| Recordings
The following recordings where K.B. reads her own poems are accessible
in audio cassettes from Sveriges Radios Programförsäljning,
telephone +46 (8) 7848484.
Notice that you can listen to three extracts below (in Swedish).
(AU files about 2 - 300 Kb):
You are the seed
Eternity
To the great humiliation
How can trust live
On the move [The first
verse as a sound file]
Idyll
Of course it hurts [The
first verse as a sound file]
I want to meet
Wish [The first verse
as a sound file]
Night of wishes
Invulnerable
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In the many visual pictures of K.B. it is first of all one of her roles
which has remained: the one as a recorder of her own poems. Her whole figure
seemed to go through a magic change, a radiation which strengthened the
message of the poem to the listeners. Olof Lagercrantz has described this
in his matter-of-fact but intense way in his essay "Memories and studies",
published the year efter her death. He begins his description in this way:
In her poems K.B. is the same person as she was
in her recitations. She did not like to place herself behind the rostrum
but a bit beside it. She wanted to stand free. It took her a good while
before she started to read so that her body had time to get into absolute
balance and while she was reading she was standing absolute still with
her heels together and her face a bit turned upwards. Her whole figure
and her clean open face harmonized in a remarkable way with the poems
she was reading. In such moments she was herself one of the symbols
that her genius was trying to approach.
The text has been taken from Björn Juléns article "The
changes of the Karin Boye picture" from "Karin
Boye's Life and work III" (in Swedish)
Copyright © (1996)
Text: Björn Julén
Picture: Ulf Boye.
Recordings: Sveriges Radios Förlag
Layout and presentation: May and Hans Mehlin
Translation into English: Rune Tideholm
Publication with the permission of:
Björn Julén, author and chairman of the Karin Boye Society.
Ulf Boye, holding the copyright of photos from the family album
Sylvia Söderlund, Sveriges Radios Förlag, holding the copyright
of the recordings.
Rune Tideholm, translation into English
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