Min text är inledningen till Svenska Akademiens klassikerutgåva av Gunnar Ekelöfs Samlade skrifter I-II, redigerad av mig själv och Anders Mortensen. Utgåvan återger Ekelöfs dikter troget från originalsamlingarna och avviker därför från tidigare utgivning av hans dikter, som följer ändringarna som skett i hans texter under åren. Detta textkritiska problem diskuteras i min inledning liksom synen på Ekelöf idag som en portalgestalt i svensk lyrisk modernism.

My text is a commentary to my translation of Paul Celan's Atemwende (1967), the first translation in Swedish of one complete collection of his poetry. I discuss the vital and continuous reception of his poetry in Sweden, but first of all the problems involved in translating his poems and in understanding his art of writing in this crucial phase. I thereby  discuss the meaning of the title, already coined in his Meridian speech (1960), in connection with Georg Büchner there called a "Breath turn" (Atemwende). What does this concept signify?

Tankar om läsning (Thoughts about reading) is an attempt to reconsider the fundamental role of reading in contemporary philosophy and literary criticism, taking as its departure the far reaching description of early reading in Marcel Proust's A la recherce and his essay "Sur la Lecture" but also the enigmatic but very revealing dialogue between the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and the French deconstructivist Jacques Derrida. My aim is to show that there are basic affinities between contemporary hermeneutics and deconstruction in the insistence on the impossibility to reach a final and totalizing and reading and on the necessity to supplement the category of meaning with a more material view of the literary text. I discuss three fundamental aspects of any  possible concept of reading: time, space and memory. My thesis is that Gadamer's idea of reading as Verweilen can be developed into a theory of re-reading, which makes it possible to view historical re-appropriation, tradition and the concept of the classic in a new light. I discuss the need to develop the idea of the canon from a more productive theory of reading, in line with the hermeneutic premises presented. I also discuss the phenomenon of survival in relation to Proust and Derrida.

The article is an attempt to clarify the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer´s late preoccupation with the temporal aspects of reading, particularly concerning literary texts, under the concept of Verweilen. It is my contention that Gadamer in his last three decades, before his death in 2002, develops his thinking on understanding texts in terms of Wirkungsgeschichte or Effective History in his magnum opus Wahrheit und Methode (1960), making reading more elastic, flexible and individually structured than before. Verweilen is a crucial concept in this process, dislodging aesthetical experience from the collectively shared historical time that prevails in his previous work.  I try to show that Verweilen, in the context of Gadamer´s intensified preoccuptaion with literary interpretation, is one link to the remarkable, "tacit" and "improbable", dialogue with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the last two decades that opens new perspectives on the status of literary hermeneutics.   

Languages of Exile examines the relationship between geographic and linguistic border crossings in twentieth-century literature. Like no period before it, the last century was marked by the experience of expatriation, forcing exiled writers to confront the fact of linguistic difference. Literary writing can be read as the site where that confrontation is played out aesthetically – at the intersection between native and acquired language, between indigenous and alien, between self and other – in a complex multilingual dynamic specific to exile and migration.The essays collected here explore this dynamic from a comparative perspective, addressing the paragons of modernism as well as less frequently studied authors, from Joseph Conrad and Peter Weiss to Agota Kristof and Malika Mokeddem. The essays are international in their approach; they deal with the junctions and gaps between English, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and other languages. The literary works and practices addressed include modernist poetry and prose, philosophical criticism and autobiography, DADA performance, sound art and experimental music theatre. This volume reveals both the wide range of creative strategies developed in response to the interstitial situation of exile and the crucial role of exile for a renewed understanding of twentieth-century literature.

Suckar, suckar äro Elementet,

I vars sköte Demiurgen andas.

Så inleds Erik Johan Stagnelius sena dikt ”Suckarnes Mystär”, den mäktigaste gestaltningen av melankolin som allomfattande Weltschmerz i svensk litteratur. Men vad betyder dessa suckar, där allt i skapelsen har sin boning, och vilken roll har de i författarskapet?

The article is an attempt to put Gunnar Björling's radical modernist poetry in the tradition of the idyllic genre. The strong link to this tradition is the fundamental role of place in the poetry of Björling. However, place, and more specifically Björling's home in Brunnsparken in Helsinki, is in general not only the point of departure of his poems. The local setting, while never abandoned, is at the same time widened in the name of ethical universalism. This inner conflict, emphazised by his innovative ungrammaticalies, makes Björling's relation to the idyllic tradition full of tensions. 

Texten är inledningen till Erik Johan Stagnelius Samlade skrifter i fem band med kommentarer och ordförklaringar, efter moderna textkritiska principer redigerad av Paula Henrikson. Det innebär bland annat att de skrifter av Stagnelius som var kända och utgivna under hans levnad har skiljts ut från de övriga i ett eget, första band. Utgåvan är den hittills största satsningen i klassikerserien som Svenska Akademien har gjort.