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Gunnar Björling

3.9/5 ( ratings)
Born
May 30 1887
Died
1010 07 19601960
Website
Go to Website
Finland-Swedish modernist poet, whose work is characterized by his attempt to find "words and more than to understand / words and that no other is". Most of his career, Björlingt suffered from lack of understanding – he was the most radical of all the modernists, a devoted dadaist, and labelled incomprehensible by the majority of the public.

Now is not dead
it is a voice
barely shimmering
in this night of light
and between space and sea


Gunnar Björling was born in Helsinki, the son of Edvard Björling, a post-office official, and Lydia Maria Rivell. After Björling's father suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1896 and was unable to continue with his work, the family fell into poverty. His childhood and youth Björling spent in Helsinki, Viipuri, and Kangasala. In 1901-02 Björling attended military academy in Fredrikshamn, but returned then to Helsinki, where he actively participated in the struggle against attempts to russify Finland.

Björling studied philosophy at the University of Helsinki, graduating in 1915. An atheist, misfit with his unconventional opinions and informal relationship with his students in the Swedish Normal Lyceum, Björling eventually abandoned his career as a teacher. Moreover, Björling was openly a homosexual, which made him something of a renegade; once he was put under house arrest. Because of his sexual orientation, he was also vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation. During the Civil war Björling remained in Helsinki, which was ruled for a period by Reds, but kept a secret White radio sender in his basement. It has been claimed, without evidence, that Björling was on the boat, that carried the condemned Socialist writer Maiju Lassila to his death. Lassila was shot while trying to escape, or drowned, before the boat reached Sveaborg. Björling never published an account of what he allegedly witnessed. After the war, Björling devoted himself entirely to writing and drew around him a group of disciples who wanted to renew Finnish literature.

As a poet Björling made his debut at the age of 35 with Vilande dag, published by Daimon, a short-lived publishing company founded by the writer L.A. Salava. The collection of prose poems showed Björling's knowledge of the work of the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, whose famous collection of song poems Gitanjali had been translated into Swedish in 1913.

Björling was deeply influenced by positivism and Edward Westermarck's relativism. Also Nietzsche, Jean-Marie Guyau, and Henri Bergson left traces on Björling's thought, which he early presented in in articles written for the magazine Quesego, and in Korset of löftet , an expression of "a universal dada-individualism".

After his hectic dadaistic period in the late 1920s, Björling published Kiri-ra! and Solgrönt , in which he began to use motifs from everyday life and nature. "Jag skriver inte litteratur, jag söker mitt ansikte och fingrarna" he said. Björling's world did not have grammatical or syntactical continuity, language was broken down, it was always open, moving, unfinished, in which "luft är och ljus" . Crucial for his thinking was the idea of the endless flow of life; nothing is complete, nothing is perfect. "Life is the banana the monkeys do not reach," he once said. In his striving to capture escaping moments of life, Björling constantly struggled with the limits of language, painfully aware of that words cannot render fully one's personal feelings. Accepting this, his radical nihilism gradually changed into self-examination, calmness, and metaphysical attempts to be one with the world: "a poem is my life", he wrote in Ord och att ej annat .

During the Continuation War an air bomb hit the house where Björling lived and destroyed all his manuscripts. In the 1940s and 1950s his bas

Gunnar Björling

3.9/5 ( ratings)
Born
May 30 1887
Died
1010 07 19601960
Website
Go to Website
Finland-Swedish modernist poet, whose work is characterized by his attempt to find "words and more than to understand / words and that no other is". Most of his career, Björlingt suffered from lack of understanding – he was the most radical of all the modernists, a devoted dadaist, and labelled incomprehensible by the majority of the public.

Now is not dead
it is a voice
barely shimmering
in this night of light
and between space and sea


Gunnar Björling was born in Helsinki, the son of Edvard Björling, a post-office official, and Lydia Maria Rivell. After Björling's father suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1896 and was unable to continue with his work, the family fell into poverty. His childhood and youth Björling spent in Helsinki, Viipuri, and Kangasala. In 1901-02 Björling attended military academy in Fredrikshamn, but returned then to Helsinki, where he actively participated in the struggle against attempts to russify Finland.

Björling studied philosophy at the University of Helsinki, graduating in 1915. An atheist, misfit with his unconventional opinions and informal relationship with his students in the Swedish Normal Lyceum, Björling eventually abandoned his career as a teacher. Moreover, Björling was openly a homosexual, which made him something of a renegade; once he was put under house arrest. Because of his sexual orientation, he was also vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation. During the Civil war Björling remained in Helsinki, which was ruled for a period by Reds, but kept a secret White radio sender in his basement. It has been claimed, without evidence, that Björling was on the boat, that carried the condemned Socialist writer Maiju Lassila to his death. Lassila was shot while trying to escape, or drowned, before the boat reached Sveaborg. Björling never published an account of what he allegedly witnessed. After the war, Björling devoted himself entirely to writing and drew around him a group of disciples who wanted to renew Finnish literature.

As a poet Björling made his debut at the age of 35 with Vilande dag, published by Daimon, a short-lived publishing company founded by the writer L.A. Salava. The collection of prose poems showed Björling's knowledge of the work of the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, whose famous collection of song poems Gitanjali had been translated into Swedish in 1913.

Björling was deeply influenced by positivism and Edward Westermarck's relativism. Also Nietzsche, Jean-Marie Guyau, and Henri Bergson left traces on Björling's thought, which he early presented in in articles written for the magazine Quesego, and in Korset of löftet , an expression of "a universal dada-individualism".

After his hectic dadaistic period in the late 1920s, Björling published Kiri-ra! and Solgrönt , in which he began to use motifs from everyday life and nature. "Jag skriver inte litteratur, jag söker mitt ansikte och fingrarna" he said. Björling's world did not have grammatical or syntactical continuity, language was broken down, it was always open, moving, unfinished, in which "luft är och ljus" . Crucial for his thinking was the idea of the endless flow of life; nothing is complete, nothing is perfect. "Life is the banana the monkeys do not reach," he once said. In his striving to capture escaping moments of life, Björling constantly struggled with the limits of language, painfully aware of that words cannot render fully one's personal feelings. Accepting this, his radical nihilism gradually changed into self-examination, calmness, and metaphysical attempts to be one with the world: "a poem is my life", he wrote in Ord och att ej annat .

During the Continuation War an air bomb hit the house where Björling lived and destroyed all his manuscripts. In the 1940s and 1950s his bas

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