Fom a tremendous amount of good information about Bo Carpelan here:
Prolific Finnish poet, novelist, dramatist, literary critic, and translator, whose career spanned over six decades. Bo Carpelan wrote in Swedish. He won the prestigious Finlandia Prize twice – in 1993 for Urwind (Alkutuuli), about the memories and mysterious visions of an antiquarian bookseller, and in 2005 for the novel Berg (Kesän varjot). However, Carpelan always considered poetry to be his "true homeland"...
...In 1960 Carpelan finished his doctoral dissertation, Studier i Gunnar Björlings diktning 1922-1933. From 1946 to 1980 Carpelan worked at the Helsinki City Library, eventually becoming the assistant chief librarian. Between 1949 and 1964 Carpelan was a reviewer for the leading Finland-Swedish language newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet. In 1980 he was appointed professor artium by President Urho Kekkonen.
Carpelan made his literary debut with Som en dunkel värme (1946), a collection of poems, which was dominated by images of darkness, sorrow and stillness. Carpelan's early works showed the influence of Swedish modernism, French existentialism, and such writers as Björling, Paul Éluard and Georg Trakl. Some of his images recall the dream landscapes of Ingmar Bergman films. In his later collections, such as Marginalia till grekisk och romersk diktning (1984) and Gramina: marginalia till Horatius, Vergilius och Dante (2010) Carpelan had drawn great inspiration and motivation from the classics of Greece and Rome. Carpelan himself said that he first achieved his own personal poetic voice in Den svala dagen (1961). It begins with his most famous poems, the melancholic 'Höstvandring' (Autumn Walk), in which a direct, laconic observation of the external world opens doors to an experience of existence and human fate in general: "A man walks through the wood / one day of shifting light. / Encounters few people, / stops, considers the autumn sky. / He is making for the graveyard / and no one is following him." In spite of the death motif, the poem can be also read as an enlightened walk in the landscape of poetry, where trees are trees and graveyards are graveyards.
It is not time that alters us,
it is space: the forest that was low as a dark ribbon
round the evening when we were children.
And the water that came up to our feet.
(from In Dark, in Light Rooms, 1976, trans. by Keith Bosley)
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