Robert Bly’s The Eight Stages of Translation offers a useful framework for translating poetry, providing insights along with a process for translation. One of the things Bly wrote that has stuck with me as a practising translator is “The idea that a great poem should be translated freshly every twenty years is rooted in an awareness of how fast the spoken language changes. We need the energy of the spoken language to keep a translation alive, just as we need the energy of the written.”⁵³

I was reminded of this idea of periodically renewing language while reading CD Eskilson’s introduction to their translation of Edith Södergran’s Dikter (Poems), just issued in March 2026 by World Poetry Books as Modern Woman in a bilingual Swedish-English edition. I looked and found that the most recent previous English versions are David McDuff’s 1984 Complete Poems, revised in 1992, and Stina Katchadourian’s 1981 Love & Solitude: Selected Poems, 1916–1923, most recently revised in 1992. Both were first published more than forty years ago, suggesting the work could be ripe for renewal.

This essay focuses on McDuff and Eskilson, as both translated Dikter in full. It asks a question drawn from Bly: does the new translation bring additional spoken-language energy to the older work’s written language? Answering it is not simple.

In our collaborative translation from the French, my partner and I work to provide the reader with as close an approximation as we can to the poetic experience of the original. Another insight from Bly’s book relates to that goal. The younger the translator, he observes, the easier it is to make mistakes in tone, and looking back at the sixty-odd Rilke poems he translated in his late twenties, he found he had to throw out nearly every line, having “confused Rilke’s mood with certain violent moods I had at the time.”⁵⁴ He had made the poems more extroverted than they were, and he added, “I may still be doing that.” When we look at the approach of the two translators to Södergran’s work, we should keep this idea in mind.

Eskilson describes their project this way: “I have accentuated a modern voice and approach to phrasing to highlight the text’s power for its intended audience — future generations, those of us reading today… I have not endeavored to make Södergran’s work sound contemporary or graft a new lexicon onto it.”⁵⁵ That is an admirable aim, though, as I know personally, it is a challenge to accentuate a modern voice without sounding contemporary.

David McDuff’s approach is framed differently. His work on Södergran was recognized with the Swedish Academy’s Interpretation Prize in 2021. The blurb on his edition states that his translations “adhere as closely as possible to the spirit and the letter of the Swedish original,”⁵⁶ and McDuff’s project is oriented towards preserving the difficulty, structure, and tone of the original. We will weigh the energy Eskilson’s new translation brings against what McDuff’s version preserves of the original.

We know Södergran as a modernist steeped in the Russian Symbolist milieu of her St. Petersburg years and in the German Expressionism she met at Davos. Knowing that, and knowing what each translator set out to do, we can form an expectation. McDuff, holding to spirit and letter, should let more of Södergran’s compression and strangeness stay active in English. Eskilson, accentuating a modern voice, should be more immediately legible but more resolved, smoothing some of that strangeness. We should also keep in mind Arthur Symons’s famous formulation of Mallarmé’s Symbolist principle, “to name is to destroy, to suggest is to create.”⁵⁷

To explore that, let’s examine how Eskilson’s and McDuff’s choices in three poems shape a reader’s experience. The first is “Jag såg ett träd…,” the poem that opens Dikter. The second is the closing section of “Dagen svalnar…,” among her most famous lyrics, where the two translations are so nearly identical that the few differences can be weighed one at a time. The third is “Vierge moderne,” the poem from which Eskilson’s edition takes its title and the one they published in advance in Waxwing with a translator’s note. The new translation’s public face, chosen by the translator themself.

Two of these poems are foregrounded by the collection itself, the third by Eskilson. Reading across the rest of the book, I found that the patterns of these three poems recur throughout. The examination will focus on differences in diction, lineation, punctuation, and syntax, as well as shifts in tone and rhetorical stance. We’ll also look at the Swedish for what is visible on the page: structure, punctuation, repetition. But we won’t use the Swedish to judge translation choices.

First, let’s look at the opening poem.

Jag såg ett träd…

Jag såg ett träd som var större än alla andra

och hängde fullt av oåtkomliga kottar;

jag såg en stor kyrka med öppna dörrar

och alla som kommo ut voro bleka och starka

och färdiga att dö;

jag såg en kvinna som leende och sminkad

kastade tärning om sin lycka

och såg att hon förlorade.

