Mozart's Third Brain

by Göran Sonnevi, Rika Lesser (Translator), Rosanna Warren (Foreword)

One of the great poetic masterpieces of the past century, exquisitely translated from the Swedish.

Winner of the 2006 Nordic Council’s Literature Prize, Swedish writer Göran Sonnevi is undoubtedly one of the most important poets working today. In Mozart’s Third Brain, his thirteenth book of verse, he attempts “a commentary on everything” – politics, current events, mathematics, love, ethics, music, philosophy, nature. Through the impeccable skill of award-winning translator Rika Lesser, Sonnevi’s long-form poem comes to life in English with the full force of its loose, fractured, and radiating intensity.

A poetic tour de force that darts about dynamically and imaginatively, Mozart’s Third Brain weaves an elaborate web of associations as the poet tries to integrate his private consciousness with the world around him. Through Lesser’s translation and preface, and an enlightening foreword by Rosanna Warren, readers of English will finally gain access to this masterpiece.

Genres: Poetry

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Göran Sonnevi is one of Sweden's most highly esteemed modern poets. In 2006 he was awarded the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for Oceanen (The Ocean).

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

For we know
nothing
of each other’s night
of each other’s darkness
of each other’s stars
shimmering darkly
*
In the hush of the luminous night the sound of the sea is audible, a
distant sound, that I too now think I can hear,
if I listen
*
We are neither too late nor too early;
an irremediable aspect of time Everything
else is nostalgia, in either direction
*
If we are translations, in the dynamic world of signs, forever
strange, who will read us?
*
How am I to exist in this shattered
human language
*
Out there is the sea, with its faraway gaze

[Stuart Cooke]

Like a Swedish version of Cardenal's Cantico cosmico, but darker, narrower, and less exciting.