Harry Martinson

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Harry Martinson (left) and Ivar Lo-Johansson (1940)

Harry Edmund Martinson (born May 6, 1904 in Jämshög , Blekinge , † February 11, 1978 in Stockholm ) was a Swedish writer. Martinson received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974 (together with Eyvind Johnson ) for “a work that captures the dewdrop and reflects the universe” .

Life

Harry Martinson lost his father at the age of six. The following year his mother emigrated to the American west coast. Boy Harry grew up in a communal orphanage. At the age of 16 Martinson hired as a sailor and traveled around the world, with longer stays and the like. a. in Brazil and India . At the age of 23 he had to give up sailing due to a lung disease. But even after that he went wandering at times.

Martinson's collection of poems Spökskeppet (The Ghost Ship) was published in 1929 as part of an anthology ( Fem unga - "Five Young"). From then on he celebrated unprecedented literary success. Martinson won many literary prizes in his home country, was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1949 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg in 1954 .

Martinson was married to the writer Moa Martinson from 1929 ; The marriage ended in divorce in 1941. In 1942 he married Ingrid Lindcrantz. Martinson lived mostly in the Stockholm area , u. a. in Gnesta , and finally in Sollentuna .

Martinson was an avowed Buddhist - "not in a religious, but in a moral-philosophical sense," as he himself put it in a 1961 radio interview.

When Martinson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974, it sparked a heated debate, not because the critics did not consider his work to be worthy of the Nobel Prize, but because of the conflict of interests: The honoree belonged to the committee that honored him. Martinson made the allegations difficult to create. In addition, the generation of younger critics accused him of being “not political enough”. After a failed suicide attempt, which he survived injured, Martinson committed suicide with scissors while in hospital.

Despite his commitment to Buddhism, he was buried in a church in Sollentuna . One of his poems ( De blomster som i marken bor ) was included in the Psalm book of the Swedish Church .

plant

He made Martinson's literary debut in 1929 ( Spökskeppet - "The Ghost Ship"). Growing up without parents and the time at sea and on the move are factors that shaped Martinson's work. The main work Aniara is the world's best known, but Vagnen (“The Car”; 1960) and Dikter om ljus och mörker (“Poems about brightness and darkness”; 1971) must also be counted among the masterpieces of Swedish poetry .

  • Nomad , 1931
  • Traveling without a destination , 1932 (new edition: Guggolz, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-945370-11-7 )
  • Cape Farewell! , 1933 (contained in: Reisen ohne Ziel . Guggolz, Berlin 2017, p. 179 ff.)
  • The nettles bloom , 1935
  • The Way Out , 1936
  • Passat , 1945
  • The way to Glockenreich , 1948
  • Aniara. A review of people in time and space , 1956

Authors whose works are declared to have had an influence on Martinson are Viktor Rydberg , Rudyard Kipling , Joseph Conrad and Lev Tolstoy .

literature

  • Renate Mangold: Me and the other. Studies on the autobiographical novels Eyvind Johnsons and Harry Martinsons. Dissertation University of Tübingen 1987.
  • Ulrike Nolte: Swedish "Social Fiction". The future fantasies of modern literature classics from Karin Boye to Lars Gustafsson. Monsenstein and Vannerdat , Münster 2002. ISBN 3-935363-60-5 .

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b Harry Martinson at www.bibliomonde.com (French), accessed on January 30, 2017.

Web links

Commons : Harry Martinson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
personal data
SURNAME Martinson, Harry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Martinson, Harry Edmund (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish writer, Nobel Prize for Literature
DATE OF BIRTH May 6, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Jämshög , Blekinge
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 1978
Place of death Stockholm