Love, Solitude and the Face of Death: Selected Poems of Edith SÃ dergran, Translated by Stina Katchadourian

Edith Irene Saodergran, one of the first modernist poets within Swedish-language literature, was born in St. Petersburg in 1892 and died in Raivola, a Finnish town near the Russian border, in 1923. Her first published poems were not well received by the conservative critics because of their free-verse style. At her death from tuberculosis, which she contracted as a teenager, she was thirty-one years old and known only within the narrow confines of the Swedish-speaking literary world; but after her death she became recognized and appreciated, and she is now considered one of the greatest poets in Swedish literature. Her poetry has been translated into some thirty languages and her passionate lyric voice continues to win new readers all over the world.