En krets var dragen kring dessa ting

den ingen överträder.

Even without knowing Swedish, we can learn a great deal from the visual aspects of the poem. The ellipsis trails off as if something is already in motion before the body of the poem begins. The title is repeated at the start of the first line, so the ellipsis connects the title phrase to the poem’s opening, creating an echo across that white space.

Then the single stanza of eight lines. Notice that the same two-word phrase, jag såg, opens each of the stanza’s three movements, connecting them through repetition. They run together, linked by semicolons rather than periods, accumulating without fully stopping. Within that flow there is a sudden percussive move, one short line after two longer ones, the short line ending with a two-letter word, dö.

Then the white space after the first stanza. Something happens in the couplet that is separate from the preceding material. Is it a conclusion or a shift? We will have to see in English, but we can already see that this poem is carefully architected.

McDuff’s version:

I saw a tree…

I saw a tree that was greater than all others

and hung full of cones out of reach;

I saw a tall church with open doors

and all who came out were pale and strong

and ready to die;

I saw a woman who smiling and rouged

threw dice for her luck

and saw she had lost.

A circle was drawn around these things

that no one crosses over.

Now we see the full poem in English. The title introduces the I saw, which echoes through that first stanza, and the ellipsis continues to do its work, as if the poem has been in motion before it formally begins.

McDuff preserves the Swedish poem’s architecture faithfully. The single stanza of eight lines holds the three visions together without white space between them, creating what I call stickiness, where the three images are experienced not as sequential events but as simultaneous presences, all held in the same moment. The unusual punctuation of the original and the word choices in this translation both seem Dickinsonian.

Within that first stanza McDuff preserves the hammer of the fifth line, and ready to die, landing short after two longer lines, as it falls in the Swedish.

Then the closing couplet. A circle is drawn around these three things, sealing them together. This is a metapoetic gesture, the poem stepping back to name what it has just performed. And that final line, no one crosses over, tells us this circle is not merely formal but absolute. The poem holds these three things permanently beyond our reach, like the cones on the tree that opened it.

Eskilson’s version:

I Saw a Tree—

I saw a tree much larger than the rest

heavy with cones none could reach;

I saw a great church with open doors

where all who emerged were pale, resolute,

ready to die;

I saw a woman rouged and grinning

shoot dice to make her fortune

and I saw her lose it all.

A boundary is drawn around these things

that none can cross.

The structural changes are immediately visible. The dash in the title makes the poem feel like an aside, that opening line almost a stutter rather than the echo visible in the original.

Eskilson breaks Södergran’s single eight-line stanza into three separate units. The unsticking of the images has a significant effect — the mind sits with each vision individually rather than being asked to hold all three simultaneously. The stickiness found in the original, that accumulating pressure of three images without white space between them, is released in this version. The original stanza is, instead, experienced as a list in Eskilson’s version.

And the couplet loses its tension. When the closing statement sits at the same visual distance from the stanzas above it as each stanza sits from the others, it no longer arrives as a separate and final act. It is just another unit. The architecture of the original is flattened through this formal choice.

Eskilson gives us their rationale in their introduction. Added stanza breaks, they write, are intended “to amplify Södergran’s symbolist tendencies, particularly the juxtaposition of image and internal experience,” and these breaks “highlight the pervasive repetition within the poems, a delightfully Whitmanesque aspect that injects yet more boldness and power.”⁵⁸ But the anaphora is visible without separation — the eye finds I saw at the left margin without needing white space to locate it.

The translator has, for the stated aim of accessibility, regularized non-standard punctuation and stanza style. Longer-lined, expansive poems in the collection, like “Livet” (“Life”), are genuinely Whitmanesque, but the stanza breaks added there exact the same cost, draining the energy of the stichic form. And this poem, specifically, moves in the opposite direction from Whitman’s expansive catalogues: compressive, closing, sealing things beyond reach.

Let’s discuss some of those word choices. McDuff gives us a circle. Eskilson gives us a boundary. Circle carries metaphysical weight — the sacred, the complete. Boundary belongs to the abstract intellect.

