Karin Boye

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Karin Boye in the 1940s.
Peter Linde's statue by Karin Boye at Gothenburg City Library .

Listen to Karin Maria Boye ? / i (born October 26, 1900 in Gothenburg , † April 24, 1941 in Alingsås ) was a Swedish writer and poet . Audio file / audio sample

Life

Karin Boye was born the daughter of an engineer in Gothenburg ; the family came from Bohemia and had settled in Sweden since 1844. In 1909 she moved to Stockholm with her family. Karin Boye studied at Uppsala University between 1921 and 1926 . In 1925 she joined the radical Swedish Clarté movement of the French pacifist Henri Barbusse and for some time was Secretary General of the Clarté. Like many Scandinavian intellectuals in the interwar period, she visited the Soviet Union and returned disappointed with Soviet reality. Then she moved to the university in Stockholm and finished her studies in 1928 with the title filosofie magister .

In 1929 she married the Amanuensis (secretary) and Clarté member Leif Björk; she was married to him until 1934. It was evidently a fictitious marriage . She distanced herself from her husband and had a relationship with Gunnel Bergström in 1932, who left her husband, the poet Gunnar Ekelöf , because of Boye. During these years Boye worked as a teacher and journalist for various newspapers and magazines.

On April 24, 1941, Karin Boye committed suicide by poisoning in a forest near Alingsås . Hjalmar Gullberg dedicated the famous poem Död amazon (“Dead Amazon”) from the poetry collection Fem kornbröd och två fiskar ( Five barley loaves and two fish ) in 1942 to her memory. Peter Weiss set a literary monument to Boye in his novel Aesthetics of Resistance .

The Venus crater Boye is named after her.

Literary work

Karin Boye published her first poems in 1922, in which she dealt with religion, the state, conventions, social requirements on the one hand and the conflicting individual wishes and dreams on the other. In 1931 Boye founded the poet magazine Spektrum with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin to make TS Eliot and the Surrealists accessible to Swedish readers. Together with the critic Erik Mesterton, she translated Eliot's first major work, the verse epic Das Wüsten Land . She was largely responsible for translating TS Eliot's work into Swedish .

All the intellectual currents of the modern age can be found in Boyes' poetry . Your novel Kallocain is heavily influenced by Jonathan Swift and deals with a very gloomy view of the future.

Works

  • Moln. 1922.
  • Gömda land. Poems. 1922.
  • Hardarna. Poems. 1927.
  • Astarte. Novel. 1931. (German: Astarte. Neuer Malik Verlag, Kiel 1987, ISBN 3-89029-022-1 )
  • Kris. Novel. 1934. (German: Krisis. Neuer Malik Verlag, Kiel 1985, ISBN 3-89029-008-6 )
  • För trädets skull. 1935.
  • Kallocain . Novel. 1940. There are three translations into German:
    • Kallocain. translated by Helga Clemens. Gutenberg Book Guild, Zurich 1947, German first edition.
    • Kallocain: novel from the 21st century. (= Fantastic Library. Volume 303; Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch. 2260). translated by Helga Clemens. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-518-38760-X .
    • Kallocain: novel from the 21st century. translated by Paul Berf. btb Verlag, 2018, ISBN 978-3-442-75775-6 .

literature

  • Margit Abenius: Drabbad av renhet . Bonnier, Stockholm 1942.
  • Gunilla Domellöf: I oss är en mångfald levande . Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm 1986, ISBN 91-7174-263-8 .
  • Camilla Hammarström: Karin Boye . Nature and culture, Stockholm 1997, ISBN 91-27-05859-X .
  • Bo Osdrowski, Tom Riebe (Eds.): Karin Boye. (= Versensporn - booklet for lyrical stimuli. No. 6). Edition Poetry tastes good, Jena 2012, DNB 1023211599 .

Web links

Commons : Karin Boye  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature
personal data
SURNAME Boye, Karin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Boye, Karin Maria (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Gothenburg , Sweden
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1941
Place of death Alingsås , Sweden