling attended a military boarding school in Hamina and then returned to Helsinki. There he studied philosophy from 1905 . After graduating in 1915, he became a teacher, but soon retired from professional life to become a full-time writer. In the civil war he sided with the bourgeois White Army.
Björling's first book publication was Vilande dag , which was published by the small publishing house Daimon in 1922 after other publishers had initially rejected the manuscript. His first books were strongly influenced by Expressionism , towards the end of the 1920s he turned to Dadaism . Björling worked for Quosego magazine from 1928 to 1929 . Rabbe Enckell called him Europe's last Dadaist. Stylistic devices often used later by Björling are changes in the position of the sentence and the omission of parts of sentences. From 1930 Björling wrote poems about everyday life, nature, light and darkness.
Björling's work is very extensive: about 30,000 poems by him are preserved in the Åbo Akademi . From 1922 to 1955 he published more than twenty volumes of poetry.
Works (selection)
- Vilande dag (1922)
- Korset ochlöftet (1925)
- Kiri-ra! (1930)
- Solgränt (1933)
- O, finns en dag (1944)
- Luft är och ljus (1946)
- Au i sitt öga (1954)
- You går de ord (1955)
- och japanlik en metarbåt / and a fishing boat at the same time Aforismer och dikter / aphorisms and poems 1925-1960 (2014)
swell
- Horst Bien and others: Meyers Taschenlexikon Northern European Literatures , Leipzig 1978
- Fredrik Hertzberg: Gunnar Björling . Foreword to Gunnar Björling: You go the words , 2007 (English)
Web links
- Biography ( memento from October 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) of Petri Liukkonen (English)
- Poems by Gunnar Björling (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Björling, Gunnar |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Björling, Gunnar Olof |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Finnish lyric poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 31, 1887 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Helsinki |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 11, 1960 |
| Place of death | Helsinki |