Karin Boye

Statue of Karin Boye, made by Peter Linde, in front of the Gothenburg City Library.

Karin Boye (Gothenburg, October 26, 1900-Alingsås, April 23, 1941) was a Swedish poet, novelist, essayist, translator, feminist, politically active and globetrotter. She committed suicide in 1941.

Biography

He was born in Gothenburg, Sweden and moved with his family to Stockholm in 1909. He studied at Uppsala University from 1921 to 1926. His first collection of poems was Clouds (Moln, in Swedish). While in Uppsala and until 1930, Boye was a member of the Clarté socialist group. Between 1929 and 1934 Boye was married to another member of the Clarté group, Leif Björck. In 1932, after separating from her husband, she had a relationship with Gunnel Bergström, who left her husband Gunnar Ekelöf for Boye.

Boye committed suicide by taking sleeping pills after leaving her home on April 23, 1941. According to police reports from the Gothenburg Regional Archives, she was found lying on a rock, on a mountain overlooking Alingsås, near Bolltorpsvägen, by a farmer who was taking a walk. In the place there is today a commemorative monument of her.

Literary career

In 1931, Boye, along with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin, founded the literary magazine Spektrum, from which they introduced T. S. Eliot and the Surrealists to Sweden. Together with the critic Erik Mesterton they translated "The Waste Land" Eliot's. Karin Boye had an important role in the translation of T. S. Eliot's work into Swedish.

Karin Boye is perhaps best known for her poems, of which the most prominent are "Of course it hurts" (Ja visst gör det ont) and "En movimiento" (I rörelse) from his collection Los hornos (Härdarna) from 1927, and "By the Tree" (För trädets skull) from 1935. He was a member of the Swedish literary institution Samfundet De Nio from 1931 until his death.

Her novel Crisis (Kris) shows her religious crisis, her lesbianism and bisexuality. In his novels The Awakening of Merits (Merit vaknar) and Very Little (För lite) he explores gambling male and female roles.

Outside Sweden, his best-known work is probably the novel Kallocaína (1939). Inspired by the heyday of National Socialism in Germany, it is a portrait of a dystopian society in the same vein as George Orwell's novel 1984 (though written ten years before 1984) and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In the novel, an idealistic scientist named Leo Kall invents Kallocaína, a kind of truth serum. In 2013, Carmen Montes received the National Translation Award for her Spanish translation of the novel.

Two very different epitaphs were written on her death, the best known being the poem "Dead Amazon (Död amazon) by the poet Hjalmar Gullberg, in which she is shown as "Very dark and with big eyes". The other was written by her close friend Ebbe Linde, it is titled "Dead Friend" (Död kamrad), in this one she is not portrayed as a Amazon, but like a normal person, small and gray in death, freed from battles and pains.

Acknowledgments

• In 2004 the name Karin Boye Library was named to one of the sections of the Uppsala University Library in its honor
• The literary association Karin Boye Sällskapet (The Karin Boye Society) was founded in 1983 and is dedicated to keeping Boye's work alive by spreading it to new readers
• The municipality of Huddinge has established in its honor and memory the Karin Boye literary award (Karin Boyes litterära pris)