Eeva-Liisa Manner (5 December 1921 – 7 July 1995) was a Finnish poet, playwright and translator.

Biography

She was born in

Helsinki Helsinki () is the Capital city, capital and most populous List of cities and towns in Finland, city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipali ...

, 5 December 1921, but spent her youth in

Vyborg Vyborg (; , ; , ; , ) is a town and the administrative center of Vyborgsky District in Leningrad Oblast, Russia. It lies on the Karelian Isthmus near the head of Vyborg Bay, northwest of St. Petersburg, east of the Finnish capital H ...

(Viipuri). Manner started as a poet in 1944 with ''Mustaa ja punaista'' ("Black and Red"). From her breakthrough collection of poems, ''Tämä matka'' ("This Journey", 1956) she was seen as one of the most influential

modernists Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this moveme ...

in post-war Finland. Manner wrote over fifteen original collections of poems, plays for theater and radio, novels and short prose. She translated widely in both contemporary and classic literature, including names like

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

Lewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and reluctant Anglicanism, Anglican deacon. His most notable works are ''Alice ...

Hermann Hesse Hermann Karl Hesse (; 2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a Germans, German-Swiss people, Swiss poet and novelist, and the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His interest in Eastern philosophy, Eastern religious, spiritual, and philosophic ...

, and

Franz Kafka Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a novelist and writer from Prague who was Jewish, Austrian, and Czech and wrote in German. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of Litera ...

. Her work has been translated to many European languages. Translation of Manner's ''Selected Poems'' in English was published in 1997, and the novel ''Girl on Heaven's Pier'' in 2016 by

Dalkey Archive Press Dalkey Archive Press is an American publisher of fiction, poetry, foreign translations and literary criticism specializing in the publication or republication of lesser-known, often avant-garde works. The company has offices in Funks Grove, Il ...

. Regarding her youth, she said:—

The war years shadowed my youth. I was seventeen when the Russian planes started bombarding my home town of Wiborg on 30 November 1939, damaging it badly. At armistice, Wiborg had to be yielded, it remained behind the border – an endless source of nostalgia for one who had a catlike, persevering fondness for homestead. Even as a ten-year-old, I had spine-chilling dreams about the destruction of Wiborg, and from those times onwards I have been haunted by reflections about the nature and mystery of time. I believe that we have a false conception of time; everything has already happened somewhere in an unknown dimension.

She died 7 July 1995 in

Tampere Tampere is a city in Finland and the regional capital of Pirkanmaa. It is located in the Finnish Lakeland. The population of Tampere is approximately , while the metropolitan area has a population of approximately . It is the most populous mu ...

References

External links

Britannica Online Encyclopedia.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Manner, Eeva-Liisa 1921 births 1995 deaths People from Tampere Finnish dramatists and playwrights 20th-century Finnish poets Translators to Finnish Finnish women poets Finnish women dramatists and playwrights 20th-century Finnish women writers 20th-century Finnish translators 20th-century dramatists and playwrights Thanks for the Book Award winners