Waiting for the Moon

i12bent:

Pär Lagerkvist (May 23, 1891 - 1974) was a Swedish author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951.

Lagerkvist wrote poems, plays, novels, stories, and essays of considerable expressive power and influence from his early 20s to his late 70s. Among his central themes was the fundamental question of good and evil, which he examined through such figures as the man who was freed instead of Jesus, Barabbas, and the wandering Jew Ahasuerus.

Lagerkvist was yet another one of those writers who himself was part of the Nobel committee (The Swedish Academy), and who perhaps would not otherwise have been considered for the highest international literary award… Still, the Committee declared in its motivation:

“On each page of Pär Lagerkvist’s work are words and ideas which, in their profound and fearful tenderness, carry at the very heart of their purity a message of terror. Their origin is in a simple, rustic life, laborious and frugal of words. But these words, these thoughts, handled by a master, have been placed at the service of other designs and have been given a greater purpose, that of raising to the level of art an interpretation of the time, the world, and man’s eternal condition. That is why in the statement of the reasons for awarding the Nobel Prize to Pär Lagerkvist, it seems legitimate to us to affirm that this national literary production has risen to the European level.” (Source)

From Aftonland, a 1953 collection of poetry, translated by W.H. Auden & Leif Sjöberg as Evening Land:

I wanted to know
But was only allowed to ask,
I wanted light
But was only allowed to burn.
I demanded the ineffable
But was only allowed to live.

I complained,
But nobody understood what I meant.

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I have read The Dwarf, Barabbas (basis of the movie with the same name) and The Sibyl . Each novel is a morality play, the themes are modern but the plots are ancient.
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