Lars Gustafsson: 'Variations on a theme by Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe'

 

Lars Gustafsson wrote a series of variations on a theme by Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe. Here is what he wrote about them in the Postscript. You can find an English translation of this collection here. 

Postscript

 

 

The collection is of course based on the musical theme and variations. I have used experimentation to find a way forward. I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious, but I have actually modelled myself on Johann Sebastian Bach.

The idea of variations based on a short theme has been slightly influenced by the Goldberg Variations. The idea of moving from one key to another which is found in great masters such as Bach in his ‘48 Preludes and Fugues’ does not, however, have any feasible counterpart in poetry. On the other hand, one can to a certain extent experiment with the emotional layers as if they were keys. The poems feel their way forwards through various emotional layers and gradually crystallise out in a fixed form – the Villanelle. This fixed form then has to give way to a new chaos and a new process of organisation, in a number of such cycles.

As theme, or ‘aria’, I make use of a couple of lines from a poem by Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe ‘The End of the Summer Holidays’. They have a powerful innate force. ‘Why Silfverstolpe of all people?’ my friends often ask me. I have always thought of him as a friend. Why should one not have friends among the dead? He was a fine poet who never got the chance to develop fully since he died so young.

Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe (1893–1942) came from a Västmanland farming family that had many literary talents. His ancestor, Axel Gabriel (spelt without the ‘f’) is the best-known of these. He wrote, among other things, ‘Skördarne’ [The Harvests]** as well as an evening poem that is regarded as anticipating Bellman’s, and his was the unusual lot to have the entire Swedish Academy suspended, as the result of an politically incorrect inaugural address in 1795, by Reuterholm for some considerable time. Gunnar Mascoll was also a member, though for much too short a period – only from 1941.

If one is able to disregard the characteristics typical of the age, he much resembles Tomas Tranströmer in his combination of a powerful articulatory capacity, anchorage in everyday life and a morally sensitive, nobly humanistic attitude. He develops, you could say, from a regionalist to a universalist . Manuals tend to characterise him as  an ‘intimate realist of the everyday’, a designation that to a certain extent is based on a confusion between material and intention. In actual fact, Silfverstolpe’s poetry has strong existentialist features and is not far removed from Pär Lagerkvist. The difference, however, is that Silfverstolpe often anchors his issues in a concrete landscape, that of the Västmanland lake-and-plain landscape around Lake Mälaren, which he portrays with meticulously sensitive, almost watercolour-like nuances. He has probably also been influenced by the contemporary English poets he diligently interpreted.

There is something unresolved, a never clearly formulated conflict in Silfverstolpe’s poetry. He often writes, indirectly, of not really being the same as other people, of not being allowed to be involved in where the action is. This unresolved yearning for authenticity is evident in various forms in his poetry. There is a poem that has to do with an upper secondary school excursion on skates across the vast open expanses of Lake Mälaren, where the writer is suddenly placed together with a rheumatic classmate who cannot take part and who watches the departure from the quay. The same theme also permeates the extremely ambiguous and complex poem about the unveiling of the Finn Malmberg statue outside the Västmanland-Dala Students’ Association in Uppsala in 1931. Both Silfverstolpe and Malmgren, who later perished in the fated polar expedition of General Umberto Nobile in 1928, were the association’s first procurators. Once again, Silfverstolpe portrays himself as the one who did not have any destiny of his own, who was left sitting there as an onlooker. As part of this complex there is the intense longing back to his own boyhood and years at school, which become a kind of paradise lost in Silfverstolpe’s world.