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Newsletter no. 11 – The Modern Art of Living
by Oscar Wieselgren
The Swedish reception of John
Cowper Powys may seem surprisingly early and intensive. This is partly due to
coincidences, but there are also some very important figures that introduced
Powys to the Swedes: Alf Ahlberg, Sven Erik
Täckmark, Cedric Hentschel.
Powys has also been treated by scholars like Harald
Fawkner, Janina Nordius, Eivor
Lindstedt. Swedish translations of Powys were
early. In the later part of the translation history Sven Erik Täckmark is the
most important individual. He was also the founding father of the Swedish John Cowper Powys Society, and he is absolutely
vital for Powys in Sweden.
Later
on, I will in a series of articles in our newsletter present the Swedish
Powys reception. I will of course deal with Sven Erik Täckmark as well as the
scholarly response to Powys in Sweden. In the first installment
however – which is to be published in next issue of the newsletter – I will
discuss the critical reception of the first translations into Swedish of
Powys, the renditions of
The Meaning of Culture and The Art of Happiness . As a foretaste,
I would like to give an example of how Powys was discussed in the Swedish
Thirties, through a review on The
meaning of Culture, written by Oscar Wiselgren
in Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet,
November 30th 1935, here reprinted in extenso.
Lars
Gustaf Anderson
THE MODERN ART OF LIVING
”Tell
me, what’s Your opinion of the Soul?”, the character
Oldfux asks in ”The Lying-In Room”, and Corfitz, confused, answers: ”Sir, that’s kind of hidden for
me”. The questioner is not satisfied with the answer, and attacks Corfitz for his sceptical position. Today, Corfitz could have spoken more freely, because there are
many who have expressed views on the subject in rather categorical ways. But
most of these statements seem to fail, no one has
stayed on as true not even for those twenty years that Ibsen, through his
mouthpiece Dr. Stockmann,
explained to be the average lifetime for an ordinary truth. The variation of
values has been so impressive that we are all used to confront new
psychological generalisations with some mistrust. At the end of the day, you
rather hold on to classical psychology, well knowing that you know what you
have got, but not what there is to come.
John
Cowper Powys, however, is not an adventurous conquistador on the field of
psychology. He may not be afraid of news, but he is in a liberating way free
from the desire to seem original at all costs. He does not need to, because
he has posture enough to be engaging in spite of his traditionalism. In the
Anglo-Saxon world he is famous since long. Among the well-known Powys
brothers - descending from a vicar’s family in Derbyshire and currently
described in a book by Richard H. Ward – he is the foremost and the one most
widely read. During 25 years he has been a public lecturer in America, and
has as such been raised to immense popularity. Nowadays he lives in England,
continuing to write, full of vigour and ideas. His work ”The
meaning of culture”, now superbly translated into Swedish by Dr. Ahlberg, is one of his best
books, and you have to rejoice that it is now accessible in our language. It
is not a systematic psychology of personality that is developed here, rather
a more general manual for the human culture of individuality. There are a lot
of wise and fine observations concerning the individual and the forces that
condition its development; social, literary, moral and artistic in diverse
mixtures, and besides that keen-eyed general analyses, clever parallels, and
well thought out valuations. The excellent Who’s Who tells us that the
writer’s favourite hobby is long walks. That is easily understood, when you
read him, since he seems to understand life and literature as a wide
landscape, which he walks through with open eyes and an open mind. There is a
lot to point out, for example the magnificent analysis of the value of
intellectual training(p. 28), the superior treatment of the loud-mouthed
apostles for the so called practical life (p. 168), and the truly personal
rendering of the importance of the great experiences of art, obviously
founded in his own life (p. 222). However, no summary can do justice to the
noble and refined intellectualism that meets the reader through these pages.
”The meaning of culture” is a book that should be read more than once, it
ought to be reflected and considered. In the helplessness and confusion of
the present moment you will hope that it has a special mission to fulfil.
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