Three other word choices in Eskilson’s version pull in the same direction. McDuff’s smiling presents the woman’s expression as inward and enigmatic. Eskilson’s grinning makes the attitude more visible, less enigmatic. Similarly, McDuff’s pale and strong leaves the quality of those emerging from the church open, a physical description without interpretation; Eskilson’s pale, resolute adds an interpretation of intent. McDuff’s allows mystery, and Eskilson’s specifies.

Shoot dice is an American colloquialism that imports a cultural register not present in McDuff’s version. McDuff simply says threw dice. And McDuff’s closing line, and saw she had lost, carries an ambiguity. The subject of saw could be the witnessing I of the poem, or it could be the woman herself seeing that she had lost. The gaze is layered.

Eskilson brings the I into that line. This eliminates the ambiguity, while and I saw her lose it all amplifies the stakes of the loss. This is not the only place Eskilson brings the I forward explicitly. The same move shapes the second poem we’ll look at.

What this comparison reveals is something more precise than a simple difference in approach. McDuff lets Södergran’s compression and idiosyncratic structures remain active, while Eskilson’s version is more legible but more resolved, smoothing some of the original’s features. Today, over a hundred years after this was written, what Södergran does in what we can see of the Swedish, and what McDuff does in the English, are what we expect from modernist poetry. But back when Södergran wrote this work, it was groundbreaking.

Eskilson’s version is more accessible, and that accessibility is a real gain for the reader Eskilson has in mind: future generations encountering Södergran for the first time. But the poem that arrives does not have the same architecture as the poem Södergran wrote. The reader who wants to experience the written energy of Södergran’s version should also spend time with McDuff, where the Symbolist credo of suggest rather than name is more closely followed.

Let’s move to a second poem, specifically the last section of it.

Dagen svalnar…

IV

Du sökte en blomma

och fann en frukt.

Du sökte en källa

och fann ett hav.

Du sökte en kvinna

och fann en själ –

du är besviken.

Looking at the Swedish, we see the same features we saw in “Jag såg ett träd…” at work. The ellipsis in the title does the same trailing-fade work as in our first poem, connecting the title to the body like a thought left unfinished. It is one of Södergran’s characteristic marks.

We also see the same stacking of phrases we found in “Jag såg ett träd…” and the same use of anaphora, the same construction opening each movement. And something new: Södergran is using a dash purposefully to move towards the poem’s termination. This makes clear that she uses these two forms of punctuation, ellipsis and dash, for deliberate and distinct effects.

McDuff’s version:

The day cools…

IV

You sought a flower

and found a fruit.

You sought a spring

and found a sea.

You sought a woman

and found a soul—

you are disappointed.

Now in English we can see how this section of the poem is operating. Each phrase pairs what was being sought with what was found, and each pairing shows a greater thing discovered than the one that was wanted. The you is the focus throughout. And in a modernist turn the language is entirely unadorned — the comparisons are offered without explanation.

That final dash relates to the final pairing, but because this is all held in one stanza, those first two images are stuck to the third. They are all present simultaneously. And we see McDuff preserves Södergran’s use of both ellipsis and dash in this poem.

Notice too that there is no I in this section. We can also see from visual inspection that it wasn’t in the Swedish. Earlier sections of this poem introduce an I and a you, or an I and a he in both McDuff’s and Eskilson’s translations. What we have here is a shift — the explicit I has disappeared completely. My reading is that the I is present in the images, in the found part of each pairing. The poet is using metaphor to make the point. The I is the fruit, the sea, the soul. The I is there without being named.

Eskilson’s version:

The Day Cools—

IV

You looked for a flower

and found a fruit.

You looked for a spring

and found a sea.

You looked for a woman

and found a soul—

I’ve disappointed you.

Set beside McDuff’s, Eskilson’s version is striking for how little it differs. The pairings are the same, the line breaks fall in the same places, the structure is untouched. Apart from the punctuation, only two things change: sought becomes looked for, and you are disappointed becomes I’ve disappointed you. That near-identity is useful. It isolates the variables. Whatever these few changes do, they do alone, and we can see each one clearly.

First, we notice the same modification from ellipsis to dash. This move to regularize the punctuation is a consistent pattern of Eskilson’s throughout this collection and is deliberate.

