The Forbidden Door bookcover

The Forbidden Door

The Selected Poetry of Lasse Söderberg
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Description

In The Forbidden Door, poets Carolyn Forche and Lars Gustaf Andersson masterfully translate the selected poems of Swedish poet Lasse Söderberg in one of his first substantial volumes in the English language. Söderberg has embraced and celebrated the phantasmagoria of life itself over a span of seventy years, in verse heavily influenced by Surrealists Paz and Eluard. "The air is like gold leaf," he writes, "I take a deep breath/and become gilded inside." The author of more than thirty books of poetry, Söderberg strikes different poses - embodying different cultures and political moments - and moves easily from one reality to another. See for yourself why Ilya Kaminsky calls this "one of the most important and moving collections of poetry in translation that I have read this decade."

Product Details

PublisherArrowsmith Press
Publish DateOctober 13, 2022
Pages200
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9798986340111
Dimensions9.2 X 6.1 X 0.5 inches | 0.7 pounds
BISAC Categories: Poetry

About the Author

Lasse Söderberg was born in 1931 in Stockholm, Sweden. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, and he is the foremost translator of post-war contemporary poets into Swedish from French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, German, English, and Italian, including Octavio Paz, Yves Bonnefoy, Charles Simic, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, and Rafael Alberti. He founded International Poetry Days, a festival in Malmö, Sweden, and continues to arrange events in Malmö with his wife, Colombian poet Ángela García Ines Castrillon. He has received numerous awards for his poetry in Sweden and was named to an honorary professorship by the Swedish government in 2002. In 2019, he received the Max Jacob Prize in Paris. This is his first substantial volume in English.
Carolyn Forché is a poet, memoirist, and translator. She is the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and five books of poetry. Her most recent poetry book, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin, 2020) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton, 1993) and co-editor of Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500-2001, with Duncan Wu (W.W. Norton, 2014). She has translated five books of poetry, most recently America by Fernando Valverde (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). She is University Professor at Georgetown University, and lives in Maryland with her husband, Harry Mattison.
Lars Gustaf Andersson is a poet and critic. He has translated works of British and American poets into Swedish, among them a selection of the poetry of Carolyn Forché, Mot slutet (Rámus 2020) and Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, De dövas republik (Rámus 2021). He is Professor of Film Studies at Lund University, Sweden, co-author of among others Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2012) and The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking (Intellect Books, 2019). He lives in Lund with his wife Carina Sjöholm.

Reviews

"The Forbidden Door: The Selected Poetry of Lasse Söderberg is compiled of imagistic and dreamlike poems that travel far from the poet's native Sweden through Arthur Rimbaud's France and Frederico García Lorca's Spain, ultimately forging ties with Spanish-language poets on both sides of the Atlantic, such as César Vallejo and Octavio Paz (whom Söderberg also translated into Swedish)."

-Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation

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