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Ralf (Thomas Friedrich) Parland (1914-1995) | |
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Writer and journalist, whose brothers Henry Parland and Oscar Parland, also gained fame as writers. With Bengt Holmqvist, Harry Järv, Göran Schildt, Sven Willner, and Henrik Tikkanen, Ralf Parland was a representative of the generation, who returned from the war without illusions and without the old system of values on which the pre-war Finland had been built. He has been called both modernist and timeless mystic. From the late 1940s Parland lived in Sweden. He received the Nils Ferlin award in 1989. "Vem tjänar denna nya tid? Ralf Parland was born in Vyborg into a family with a distant English background. His father Oswald Parland was an engineer and bridge builder, who worked for the Russian civil service. His mother Ida Maria Parland came from a Baltic-German family, the Sesemanns, prominent in Vyborg's history. At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, the family moved to Finland. Parland graduated in 1935 from secondary school. In his early works he shared Henry Parland's light style and ironic view. His first book, BUSCH, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1934 and was followed by EBONIT in 1937. Parland also contributed music - he played violin - and other columns to several magazines, among others Nya Argus, Stocholms-Tidningen, Dagens Nyheter and Perspectiv. In 1938 he married the writer Eva Aline Wichman; they divorced in 1945 and Parland married Heli Gestrin. After divorce in 1960 Parland married Helga Henschen. As a poet Parland started in the modernist vein of Elmer Diktonius and Gunnar Björling with his book AVSTÅND (1938). Diktonius was his neighbour in Grankulla. As a young man Parland spent a good deal of time with him. Parland used images from jazz, natural sciences and technology, often with pessimistic undertones. He contributed publishing house Holger Schildts's new cultural magazine, a quarterly, which had liberal editorial policy. In 1939 he started his career as translator with Marcu Valeriu's Machiavelli, renessansmänniskan och maktfilosofen. Other translation's include Goethe's Den unge Werthers lidanden in 1949 and Robert Musil's Tre kvinnor, with an introduction (1957). During World War II Parland was critical about Finland's policy, and opposed the war against the Soviet Union. In his postwar production Parland moved away from Diktonius's influence, becoming more abstract. In the late 1940s he joined the leftist literary association Kiila ('wedge') with Oscar Parland, Thomas Warburton and a number of other Swedish-speaking Finnish writers. In 1948 Parland moved from Finland to Sweden, where he lived since, publishing poems and short stories with Orwellian science fiction themes (EROS OCH ELEKTRONERNA, 1953; EN APA FOR TILL HIMMELM, 1961). With these works he took distance to modernism. He had already showed in ABEL Y AIFARS SÅNGER (1941) his interest in myths, and in MOT FULLBORDAN (1944) his interest in China and India. In HYMNER FRÅN SANTSCHE-PI (1959) Parland created an antiutopia, with connections to the James Hilton's more simple story of Shangri-La. "Jag är kommen till Santsche-Pi / att lärä er oberördhetens broderskap / det blå medvetandets sanning: / Varen rör / för detta viddrag från tingen! / Ty det är icke ni / det är vinden genom er." Parland's dystopic science fiction culminated in I. EN ROMAN OM FÖRHÄVDELSEN (1973), a prose expansion of the Santsche-Pi myths. SONAT FÖR FALLSKÄRM OCH KALEBASS (1964) showed the author's affection for Russian culture. Parland has translated into Swedish Olavi Paavolainen's work Finlandia i moll (1947, with Lars Hjalmarsson Dahl and Atos Wirtanen). Parland's short stories were usually sketchy. Like his brother Oscar, he returned in several works into his childhood milieu, among them HEM TILL SIT HAV (1957) and EN HUNDPREDIKAN (1966). Like a bell's hollow blow For further reading: Femtio år finlandssvensk litteratur by Thomas Warburton (1951); Modern finlandssvensk litteratur by Bengt Holmqvist (1951); 'Ett folk som blött' by Johan Wrede in Den Svenska Litteraturen, vol. 6 (1990); A History of Finland's Literature, ed. by George C. Schoolfield (1998); Finlands svenska litteraturhistoria. Andra delen: 1900-talet, ed. by Clas Zilliacus (2000) Selected works:
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