While studying history of literature at Stockholm University College Espmark made his debut as a poet with Mordet på Benjamin (1956; ‘The murder of Benjamin’). There one may discern the contours of his major inspirer, T. S. Eliot. With the symptomatically entitled Världen genom kameraögat (1958; ‘The world through the eye of the camera’) Espmark appears as the most pronounced role poet of the 1950s. His poetry is a kind of lyrical story-telling, often in “I” form, where the “I” is a temporarily adopted I, observed from a certain distance. Eliot’s “objective correlate” and stance of impersonality become king-pins of what has been called “perhaps the least subjective poetry in Swedish post-war literature”. Espmark took his Licentiate of Philosophy in 1959 and then continued studies of the poetry of Artur Lundkvist.
Even though the 1950s roots of Espmark’s poetry are incontestable, it was predominantly from the 1970s that his writing developed – with a social and political orientation that was of its time yet departed from contemporary certainties. And even though he achieved a certain breakthrough with the critics with his collection Mikrokosmos (1961; ‘Microcosm’) – the last for seven years – the 1960s were devoted above all to literary research, with two fundamental studies of the genesis of the literary language. First, Artur Lundkvist’s path to a voice of his own was mapped in an extremely precise study, his doctoral thesis Livsdyrkaren Artur Lundkvist (1964; ‘Artur Lundkvist the worshipper of life’), and then Harry Martinson’s in Harry Martinson erövrar sitt språk (1970; ‘Harry Martinson conquers his language’). These are required reading in the art of capturing the writer’s many-faceted path to authorship.
That Espmark’s literary-historical writing then changed character was not independent of his return to poetry. In the trilogy Sent i Sverige (‘Late in Sweden’) his role poetry has been reinforced and provided with a thematic framework. Mikrokosmos points forwards to the trilogy both in its title, the art of shrinking the world, making it sensorily graspable in micro-format, and also through a theme more hinted at than executed, reflected in e.g. the title of the poem “Brev från ett avskärmat land” (‘Letter from a screened-off country’), where the following is said: “Much here has been crossed out / pending exchange. / We are helped on to a usable truth.” This “screened-off country”, which we may imagine is Sweden, is the theme of Sent i Sverige: what emerges is the crossed-out Sweden in micro-format. Alienated voices rise from the Swedish undergrowth. “Who lives only his own life?” it is asked in the introductory poem to the introductory volume Det offentliga samtalet (1968; ‘The public conversation’). The three volumes are symmetrically arranged, with 25 poems each, and the titles that follow, Samtal under jorden (1972; ‘Conversations underground’) and Det obevekliga paradiset (1975; ‘Implacable paradise’), suggest links to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The social criticism is aimed at domestic suffering, at the building of the welfare state that “helps us to a usable truth”, and concerns largely, as stated in a later interview, “an implacability in the structures in which we live, simply how one is shaped by the chair one is sitting in and how one lives in contexts that force words from one’s mouth”.
What Kjell Espmark was doing at this time in his poetry was thus a kind of “soul translation” – and this became for a time the direction his literary-historical writing took. He published a couple of important volumes which in a natural way led to the professorship at Stockholm University in 1978: Att översätta själen (1975; ‘Translating the soul’) and Själen i bild (1977; ‘Image of the soul’). This “materialisation of the state of the soul” – how the “inner” becomes the “outer” – is followed in the former book through international lyrical modernism (including Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Eliot and Breton), in the latter through Swedish (including Ekelund, Lagerkvist, Södergran, Ekelöf, Thoursie and Tranströmer): “The will to materialise what is internal is all-pervading in turn-of-the-century symbolism, the avant-gardism of the 1910s and surrealism.”
Shortly after Espmark had received his professorship a new lyrical trilogy started. The perspective had now widened, and in Försök till liv (1979; ‘Attempt at life’), Tecken till Europa (1982; ‘Intimations to Europe’) and Den hemliga måltiden (1984; ‘The secret meal’) – once again symmetrically conceived (12 fairly extensive poems per volume) – it is Europe and successively the world as a whole that stand at the centre. His writing now takes a culture-historical turn, and one that is critical of civilisation. The “implacable structures” now concern to a greater extent power, the voices that rise from the underworld are not caught in the net of the welfare-state people’s home but are, rather, stifled by the power that down the centuries appears as the foremost driving force of mankind. His writing darkens.
Espmark was elected to the Swedish Academy in the middle of the trilogy, and in his inaugural address on his predecessor he draws a strikingly indirect self-portrait: “Elias Wessén is present on every page of his work, yet he is not visible there. He has entered his work and is one with it.” During the 1980s his literary studies once again take a new direction. He allows himself to be influenced by the new hermeneutic orientation in some of his better-known students (Horace Engdahl, Anders Olsson et al.) and writes a thematically oriented study of Tomas Tranströmer, Resans formler (1983; ‘Formulae of the journey’), and makes use of an intertextual perspective (termed “dialogicity”) in the essay collection Dialoger (1985; ‘Dialogues’). The fixed point is “the dialogistic element in literature”.
Towards the end of the 1980s Espmark becomes a novel writer. He has talked of his authorship in terms of “insidious simplicity”, and nowhere does this become as clear as in the solid but glass-clear, seven-volume, suite Glömskans tid (‘Time of forgetfulness’). His sharp glance is turned now back onto the ruins of the Swedish people’s home. Once again with Dante’s realm of death as model and with role poetry as a basis, a whole series of representatives of different social classes is allowed the floor in the short novels Glömskan (1987; ‘Forgetfulness’), Missförståndet (1989; ‘Misunderstanding’), Föraktet (1991; ‘Scorn’), Lojaliteten (1993; ‘Loyalty’), Hatet (1995; ‘Hate’), Revanschen (1996; ‘Revenge’) and Glädjen (1997; ‘Happiness’). Glömskans tid is a novel suite drawn in the darkest possible colours and without counterpart in our time.
It was entirely logical for the suite to be followed by the abandoned satire Voltaires resa (2000; ‘Voltaire’s journey’) with the unsurpassed introductory sentence: “When Voltaire was in the process of waking up, he noticed that he had got his teeth back.” The two verse collections of the 1990s, När vägen vänder (1992; ‘When the road turns’) and to an even greater extent Det andra livet (1998; ‘The other life’), give an – of course indirect – picture of loss and restarting in life: “Like standing beside a burned-out car and seeing one’s own body slumped over the steering-wheel.”
Jan Arnald
(Translated by Tim Crosfield)