Aus dem Sansibar des Alls in Richtung Leier
Reading Poetry by: Harry Martinson

Reading
Talk
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Please note that the event is designed for a Swedish- or German speaking audience.

Harry Martinson (born 1904 in Jämshög, died 1978 in Stockholm), awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974, left behind a richly varied body of work, including novels, travel writing, and several volumes of poetry. The central star of his oeuvre, however, is the legendary and dark space opera Aniara – A Review of Man in Time and Space, a long poem in 103 sections.

It was written almost exactly five years before Kris Kelvin took up residence at the Solaris research station, and ten years before Captain James T. Kirk set off with his crew aboard the Enterprise into the vast unknown.

At the center of Aniara stands the spaceship of the same name, one of many intended to evacuate humans (here called “passengers” or “emigrants”) from the radiation-poisoned Earth, which lies dormant in a “peaceful quarantine.” It is sixteen thousand feet long, three thousand feet wide, and houses eight thousand souls, as well as the so-called “Mima,” an artificial intelligence — something like a secular, local deity on board; an artificial brain-creature of nearly infinite capacity; a source of comfort and central thinker; in short, an automaton that has achieved self-awareness (wherever Martinson was speculating back then, reality now sends its greetings).

The narrator is a kind of technician who maintains this AI: “the faithful Mima’s blue liturgist,” a so-called Mimarobe. The destination is Mars. That is the experimental setup — up to that point everything proceeds along orderly tracks. But after having to evade an asteroid, Aniara is thrown off course. Following a curve “in the outer ring of the Magdalene Field,” plagued by meteor showers, the ship loses itself in the vast nowhere, in “mystery-wide space,” in “crystal-clear infinity.” It moves inexorably toward the constellation Lyra, drifting into “sarcophagus rest” amid space debris and cosmic dust. Here the idea of humanity’s existential homelessness is powerfully translated into bound language.

Thus Mima transforms into a “shrine of visions,” supplying the passengers with disparate information from the cosmos — exactly where it comes from she does not reveal. When news of the final destruction of Earth reaches the ship, this artificial intelligence collapses, leaving behind an “extinguished hearth” around which the passengers gather. Some pass the time dancing, with orgies and penitential masses. Others stroll the planetarium deck beneath a clear plexiglass dome, watching suns roll “on the X-ray pyre in the pit of eternity.” Ennui everywhere one looks.

More than sixty years after a now somewhat dusty translation by Herbert Sandberg, a newly rendered version has just appeared from Guggolz Verlag, translated by Lena Mareen Bruns. The old varnish has been stripped away; Aniara shines in new splendor.

The event will be interpreted Swedish–German, with the kind support of ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.

In reading & conversation Dietmar Dath and Anna Hallberg
Moderation Sebastian Guggolz