Eskilson has done something here that fits with Bly’s idea of making a translation speak in the language of its time. Sought is more formal in contemporary English. Looked for is how people speak today and does not hit the ear of the modern reader the way sought might. This is Bly’s rule operating. Even though Eskilson says in their introduction that they are not making the work sound contemporary, it would be hard to see this wording choice any other way. We can understand the impulse for looked for.

But sought is not merely formal. It carries resonance that looked for cannot. The phrase Seek and ye shall find is evoked by that word, and McDuff’s version appears to be playing with it directly. Södergran even closes the section with soul, and both translators agree on that word. The deeper point is that she is turning the biblical promise on its head. Seek and you shall find more than you sought. And then it turns out the seeker is disappointed with the greater things found. This small section is doing enormous work beneath its plain surface.

And then the last line. McDuff gives us you are disappointed. The grammar keeps the focus entirely on the you, the section closes on the seeker’s failure, and the I remains present only in Södergran’s images. The you could be any of us. The poem section stays universal.

I’ve disappointed you. With that single choice the section changes its nature entirely. The I steps forward, takes responsibility, addresses the you directly. It becomes a personal exchange between two people rather than a statement about seeking and finding. The universal closes down into the particular. The Swedish suggests Södergran deliberately withdrew the I from this section. Eskilson chooses to insert it.

Eskilson’s is immediate, emotionally direct, the personal exchange between speaker and addressee landing with clarity. Eskilson’s stated aims support this choice. This directness is the contemporary energy the poem needs for a new reader and is the kind of spoken-language vitality Bly calls for.

But what Eskilson’s version has traded away is what gives McDuff’s version its energy. The biblical echo beneath sought, the universal you that could be any of us, the I present only in metaphor — these are not decorative features of the section. They are what the section is doing. Södergran withdrew the I deliberately. The grammar enacts the argument: the speaker is the fruit, the sea, the soul, present without being named, greater than what was wanted and still a disappointment. Eskilson’s I’ve disappointed you resolves that into a conversation between two people. Again, Eskilson’s version is more immediately legible but more resolved, smoothing the original’s strangeness by making the speaker explicit.

Having looked at each change against both McDuff and what we can see in the Swedish itself, we can weigh what the modernizing actually did. The diction genuinely renews: looked for brings the contemporary energy Bly asks for. But that same impulse, carried into the punctuation and the final line, gives up things the poem was using — the ellipsis, the biblical echo, the withheld I, the universal you. Eskilson trades key elements of the poem to pursue contemporary energy, and the near-identity of the two versions lets us see exactly what the trade gained and what it cost.

This is the most ambitious poem in the collection, and it uses many of the poetic techniques we have been tracking.

Vierge moderne

Jag är ingen kvinna. Jag är ett neutrum.

Jag är ett barn, en page och ett djärvt beslut,

jag är en skrattande strimma av en scharlakanssol…

Jag är ett nät för alla glupska fiskar,

jag är en skål för alla kvinnors ära,

jag är ett steg mot slumpen och fördärvet,

jag är ett språng i friheten och självet…

Jag är blodets viskning i mannens öra,

jag är en själens frossa, köttets längtan och förvägran,

jag är en ingångsskylt till nya paradis.

Jag är en flamma, sökande och käck,

jag är ett vatten, djupt men dristigt upp till knäna,

jag är eld och vatten i ärligt sammanhang på fria villkor…

The Swedish once again allows us to see a number of things. The first is the title. Besides “Nocturne” (night poem), “Vierge moderne” is the only other title in the collection in which Södergran used a phrase in another language — a deliberate reach outside Swedish, signalling ambitions wider than the local.⁵⁹

The use of the French moderne (modern) with vierge (virgin) evokes for me the idea of an update to the classical tradition of the Roman Vestal Virgins. Those women, who stayed celibate but gained power and prestige while maintaining the sacred fire, occupied a space that was outside the patriarchal power structure and the traditional female roles of the time.

Now the Swedish itself. The key engine of this poem is anaphora, Jag är opening each movement, driving the poem forward through accumulation. Södergran is also doing something sophisticated with sentence length and punctuation. The first line opens with two short end-stopped sentences. Then two longer lines, the second trailing into an ellipsis — that fade we have discussed, a film dissolve rather than a cut, the thought continuing even as we move into the next image. Then four shorter phrases, the last ending again in an ellipsis. Then three lines forming a single end-stopped sentence. Then three more lines lengthening out until we reach the longest line in the poem, which ends with a third ellipsis and fades to black. Three ellipses in all, each placed where the thought dissolves rather than stops.

