Gunnar Ekelöf


Bengt Gunnar Ekelöf was a Swedish poet and writer. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1958 and was awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Uppsala University in 1958. He won a number of prizes for his poetry.

Life and works

Gunnar Ekelöf has been described as Sweden's first surrealist poet; he made his debut with the collection sent på jorden in 1932, a work that was too unconventional to become widely appreciated and which the author described as capturing a period of suicidal thoughts and apocalyptic moods. It was, in a sense, an act of literary revolt akin to Edith Södergran's Septemberlyran a dozen years earlier. While not disavowing his debut, Ekelöf moved towards romanticism and received better reviews for his second poetry collection Dedikation. Both of his first two volumes are strongly influenced by surrealism and show a violent, at times feverish torrent of images, deliberate breakdown of ordered syntax and traditional poetic language and a defiant spirit bordering on anarchism. This defiant outsiderhood was grounded in his person; though he came from an upper-class background, Ekelöf had never felt committed to it – his father had been mentally ill, and when his mother remarried, Ekelöf strongly disapproved of his stepfather and, by extension, of his mother, who had let him in; he became a loner and a rebel already in his teens – and would never feel at ease with the mores of the established upper and middle classes or with their inhibitions and, as he perceived it, hypocrisy and back-scratching. Swedish critic Anders Olsson described Ekelöf's turn to poetry as a choice of "the only utterance that doesn't expurge the contradictions and empty spaces of language and of the mind".
Färjesång, a finely expressed blend of romanticism, surrealism, and the dark clouds of the ongoing Second World War spelled a mark of maturity and would influence later Swedish poets, as would Ekelöf's debut over time. From this point on, his transformations of style and imagery, his deep familiarity with a wide array of literary idioms, stretching far beyond modern writing, and an almost Bob Dylan-like propensity to make fresh departures in his writing and challenge critics' readings of his work in order to keep true to it, made him one of the most influential and, in time, widely read of Scandinavian modernist poets, a kind of father figure and challenging and inspiring model for many later writers not just in Sweden but also in Denmark and Norway. He has been translated into many languages and is a classic of 20th-century Swedish poetry.

Legacy

He is remembered as being one of the first Surrealist poets of Sweden.
On his 103rd birthday, 40 Swedish poetry enthusiasts gathered in Salihli. Together with the deputy mayor they honored Ekelöfs legacy in the city where he became most ardently admiring of in a visit in 1965, and has portrayed in several poems. In his will he detailed that he wished to be cremated and his ashes spread over the Sard stream in Salihli. A bust of Ekelöf by Gürdal Duyar was intended to be placed at this location, however this was never realized and it now waits in the garden of the Swedish Embassy in Istanbul for its chance to be brought to its true home.

Selected bibliography

In Swedish:
A collected volume of Ekelöf's poetry, Dikter, was published by Mån Pocket in 1987.
In English:
Ekelöf made some substantial re-edits of the text and sequence of poems in later collected editions and anthologies of his work, especially relating to his 1930s books.