Boknytt: Ernst Jünger -- A Portrait (Svensson 2014)

Min senaste bok är en biografi över Ernst Jünger. Living Traditions Magazine säger om den: "A biography of the very highest calibre." Boken kan köpas här.

Jag har skrivit en bok. Boken handlar om Ernst Jünger. Han var en tysk som levde 1895-1998. Boken är på engelska. Förlaget som gett ut boken heter Manticore Press. Det är baserat i Australien.

Boken heter "Ernst Jünger -- A Portrait". På 288 sidor berättar jag om Jüngers liv, hans centrala verk, hans kontroversiella sidor och lite till. Som hans syn på konst och historia, hans sf-romaner och hans särprägel i största allmänhet.

Boken kan beskrivas som en essä, en personligt hållen biografi. Kort sagt: ett porträtt (eng. portrait). På tyska har vi Helmuth Kiesels och Heimo Schwilks mer akademiskt hållna Jüngerbiografier. Dessa böcker kom 2007. Och här är min Jüngerbok, en bok med en friare, personligare utgångspunkt. En bok som både tar en titt den kontroversielle Jünger och som lyfter den esoteriske, livsbejakande Jünger. En Jünger som är synnerligen aktuell i dessa nihilismens tider.

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Boken har 32 kapitel. Ett exempel på stilen är detta, ur kapitel 10 som handlar om "På Marmorklipporna", Jüngers roman från 1939 som på engelska heter "On the Marble Cliffs":

”On the Marble Cliffs” displays a rich collection of characters. We have [for example] prince Sunmyra, pale and frail yet strong and belligerent, a romantic dreamer aroused from his sleep and ready to act against darkness, mirroring in a way the statue of the Bamberg Horseman (der Bamberger Reiter) in Bamberg cathedral: a heroic medieval knight, seemingly distraught but essentially a true rock of resistance. Mythologically he is in my book juxtaposed by the knight depicted by Dürer in his 16th century engraving ”The Knight, Death and the Devil”, a no-nonsense fighter with a literal devil-may-care attitude, a man of a hard mindset and yet no mere barbarian. And this character could be said to be represented by another ”Marble Cliff” figure: Biedenhorn, the commander of the mercenaries. The brothers at the centre of action get some help from him at the end, and before that he is lovingly depicted as the timeless solider, without higher ideals but reliable when it comes to battle and a jovial friend to his brothers in arms.

Du köper boken till exempel här, på Adlibris.




Relaterat
Recension av boken
På Marmorklipporna
Heliopolis
Svensson: biografi med galleri

Some Notes on A Book by Clark Ashton Smith

Hallelujah.

Who has seen the towers of Amithaine
swan-throated rising from the main
whose tides to some remoter moon
flow in a fadeless afternoon...?
Who has seen the towers of Amithaine
shall sleep, and dream of them again.

These are words by the poet Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961). I sit here with his "Out of Space and Time" vol. 2, reading about demons and gargoyles, brownies and fairies, charnel-dungeons and emerald hornettoes. A truly mind-boggling journey through thick and thin:

Rememberest thou? Enormous gongs of stone
were stricken, and the storming trumpeteers
acclaimed my deed to answering tides of spears,
and spoke the names of monsters overthrown -
griffins whose angry gold, and fervid store
of sapphires wrenched from mountain-plunged mines -
carnelians, opals, agates, almandines,
I brought to thee some scarlet eve of yore.

The collection also has prose-poems like "From the Crypts of Memory", about a shadowy existence in a dying land beyond the Beyond. This is fat, rich poesy with words you don't even find in Longman Dictionary. The piece ending the book, "The Shadows", is as rich, with all its "fretted windows", "the undesecrated seal of death" and "a meaningless antic phantasmagoria". I read them again and again these jewels of literature: neither stories nor versified poems, but poems in prose. Being about two pages long they have the right length for a prose poem.

I like the book's more conventional tales too, like "The Last Hieroglyph", "The Monster of the Prophecy", "The Death of Ilalotha" and "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis". These outings aren't overly deep, not profound in any sense of the word -- but fun in a quiet way, fun in a "oh-how-he-can-adorn-his-language-with-obsolete-words"-way. There's that personality you can't mistake, that jewelry tinge to it all that makes me come back for more. Purple shadows, man.

For trumpets blare in Amithaine
for paladins that once again
ride forth to ghostly, glamorous wars
against the doom-preparing stars.
Dreamer, awake! ... but I remain
to ride with them in Amithaine.

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The Operational, Endemic Problems of Today's MSM
My Bibliography
Obama: Is He the Mahdi?
Jordkrönikan, del 1 (in Swedish)

As you can see the depicted book is another one than the one treated in the post. However, I love that bluegreen cover, painted by Bruce Pennington as it is.