Reflections on Nature in a Stockholm Park

About the Book

For one year, I wrote down what I saw and experienced in the nature around my home in Stockholm. That is all: no more, no less.

Instead of human beings, I tried this time to portray nature at my door. At first, it felt like moving from something invisible to something tangible. But soon I understood that also in nature most things are hidden and secret. Something happens constantly beneath that which seems to be.

I am not a specialist. I had to manage with neither a microscope nor a butterfly net. I have kept to human measurements and senses. The trees are really there and the herons fly. Nothing has been made up. At least not by me.

       Margareta Ekström

About the Author

Margareta Ekström is a Swedish writer who has published about 30 much admired works – novels, short stories, poetry, reflections and also translations. “She has been called a ‘readable’ author ...one never stops to consider how (her stories) came about. They are simply there: finished, living, and authentic ...” But the most important side of her talent is “her linguistic artistry. Every line, every speech, every reconstruction has ... linguistic freshness that bears witness to a rich supply of unexpended verbal energy. She is having a sort of happy love affair with the language ...” Eva Claeson is a translator from Swedish, who, after many years in Europe now lives north of Amherst Massachusetts. In 1992 she was one of the people who started and put together the translation journal Metamorphoses, which continues to be published, now under the auspices of Smith College in Northampton Massachusetts. Among her translations published in the US there are 2 collections of Margareta Ekström’s short stories, poetry by Ekström and others in literary journals. Most recently she completed a classic novel The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg, which will be published this year.