This is a carefully built speed variation: short, long, short, stopped, lengthening. And the mix of punctuation is doing precise expressive work throughout.

McDuff’s version:

Vierge Moderne

I am no woman. I am a neuter.

I am a child, a page and a bold resolve,

I am a laughing stripe of a scarlet sun…

I am a net for all greedy fish,

I am a skoal to the glory of all women,

I am a step towards hazard and ruin,

I am a leap into freedom and self…

I am the whisper of blood in the ear of the man,

I am the soul’s ague, the longing and refusal of the flesh,

I am an entrance sign to new paradises.

I am a flame, searching and brazen,

I am water, deep but daring up to the knee,

I am fire and water in free and loyal union…

Now we see the poem in full. McDuff preserves all three ellipses, maintaining the fade Södergran built into the poem’s architecture. The thought continues beyond the line rather than stopping at it.

The first line is challenging, perhaps the hardest we’ve encountered so far. To understand the nuance of I am no woman in English, I need to go to another English phrase, I am no angel. That phrase carries the meaning “I may look like an angel, you may think I act like an angel, but I act the opposite sometimes, so I am more complicated than that.” There is an ambiguity or ambivalence to that phrase. I think that is what is happening here. McDuff’s translation is saying “You think I am your idea of a woman, I am different from that idea.”

The second half is even harder: I am a neuter. It is a strange thing to call a person. In English the word pulls a few ways at once — the grammatical neuter, the neutered animal, the biologically sexless worker — but what a reader lands on, without reaching for a dictionary, is something like neither male nor female, a being whose sex is left undefined. Not neutered, with its sense of something taken away; closer to sex simply not assigned. And the word stays open. A neuter does not tell us what she is, only what she is not. The reader is left with the strangeness and has to hold it unresolved.

Difficult, but when we see how the whole poem operates, this difficulty makes more sense. This statement will be contradicted quickly in a poem that is very sexual and celebratory of femininity. This poem loves paradox and the layering of contradictions. I am a step and then I am a leap. I am a flame, I am water, I am fire and water. The contradictions do not cancel each other — instead they accumulate. I am no woman, I am a neuter and I am feminine and sexual.

Eskilson’s version:

Vierge Moderne

I am not a woman. I am neutrois.

I am a child, a tomboy, a bold decision,

I am a laughing streak of scarlet sun;

I am a net for all voracious fish,

I am a toast to women’s glory,

I am a step towards luck and towards ruin,

I am a leap to freedom and to myself;

I am blood’s whisper in a man’s ear,

I am the soul’s ague, flesh’s longing and refusal,

I am a signpost pointing to a new paradise.

I am a flame, gallant and searching,

I am a pool, knee-high deep yet daring,

I am fire and water in a free and honest union—

This is a different poem from McDuff’s. Almost every line carries a change that is substantial in the experience of the poem.

First, as in both previous poems, Eskilson replaces the ellipses. The two mid-poem ellipses become semicolons, resulting in a pause rather than a fade, the thought contained rather than continuing beyond the line. The final ellipsis becomes a dash, closing the poem with a definitive stop where Södergran left it dissolving into silence. This regularization of the punctuation is reminiscent of what was done to Emily Dickinson’s work when first published, an attempt to make the strange more accessible to readers.

Eskilson’s version does not have the same difficulty as McDuff’s version. I am not a woman is clear with none of the ambiguity. Neutrois is a specific identity category coined in the 1990s.⁶⁰ Though this works against Eskilson’s intention not to graft on a new lexicon, the line is definite and works towards their project of legibility. I am not this. I am this. Neutrois names what neuter suggests.

Page becomes tomboy. The page, medieval court attendant, young, serving, neither fully masculine nor fully adult, carries its own gender ambiguity through history and meaning. Tomboy resolves that ambiguity into a recognizable contemporary category.

Eskilson explains these choices in the translator’s note in Waxwing: “I employed the more radical term ‘neutrois’ instead of the somewhat awkward ‘neuter,’ and used ‘tomboy’ where the original read ‘pageboy.’ Through this, I hope to present the complex negotiation and at times rejection of gender norms in Södergran’s work.”⁶¹ There is a clear logic to that, and bringing Södergran to readers who might not otherwise find a way into her strangeness is a real gift.

Some changes serve Bly’s principle honestly: towards hazard and ruin becomes towards luck and towards ruin. Eskilson’s version sounds more conversational. But the effect is quite different. In McDuff’s version, hazard and ruin both have negative connotations and are combined as one destination. Eskilson has chosen words that are opposites while repeating the towards to make it clear that these are two different things, making a move towards opposite destinations.

We can credit the use of toast instead of McDuff’s skoal with providing a clearer, more contemporary phrasing, the kind Bly calls for. A reader in 1984 might recognize skoal in a way many readers in 2026 might not. Here the modern choice wins, with nothing traded away.

One of the most revealing comparisons in the poem sets Eskilson’s more natural phrasing against the poetic effect of McDuff’s. Eskilson gives us I am blood’s whisper in a man’s ear; McDuff, I am the whisper of blood in the ear of the man. Eskilson’s is simpler and more compressed. But McDuff’s longer line carries two anapests — in the ear, of the man — and their rising, evenly beating motion enacts the pulse the image names; blood whispering in an ear is the sound of one’s own heartbeat, and the line beats it out.

Eskilson’s compression leaves no room for that rhythm. The diction shifts too: blood’s whisper is more natural than the whisper of blood, but it loses a possibility the of keeps open — that the whisper is itself made of blood, not merely something blood possesses. The compression that makes Eskilson’s line more natural is the same move that empties it of both the rhythm and the ambiguity McDuff’s line holds.

Other changes alter the poem’s texture and tone in ways that accumulate. Searching and brazen becomes gallant and searching. Brazen reinforces the flame image that permeates the poem as well as the sensuousness and celebration of women. Gallant is a word choice that is more masculine and chivalric and surprisingly formal, not in keeping with the project of modernizing the language. McDuff’s an entrance sign to new paradises evokes the liminal and contains the plural strangeness of paradises. Eskilson’s signpost pointing to a new paradise is more distant and directional, the mystery of multiple paradises collapsed into one. Both these choices are flatter in energy than McDuff’s.

Södergran’s work rewards the kind of attention this comparison has asked of it. None of the formal architecture or punctuation is accidental, and the more closely you look, the more precisely it is working. It is no wonder she is considered a foundational figure, and it is no wonder her work attracted McDuff and Eskilson. The poems stand on their own without the mythology that developed later.

What this comparison has shown is not simply that two translators make different choices. It has shown that those choices have consequences: for the poem’s argument, its strangeness, its written energy. A reader who comes to Södergran through Eskilson will find a poet who feels contemporary, urgent, and accessible. A reader who then moves to McDuff will find that Södergran was doing something older and stranger beneath that accessibility, and that the strangeness is not incidental but essential.

Bly proposed renewal in the name of spoken-language energy being added to older translations, but a renewal can subtract, and this new one also does that. Eskilson often trades the energy McDuff preserves, and even what we can see in Södergran’s Swedish, for accessibility. Eskilson’s accessibility has brought new readers to Södergran, including the author of this essay, and that matters.

Bly wrote that the best translation “resembles a Persian rug seen from the back — the pattern is apparent, but not much more.”⁶² Based on these two translations, I’m going to argue with him. Both translators gave us more than the pattern on the back, even if they sometimes seem like they gave us different rugs. We can be grateful for that.

53. Robert Bly, The Eight Stages of Translation (Boston: Rowan Tree Press / St. Paul: Ally Press, 1986; first published 1983), p. 25.

54. Bly, The Eight Stages of Translation, p. 31.

55. Eskilson, Modern Woman, p. xi.

56. McDuff, Complete Poems, back cover.

57. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1919), p. 196.

58. Eskilson, Modern Woman, p. xii.

59. The only two poem titles in Dikter not in Swedish are “Nocturne” and “Vierge moderne”; both appear in McDuff, Complete Poems, and Eskilson, Modern Woman.

60. “Neutrois FAQ,” Neutrois.com, https://www.neutrois.com/neutrois-faq/.

61. CD Eskilson, “Translator’s Note,” Waxwing Literary Journal, Issue 28.

62. Bly, The Eight Stages of Translation, p. 48.