Pioneering Scandinavian modernist Edith Södergran’s rather short life ended in Finland on June 22nd, 1923 on Midsummer’s Eve, the longest day of the year. She was born 31 years earlier on April 4th, 1892 in St. Petersburg, Russia to Swedish upper middle class parents. Her work has been translated into close to thirty languages and her influence on 20th and 21st century Scandinavian poetry is both unrivaled and ongoing. If there is, in this world, a possibility for an entirely free and pure poetics, a state of writing from an unbounded spontaneity carried as if entwined with the present moment, then that might have been the poetics of Edith Södergran. She once wrote: “There are words I have never heard, but I need those words. Perhaps your own heart could give you or tell you those words. But have you ever believed your own heart?”

Malena Mörling, born in Sweden, is an American poet and translator. She is the author of two books of poetry, Ocean Avenue and Astoria. She has translated several Swedish poets and is editing the antohology Swedish Writers on Writing with Jonas Ellerström. She is an Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Jonas Ellerström is a Swedish author and translator. He has published three collections of poetry, a book on chess and an essay accompanying the earliest poems of Tomas Tranströmer (also published in book form in Germany and the USA). He has, among other works, translated T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer.