Just a belated side note on Södergran's "Till fots / fick jag gå genom solsystemen": it's been pointed out by some observers that although Edith Södergran came from a Finland-Swedish family and wrote much of her mature work in Swedish, this was not the literary language in which she felt most at home. Her early poetry was written almost exclusively in German, and she was educated at a German-language school in Russia. Her grasp of Swedish grammar and orthography was sometimes shaky, and there are a number of strange usages in her deployment of the Swedish language. Some have suggested that "solsystemen" (the solar systems) may well be a mistake, and that what she meant to write was "solsystemet" (the solar system). See Gunnar Tideström's biography for more information about E.S.'s relation to Swedish.
|