Håkan Sandell

Håkan Sandell Poems

Håkan Sandell Biography

Håkan Sandell, born 16 February 1962 in Västra Skrävlinge, is a Swedish poet. Håkan Sandell emerged in the 1980s as a member of Malmöligan, a group of poets based in Malmö, consisting of Sandell, Clemens Altgård, Per Linde, Kristian Lundberg, Lukas Moodysson and Martti Soutkari. Although diverse in style and subjects, the members were inspired by punk rock, the Danish poet Michael Strunge and differed from the politicised poetry that had dominated Sweden in the 1970s. The group disbanded in 1993 after which Sandell moved to Denmark, Ireland and eventually Norway. In the 1990s, Sandell and Altgård wrote the pamphlet Om retrogardism ("on retrogardism"), in which they advocated a literature rooted in traditional expressions. Sandell has mentioned the painter Odd Nerdrum as an important influence for this direction away from modernism. The first Nerdrum painting he saw was Return of the Sun, through which he realised which qualities modernism was missing: "the pathetic, the heroic, the sentimental, the nostalgic, the decadent, the Luciferian, the declamatory, the dramatic, the Dantean! (Dantesque?), the Gothic, late Manierism, Romanticism, historicism, symbolism, etc." A volume of Sandell's poetry titled Dog Star Notations: Selected Poems 1999 - 2016 appeared in English in 2016, translated by Bill Coyle and published by Carcanet Press.)

The Best Poem Of Håkan Sandell

Time and Space

My time is now, my place is here,
the password long since been spoken -
no longer do I need to seek for it.
But as a wing will try to test its flight
my eye has difficulty finding focus.
It's injured in all kinds of ways,
by mediocre and unsightly things,
on cornered squares and in restricted space;
scrapes and sprains and hits the roof,
blinking slightly in its blackened eye
until it - bend now backwards! - rises up
and finds its freedom in a widened room
as if this eye had planned to annex it.
There is a limit to what one manages
of stuffiness and stifled breathing.
How easy to lose one's creative drive
and crouch despite the sky above does
incessantly generate new fresh frescoes
with clouds so airy white and monumental
that they only leave behind small traces
of the blue that inaugurated the place.
My eye must die in your apartments,
it's getting grey, the world is fading,
and only flashes in the lighter's flame,
the moment before the smoke's new greyness.
The ceiling's low, the cage is cramped;
a sudden glance, with nothing to lose.
It's a crime you know, to turn one's back
but I fled, to nature's lap,
to Irish rivers and Norwegian hills
and drowned myself in rapture wild;
the sound of jubilance, my head
was swept along on frothy waves.
But as rebellion's seeking in, and digs
it's heels, or takes off into the woods,
it must loyally one day return to fight.
I'm all cracked up, but my nut is ripe,
it has brightened, sweet and golden,
its shell no longer needs to hold it.
I'm feeling what I've always felt,
how the forces that strive to unmake
exactly measure up to those that create,
and if there was to be a task for me,
it should be a one to fit a mould
of sorts around a gloomy void.
I bring the contours back to twilight,
from stubble blue I'd like to make
a colour print so time preserves,
a weight for the floating, fillings
for the vacuous and hollow.
From these dreary quarters a draughtsman
might now and then appear, although how rare,
who with a sharpened pencil point
can lend the skies a bold relief
and, line for line, recreate the space,
and where at dusk - and godlike -
the bright blue air fills in with ease.

Translated by Finn Printz-Påhlson

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