GUSTAF FR?DING

GUSTAF FRÖDING

If Gustaf Fröding had been born in England, France, Germany or Italy he would have been one of the world's most famous poets right up there with Keats, Shelley and Heine. But Fröding was born in Sweden and although he became the country's most popular poet almost overnight with his first collection of poems, he has until now been regarded as a "prisoner of language" with little recognition outside of Sweden.

This may all change because Henrik Aspan, with the help of seasoned translators Paul Britten Austin and Martin Allwood has just published "The Selected Poems of Gustaf Fröding" (Persona Press and available through the Swedish Press Subscriber Service on page 4) with translations of some 40 of Gustaf Fröding's best poems. The translations ring true contrary to Robert Frost's assertion that "the poetry is what gets lost in translation ". Every Swedish school child would immediately recognize the poem of simple pleasure:

A plough would be fine and a harrow beside, a horse would be nice who could struggle and stride!

In a small garden plot we'd grow cabbage and beans!

Erk, my love! Maja, dove! Yes, by all means!

And the poem about idealism and realism could just as well have been written i English:

But rot is rot, and snuff is snuff albeit in golden boxes, and roses in a broken pot will always still be roses.

Gustaf Fröding (1860-1911) was born into a formerly well to-do family in the province of Värmland. He was deeply rooted in the local peasant culture, with its atmosphere of mythological forest beings and robust humour. His genius came with a large dose of insanity and he spent many years of his life in an asylum. He worked as a journalist at the small local Karlstad paper and often took the side of women, the weak and the exploited. He became very controversial at the time, but he sounds thoroughly modern when you read him today.

Fröding was shockingly frank. Once he reported himself to the police for having "unnatural intercourse" with a prostitute and was deeply shocked when the local police chief threw his self-denunciation in the fire. Another poem's undisguised picture of sexual intercourse - a good 30 years before D.H. Lawrence - led however to a sensational prosecution, and an equally sensational acquittal. Fröding had just that "blend of profundity and common humanity which makes a very great poet". The poems are beautiful and firm and may well become as loved in English as they have always been in Swedish.