Aniara is a book of prophecy, a panoramic view of humanity’s possible fate. A malfunction knocks the craft off course, taking these would-be Mars colonists on an irreversible journey into deep space. Aniara is the story of a luxurious space ship, loaded with 8,000 evacuees, fleeing an Earth made uninhabitable by Man’s technological arrogance. Story Line’s description: "The great Swedish writer Harry Martinson published his masterpiece, Aniara, during the height of the Cold War – right after the Soviet Union announced that it had exploded the hydrogen bomb. All of these editions are out-of-print and pretty hard to find. It was reprinted in the US by the now-defunct Story Line Press. In 1991, the Swedish publisher Vekerum brought out a new English translation by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjoberg. The poet does this not once, but time and time again, relentlessly and in many ways.“ Theodore Sturgeon said: "Martinson’s crowning achievement is the communication at last of galactic immensity, something heretofore reserved to intuition or the highly exclusive speech of abstract mathematics. This edition of Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space by Nobel-Prize winner Harry Martinson was “adapted from the Swedish by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert.” Knopf published the same translation in 1963 and then Avon reprinted it as a paperback in 1976. MacDiarmid is the giant Scottish modernist poet and Schubert translated many books from Sweden, and I bet their version is idiosyncratic and wild. People continue to not read space poetry.
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