Summary
Kaj Falkman: Netaknuta struna
Kaj Falkman (1934) is a distinguished Swedish writer, translator, diplomat and president of the Swedish Haiku Society. He was a close and good acquaintance of the man, diplomat and writer Dag Hammarskjöld, and published articles about him in the Swedish and international press, and also published a book of Hammarskjöld's speeches and essays entitled Speaking for the World. In his oeuvre, the book Netaknuta struna that he wrote and in which he published a collection of selected haiku poems and photographs of Dag Hammarskjöld stands out.
Netaknuta struna is a tribute to the human and poetic greatness of Dag Hammarskjöld, a Swedish writer and diplomat, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. These are 50 haiku poems and 36 suggestive black-and-white photographs from Hammarskjöld's legacy. In this book, Falkman, through the prism of Hammarskjöld's haikus, brings us closer to the significance of this man who directed the strength of his own contradictions towards the search for harmony in service and the welfare of humanity. Falkman talks about a man in whose spirit East and West met, as a result of which some of Hammarskjöld's haiku deviate from the concreteness and immediacy of true haiku and adapt to an abstract, "Western" manner. That's why Untouched String is another (welcome) bridge between West and East, another effort to bring the principles from which haiku stemmed.
As for Hammarskjöld's photographs, they are especially in accordance with his poetry: he does not impose himself on the scene he photographs, he allows the scene to be imposed on him; as in the paintings of the Chinese masters, people and their traces are only integral components of his harmonious, magnificent landscapes, often barely visible in photographs, and often completely absent. Even the urban scenes he photographed are coated with an aura of naturalness, of calm acceptance of the world with all its contradictions melancholy.
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