Folke Isaksson was a Swedish writer, translator, debater, and a literary critic. Known for his poetry and his reporting stories from both Asia and Sweden, Isaksson has a wide range of authorship.
Background
Folke Isaksson was born on October 9, 1927, Kalix, Norrbottens Lan, Sweden. He was a missionary and Lutheran preacher's son of Otto and a hospital nurse Hilder (Nordqvist) Isaksson. He was the older brother of Olov Isaksson and grew up in Kalix and in Gammelstad in Luleå. In 1937, when Folke Isaksson was 10 years old, the family moved to Gammelstad. The boys Folke and Olov felt that they were being banished to Gammelstad. It was a very different society, at the same time both rural and with a great sense of church. For the first two years, the family lived in the center of Gammelstad with a very tough elderly lady and her unmarried daughter. They had a small farm and the cows were roaming and the screams at pig slaughter the boys Isaksson experienced very close up. Then the Isaksson family built a house opposite the present Assembly House in Gammelstad.
Education
Folke Isaksson studied at Uppsala University. He attended Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in 1952 and Harvard International Seminar in 1962.
Folke Isaksson worked at the Expressen, Stockholm. Sweden as a literary critic in 1948-1952. During 1952-1958 he was working at Morgon-Tidningen, Stockholm, Sweden as a literary critic. In 1958-1972 he was a literatury critic at Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Sweden. In 1977 he was an advisor in the cultural section on Channel 2 (Swedish television). He wrote and narrated for Swedish television 13 films on great poets (1986-2000).
Isaksson grew up in a tiny area near Sweden's northern coastline and the Arctic Circle, where snow and winter were influential elements in his life, and he often writes about them in his poetry. His debut effort was a work titled Vinterresa, or "Winter's Journey." And in a poem titled "Patria mia," Isaksson later wrote, "In my land the snow is always falling." Other works throughout Isaksson's career continue the theme of carving out an existence in a wintry world, although he did not necessarily see the ice and snow as negatives. On the contrary, Isaksson often portrayed them as invigorating, such as in the poem "The Love Letter," from the collection Terra magica, which was inspired by the more bucolic nature of the island of Gotland: "He stands transfigured, a discoverer,/ and whispers to himself:/You are a seed./ A snow seed. Ready to fly!/ You will strike root/ in a cleft of the sun."
Isaksson's other volumes of poetry include Det gröna året, Blått och svart, Teckenspråk, and Tecken och under, which marked Isaksson's return to poetry after an absence of almost two decades. However, Isaksson has published more than poetry. He is also a noted prose writer, journalist, and translator. In Dubbelliv, a semi- biographical volume containing memoirs, diary excerpts, essays, poems and journalistic pieces, Isaksson again takes up the theme of living in a land isolated by its geographic location and harsh climatic conditions. "Dream about exile. The snow falls outside the window, continually, also here in Europe [as distinct from Scandinavia]," he wrote. "So I am at home even in my exile."In 1964, Isaksson wrote a portrait about the Polish city of Warsaw, and four years later, with Leif Furhammar, published an examination of film propaganda titled Politics and Film. In addition, Isaksson has translated into Swedish the work of Hungarian poets and authors such as William Blake and Wallace Stevens. De fjärran ländernas närhet: Resor och uppehåll 1949-89 is a collection of Isaksson's travel writings. For the book's title, Isaksson borrowed a line from the poem "Euforia," by fellow countryman and poet Gunnar Ekelöf. In the book's introduction, the author explains that he spent hours and days in his isolation dreaming of tropical lands. Isaksson's inspirations were stamps and old postcards, the voices and sounds of the short-wave radio and small keepsakes from his pious father's only journey abroad. (Isaksson's father was bound for Eritrea as a missionary, but was stopped in Naples and sent back without an entry permit by Fascist authorities.) Those postcards piqued Isaksson's interest in the idea of traveling the world. Over the course of forty years, he fulfilled that interest by traveling to such cultural centers as Berlin, Dublin, Vienna, Madrid, Prague, Leningrad, Shanghai, Calcutta, Venice, Mexico City, and New York. The book recounts his experiences during those travels, including his time in Kathmandu and being in San Francisco during the city's 1989 earthquake. In the work's final section, Isaksson describes the trips he took to a number of islands, including the Aran Islands, the Faroes, the Seychelles, Mauritius, and the little-known Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean.
After reviewing the volume, literary critic Margareta Mattsson of World Literature Today referred to Isaksson as "a literate and literary traveler" who "seems to be at ease in all ports of call." Isaksson has also written some volumes of prose poetry, the first being Skiftningar i en väv. A second collection of his prose poems is Ombord på Skymningsexpressen: Prosadikter II, in which the poems describe riding on a train as it travels across the landscape at dusk. Skymning is the Swedish word for "dusk." "I sit aboard the twilight express with/ departure's tart taste on my tongue," Isaksson writes in the volume's final poem. "I don't know where I'm heading or if it's possible any more to get off." The work impressed literary critics, including Brita Stendahl of World Literature Today, who compared reading it to "traveling in a luxurious train toward evening."Stendahl continued: "The impressions are jewels of clarity and form. They are by no means hastily produced but carefully chosen, polished and framed to delight the traveler."
When he published "Terra magica" from 1963, he became increasingly political and devoted many years to political writing.
Later he joined the Green Party. A Green party is a formally organized political party based on the principles of green politics, such as social justice, environmentalism and nonviolence. Greens believe that these issues are inherently related to one another as a foundation for world peace.
Views
Quotations:
"To be an author is to be on an ever-present journey, a voyage of discovery. I write in order to enhance my awareness and deepen my understanding, and to defend something that is threatened and most precious: our humanist culture."
"You will not write better when you get older. You will write more slowly. The ink dries, the text pales. But there is the possibility of rendering the text more dense, more compact."
Membership
Folke Isaksson was a member of Swedish PEN and a vice president in 1987-1989.
Jonathan Swift "Gulliver's Travels," William Blake, Friedrich Hölderlin, Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico García Lorca, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Paul Celan, W.H. Auden
Connections
Folke Isaksson married an editor Marianne Alilen, on December 16, 1964. They had two children: Par and Daniel.
