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Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling
Post 19 above.
William, welome to Eratosphere.
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Thank you, Janice. I look forward to taking part in this forum, which looks like an interesting and lively one.
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Edith Södergran was not adrift in the Swedish language. It is however true that as an adult, she developed her own poetic language style but do not be deceived to think that she didn't know singular from plural.
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No, but she did write a rather idiosyncratic version of Swedish - and only some of that was down to "modernist tendencies". Another possibility is that "systemen" is a misprint, one that was preserved throughout all the editions of her work. I remember that Holger Lillqvist, who prepared and published a new edition of Södergran’s work, found that there are some strange things not only in her manuscripts, but also in the earlier editions of her poetry, things that are more or less unaccountable. But to back you up, I'm unable to confirm that "systemen" was one of them.
It's interesting to note that many of the non-English translations of the poem opt for "solar system" rather than "solar systems" - this is true, for example, of Nelly Sachs's German translation (Zu Fuß mußte ich durch das Sonnensystem gehen), and also of the French translation by Carl Gustaf Bjurström and Lucie Albertini (Ā pied / Il m'a fallu traverser le systčme solaire).
"Solar systems" doesn't really make a great deal of sense, I suppose, and therefore translators have tended to choose the more normal form of the term.
Apologies for thread drift.