Stewe Claeson American Book Collection
The collection includes American poetry, books on North American First Nations, and Stewe Claeson's own writing.
About the collection
American poetry
This constitutes the absolute majority of the collection, some 1 300 American poetry titles, mainly from the 1970s until about 2020. Some of the titles are Swedish translations of works by American poets, but for the most part, they are original texts. Most of the latter cannot be found in any other library in Sweden.
Since Stewe Claeson spent a large part of his life translating American poetry in particular, including Nobel laureate Louise Glück, the collection is of great value as a source material for research on Claeson's translations. In addition, many of the books are marked with underlining and marginalia, as well as dedications from the authors. In some of the books brief translation drafts for individual lines can be found, and in some cases for entire poems.
Further, there are a few collections of short stories and essays by the poets represented in the material.
Access the collection
The collection is held in the closed stacks at the Humanities library. It is available for reading room use only.
Catalogue
The collection is currently being catalogued, and is partially available for browsing.
In Libris
In Supersearch
Humanities library
Renströmsgatan 4
405 30 GOTHENBURG
Phone: 031-786 17 45
Text:
Stefan Benjaminsson.
The collection has been partially catalogued by Stefan Benjaminsson.
Native Americans
The collection also includes a small portion of books on the First Nations of North America. These books are mostly from the 1980s or later, and amount to approximately three shelf metres.
Stewe Claeson's own texts
In addition, the collection displays Stewe Claeson's own written production; novels, poetry and various contributions to books, anthologies and magazines, which provide a context of publication history to Claeson's authorship.
Acquisition history
The book collection was donated by Stewe Claeson's family to the Gothenburg University Library in 2023, along with his personal archive.
Biography
Stewe Claeson was born in Alingsås, Sweden, in 1942. He grew up in Landala, Gothenburg, and published his first work in 1969; a collection of poems titled Semantica: Op. 18. His last book was a novel, