Eeva-Liisa Manner
Encyclopedia
Eeva-Liisa Manner Finnish poet, playwright and translator. She was born in Helsinki but spent her youth in Vyborg
(Viipuri). Manner started as a poet in 1944 (Mustaa ja punaista; "Black and Red"). From her breakthrough collection of poems, Tämä matka ("This Journey", 1956) she has been seen as one of the most influential modernists in postwar Finland.
Eeva-Liisa Manner wrote over fifteen original collections of poems, plays for theater and radio, novels and short prose. She translated widely contemporary and classic literature, including names like William Shakespeare
, Lewis Carroll
, Hermann Hesse
, and Franz Kafka
.
Her work has been translated to many European languages. Translation of Manners Selected Poems in English was published in 1997.
Vyborg
Vyborg is a town in Leningrad Oblast, Russia, situated on the Karelian Isthmus near the head of the Bay of Vyborg, to the northwest of St. Petersburg and south from Russia's border with Finland, where the Saimaa Canal enters the Gulf of Finland...
(Viipuri). Manner started as a poet in 1944 (Mustaa ja punaista; "Black and Red"). From her breakthrough collection of poems, Tämä matka ("This Journey", 1956) she has been seen as one of the most influential modernists in postwar Finland.
Eeva-Liisa Manner wrote over fifteen original collections of poems, plays for theater and radio, novels and short prose. She translated widely contemporary and classic literature, including names like William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
, Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
, Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, and Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
.
Her work has been translated to many European languages. Translation of Manners Selected Poems in English was published in 1997.
Manner about her youth
The war years shadowed my youth. I was seventeen when the Russian planes started bombarding my home town of Wiborg on 30 November 1939, damaging it badly. At armistice, Wiborg had to be yielded, it remained behind the border – an endless source of nostalgia for one who had a catlike, persevering fondness for homestead. Even as a ten-year-old, I had spine-chilling dreams about the destruction of Wiborg, and from those times onwards I have been haunted by reflections about the nature and mystery of time. I believe that we have a false conception of time; everything has already happened somewhere in an unknown dimension.