It may seem strange that a poet known primarily for his nature writing would win a Nobel Prize in 1974 for a long narrative poem that narrates the nuclear destruction of the world and its aftermath. But Harry Martinson’s literary epic Aniara: En revy av människan i tid och rum (Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space) is designed to illustrate, in 103 haunting and compelling individual songs, the consequences of humankind’s unexamined faith in technology and its consequent alienation from nature.
While a number of famous dystopic science fiction novels were published in the early 20th century—among them Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, Karin Boye’s Kallocain, and George Orwell’s 1984—Martinson’s Aniara is considered the first great poem of the Space Age and the Atomic Age. Martinson has said that the inspiration for Aniara came from one night when he was studying the Andromeda galaxy through his home telescope, and the galaxy seemed to be shining so much brighter than before that he woke his wife, Ingrid, to come look. This experience sparked his imagination about what it would be like to travel to the galaxy in a spaceship.
Martinson’s subsequent publication of the first 29 songs in 1953, under the title “The Song of Doris and Mima” in his collection Cicada, happened the same year the Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb and preceded by four years the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, which started the space race between the world’s two superpowers, the USSR and the United States. Through this poem Martinson offers the world a dystopic vision of what could happen if both the space race and the nuclear arms race continued to accelerate unchecked.
Harry Martinson
Aniara is on one level a compelling, fantastical travel narrative told through a sequence of poems, recalling ancient epics such as Homer’s The Odyssey. It depicts the fallout of a nuclear war that destroys Earth and forces its survivors to flee on spaceships to colonies on neighboring planets. One of these ships, Aniara, is knocked off course by an asteroid and is lost in outer space, predicting by several decades the premise of the popular 1990s American television show Star Trek: Voyager (the first song describes being knocked off course).
The refugees onboard Aniara panic when they realize they are doomed to drift in space forever, but an empathetic telecommunications console known as the mima, which culls the galaxy for audio and video feeds of their lost home and projects them for the refugees, restores their hopes: “The mima tuned us into signs of life / spread far and wide… We pull in traces, pictures, landscapes, scraps of language / being spoken someplace, only where?” (Song 6).
The mima becomes a goddess figure for those onboard, and most of the poem’s songs are narrated by the mimarobe—the mechanic who maintains the mima. But the mimarobe and everyone else soon realize that the mima is no longer mere machine but, by becoming humanity’s vessel of hope, has developed human qualities such as empathy: “the mima had invented half herself” (Song 9). Thus, when the mima receives the horrifying images of the nuclear destruction of Earth, she is overwhelmed with sorrow and dies (Songs 2 through 29).
For the remainder of the doomed journey, the mimarobe and his travel companions first try to repair the mima, then to re-create their harsh reality by creating a world of visions (Songs 30 to 68), then to take refuge in memories of life on Earth (Songs 69 to 80). In the fourth and final phase of the journey, which begins, “The dark in our minds neared its worst,” the mimarobe’s songs become especially despairing and haunting (Songs 81–101).
The final two songs are the concluding comments of the mimarobe, whom Martinson clearly intends to be society’s poet, trying to make sense of the whole calamity: “I had meant to make them an Edenic place, / but since we left the one we had destroyed / our only home became the night of space / where no god heard us in the endless void” (Song 102).
Martinson’s long poem is distinctive for its depth of emotion, its compelling female characters throughout, its skillful use of neologisms (to suggest futurist technology and experience), its evocation of Norse and Greek myth and legend, its breathtaking poetic imagery, and the rich variation in its lyrical form. These qualities made it ideal for musical adaptation, and it was transformed into a successful opera, which premiered in 1959, with music composed by Karl-Birger Blomdahl.
Like many works of science fiction, Aniara has its own distinctive vocabulary. Earth is named Doris (after a district of ancient Greece just north of Mount Parnassus, expressing “both the natural and intellectual beauty found upon Earth”), the telecommunications console-goddess is “mima,” the mima’s mechanical processes are a “gyrospin,” the spaceship is called a “goldonder,” and the chief pilot—a woman—is named Isagel, suggesting Isis, the Egyptian goddess associated with the cosmic order.
Although the poem was written in Swedish, because Martinson invents this fantastical vocabulary from words with Latin and Greek roots familiar to English speakers, Klass and Sjöberg were able to translate Martinson’s distinctive vocabulary very skillfully in their English version.
As all good science fiction does, Martinson’s poem easily transcends the historical moment in which it was written to become a universal tale for all ages. In addition, Martinson used the distinctive qualities of lyrical poetry to depict the beauty of nature and humankind, even in its most devastated, compromised state.
Bibliography
Broman, Lars. “Aniara: On a Space Epic and its Author.” Planetarian 27, no. 2 (June 1998).
Hall, Todd. “Introduction to Aniara.” Just the Other Day: Essays on the Suture of the Future, edited by Luk Vos, 383–386, Antwerp: EXA, 1985.
Martinson, Harry. Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space. Translated by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg. Ashland, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 1999.
Categories: British Literature, Swedish Literature
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