The author thanks World Poetry Books for providing a review copy of Modern Woman, and for their ongoing work bringing poetry in translation to English-language readers.

Passages from the translations by David McDuff, CD Eskilson, and Stina Katchadourian, and from Jane Hirshfield’s poem, are quoted for purposes of criticism and review, with attribution throughout. The Swedish texts of Södergran’s poems follow the first edition of Dikter (Borgå: Holger Schildts Förlag, 1916), now in the public domain. The 1984 edition of McDuff’s Complete Poems is the one used for the comparative analysis.

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Eskilson, CD, trans. Modern Woman. By Edith Södergran. New York: World Poetry Books, 2026.

Eskilson, CD. “Translator’s Note.” Waxwing Literary Journal, Issue 28. https://waxwingmag.org/items/issue28/56_Eskilson-Translators-Note.php

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Hirshfield, Jane. “It Was Like This: You Were Happy.” In After. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

Hökkä, Tuula. “Södergran, Edith (1892–1923).” Kansallisbiografia. Studia Biographica 4. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2002. http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:sks-kbg-004814

“Holmroos, Gabriel Michelsson (1824–1896).” Geni. https://www.geni.com/people/Gabriel-Holmroos/6000000079397328050

Katchadourian, Stina, trans. Love & Solitude: Selected Poems, 1916–1923. By Edith Södergran. San Francisco: Fjord Press, 1981; 3rd ed., Seattle: Fjord Press, 1992.

McDuff, David, trans. Complete Poems. By Edith Södergran. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1984.

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Södergran, Edith. Dikter. Borgå: Holger Schildts Förlag, 1916. Project Gutenberg ebook #77933, 2026. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77933

Södergran, Edith. The Poet Who Created Herself: Selected Letters of Edith Södergran. Commentary by Hagar Olsson. Translated by Silvester Mazzarella. Norwich: Norvik Press, 2015.

“Södergran, Edith (1892–1923).” Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/sodergran-edith-1892-1923

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David McDuff (born 1945, Sale, Cheshire) is a British translator, editor, and literary critic. Educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied Russian and German and earned his PhD in 1971, McDuff has spent his career bringing Russian and Nordic literature into English. His translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot for Penguin Classics, as well as poetry by Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova. His Bloodaxe Books translations include the Complete Poems of Edith Södergran (1984) and the Complete Poems of Karin Boye (1994). Among his awards: the 1994 TLS/George Bernard Shaw Translation Prize, the 2006 Stora Pris of the Finland-Swedish Writers’ Association, the 2013 Finnish State Award for Foreign Translators, and the Swedish Academy’s Interpretation Prize (Tolkningspris) in 2021.

CD Eskilson is a trans nonbinary poet, editor, and translator from Los Angeles. They are the author of Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025) and hold an MFA from the University of Arkansas, where they received the Walton Family Fellowship in Poetry and the Lily Peter Fellowship in Translation. Their work appears in The Kenyon Review, The Offing, Pleiades, The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, and others. They are a recipient of the C.D. Wright / Academy of American Poets Prize and have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Modern Woman is their translation of Södergran’s Dikter, published by World Poetry Books in 2026.

The author is solely responsible for the writing and ideas contained in this work. During the preparation of the biographical section, the author utilized English-language sources directly while also employing Claude to identify specific historical data within Swedish and Finnish materials. All identified facts were manually cross-checked against the original Swedish or Finnish texts, and the translations were then verified for accuracy using DeepL, Reverso, and often primary-source comparisons.