”Jeg vil hjem to menneskene” – with the title made by the then 25-year-old Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo an outstanding debut in 1946. Europe was bruised, cities lay in ruins and the world had seen movies where the bulldozers pushes the piles of dead bodies in front of him. One of Hofmos first poems, ”There is no everyday life more” begins with the lines:
It is a poem that strikes the tone which is sounded by Gunvor Hofmos early authorship. With time, she becomes one of the most remarkable poets. Now we can read a sample in English in the ”I forget not”, where Eva Runefelt and Staffan Söderblom interpreted a hundred poems and Elise Ingvarsson wrote the afterword.
in 1921, in a politically radical family in Oslo. There are photographs from a christmas celebration in which the Soviet red star decorates the tree top. Already as a 14-15 year old, she starts to write poems in which she, with astounding maturity to realize what the nazi ideology would lead to.
on a farm On the Norwegian countryside meet with her in 1940, the jewish refugee Ruth Maier, who by his mother is sent out of Austria after the German annexation. They are two reading women who immediately fall in love. In november 1942, is Ruth one of the over 500 women and children during a night collected by the nazis and shipped to Germany.
From the boat manage to Ruth smuggle out a letter which she writes to Gunvor: ”Why shall we not suffer when there is so much suffering?”
When Ruth arrives at Auschwitz, and gassed her to death.
is smärtpunkten in this dark, brilliant writer. In the early poems depict Gunvor Hofmo a kind of chockartad and dull pain in the face Ruth’s fate, but also the face of all the millions of dead. She is one of the people with a heightened sensibility sees his time, but without the ability to create defenses against it.
It is therefore debuttitelns ”I yearn to return to the people” is so touching. It expresses a longing to return to communion with other people, but among them are those who built the gas chambers, but also those that seem prepared to try to forget in order to live on. It’s like Gunvor Hofmos contract with humanity fractured. The world wants to go further but she is incapable of it.
Of this, she creates a painful, beautiful and crystalline poetry. She gets us to understand the icy feeling of being alone in the world, turned off from the living but also from the dead. The only thing she can relate to is nature; the trees, the rocks, the birds, stjärnhimlarna, the sea. It gives no comfort, but there is a rest in its timelessness. She sometimes sounds like a Norwegian Edith Södergran, but without her ecstatic periods.
write Hofmo in the fast pace of five collections of poetry, at the same time as she becomes increasingly more paranoid and mentally unstable. 1953 taken she into a mental hospital in Oslo, where she basically lives in 22 years. The diagnosis is schizophrenia. She psychostimulants and was treated with electroshock, but forward-thinking doctors do not recommend lobotomering and look instead to her own skrivplats.
She is one of the people with a heightened sensibility sees his time, but without the ability to create defenses against the
After 16 years of silence, will Hofmo 1971 surprisingly out with the ”Gjest on earth” becomes a literary sensation. She gets rave reviews and awarded the great critic award. Then she gives out fifteen collections of poetry at a fairly regular pace. They represent a new phase in her writing: the pain and the loneliness was still there, but it’s like Gunvor Hofmo miraculously healed during my years at the mental hospital. Through the poems she returns to the scenes of childhood, and combines his life.
the Images are more concrete, and the syntax is easier and more mobile. Now can nature’s animals and vegetation, the heat and the light, as she sooner considered on hold, to enfold her: ”Come bumblebee came wasp/com bi from God,/and fertilize the scars of my loneliness”. And in poem after poem rises up, the memories seem to unfold in a more humane context.
and the author Jan Erik Vold made an invaluable contribution by highlighting the Hofmos poetry and prose, among other things, in the biography ”Mørkets sangerske” (2000). Therefore, it is so gratifying to Eva Runefelt and Staffan Söderblom now taken over the baton and translated her into English. Their interpretations are sensitive and identifikatoriska, and with the precision captures her distinctive tone.
Although Gunvor Hofmo in his late poems seemed to return to the people, she made it never in reality. After she was discharged from the hospital in 1975, remained she was very timid and allowed themselves to either be interviewed or photographed. She lived in a small apartment in Oslo, and was very rarely out. She died in October 1995.