Birgitta Trotzig, born 11 September 1929 in Göteborg. Writer. She was elected to the Swedish Academy on 11 February 1993 and admitted on 20 December 1993. Trotzig succeeded her fellow-writer Per Olof Sundman to Chair number 6. Among other awards she received the Aniara Prize in 1981, the Selma Lagerlöf Literature Prize in 1984, the 1985 Pilot Prize, the 1991 Kellgren Prize and the 1997 Övralid Prize.
Following her upper-secondary-school certificate in 1948, Trotzig made an early literary debut in 1951. In an article on “the two realities” (1950), reprinted in Utkast och förslag (‘Drafts and Proposals’) in 1962, she had already established the fundamental conflicts that were to nourish her writing: between art and life, between the self and poetry, between the aesthetic and the ethical. According to this article, “the artist aware of her awareness” is faced with an inescapable compromise: it is impossible either to live poetry or to poeticize reality. A quarter of a century later she formulates this as follows: “It is a banality that poetry is not a direct rendering of reality: for me this banality has been an existential dilemma. Achieve reality – ‘reality’ – but how?” (from the article “Hållpunkter, hösten 1975” [‘Fixed points, autumn 1975’], in Jaget och världen [1977; ‘The self and the world’]).
Birgitta Trotzig emerged as a writer in a period dominated by post-war nihilism. To deal with the world and “its unprecedented terror” she resorted to a religiously existential “borderland poetics” where above all names such as Dostoyevsky and Simone Weil stand out, but also Hölderlin, Novalis, Kafka, Celan and Nelly Sachs – and of course the Bible and the “old churches”, Catholic and Orthodox.
Trotzig’s suggestive debut with the “tale-triptych” Ur de älskandes liv (1951; ‘From the lovers’ lives’) is in many ways typical of her writings. Behind the notion of writing a purely aesthetic book – one from which everything but imagery has been erased – there lies an ethical notion, that the book itself, the actual aesthetical activity, is fundamentally ethical: through working at the relationship to reality. Aesthetics is always automatically ethical.
After the clear-cut, body-hugging and down-to-earth prose poems in Bilder (1954; ‘Images’), Trotzig converted to Catholicism during the spring of 1955. She wrote herself out from the fifties and into history, down into the most basic depths of myth. In her hunt for a valid symbol world in hyperrationalised post-war society she found the language of religion and myth to be the place where a possible meaning has been rescued and can be won back.
Her conversion by no means resulted in any songs of joy shimmering with light: her books continued to circle around the great emptiness, God’s absence. She drills her way mercilessly down to the “lowest of the low”, to the ultimate outposts of vulnerability. Precisely where ruin and the Apocalypse threaten she locates the glow from the almost extinguished light of human existence. The most fundamental light.
Now Birgitta Trotzig started to write more closely connected tales – though always primarily lyrical. However she deliberately avoids calling them “novels”, a genre description rooted in a period from which she – on one plane – is seeking to extricate herself. On another plane she approaches contemporary reality more than most people do; only one must never do this in a naïve, unreflecting manner. During long periods in Paris, her second home, she adopted a broadened concept of ideology that gave her a preparedness for political action. Yet this differentiates her sharply from the contemporary left of 1968.
The great tales now followed in quick succession. First came the “legend” De utsatta (1957; ‘The exposed’) from late-seventeenth-century Scania. The action in En berättelse från kusten (1961; ‘A tale from the coast’) – dedicated to Nelly Sachs – also takes place in Scania, now at the end of the Middle Ages. The book can be read as a 250-page prose poem, a lament over human life in Åhus, on a small tongue of land representing a typical Trotzig border zone between the sick land and the enormous sea. The “tale” Sjukdomen (1972; ‘The disease’) portrays with devastatingly suggestive insight an absolute nadir in which the forms and colours of mental illness glide right into the surrounding landscape, once again Scanian. From sick Elje’s decomposing consciousness rise, fragmentarily, the contours of the great war, the contemporary vision. And, scored for full orchestra, the masterpiece Dykungens dotter (1985; ‘The mud king’s daughter’), “a children’s story”, is also set in classical Swedish proletarian-realistic territory, the urbanisation of the twenties – and the black tale draws, in passing as it were, a picture of those who were crushed in the building of the Swedish welfare state, the “people’s home”.
Collections of shorter, often saga-like stories are found in Levande och döda (1964; ‘Living and dead’), in I kejsarens tid (1975; ‘In the time of the emperor’), Berättelser (1977; ‘Tales’) and in Trotzig’s most recent book Dubbelheten (1998; ‘Doubleness’). In addition Birgitta Trotzig keeps up the more distinctly lyrical-prose parts of her production. Ordgränser (1968; ‘Word limits’) is a markedly metapoetical collection of prose texts that move between the expressible and the ineffable. Anima (1982; ‘Anima’) is followed by the pent-up accumulation of force Sammanhang – material (1996; ‘Context – material’) with the expressive motto “Threshold, limit, difference, outside, inside”. The book ends: “but the child who was buried – from the tiny silent chest there grows a storm, a savage song more frightful than the end of the universe”.
“The artist aware of her awareness”, Birgitta Trotzig has also reflected diligently over her own and others’ writing in essays that seldom maintain strict frontiers with fiction. On the contrary, starting with Utkast och förslag (1962) there stands out an entirely individual, continually self-testing essay form. Jaget och världen (1977) should be seen first as a series of extremely important reflections over her own writings, while Porträtt – Ur tidshistorien (1993; ‘Portraits – From the history of time’) portrays to a greater extent literary affinities.
Jan Arnald
(Translated by Tim Crosfield)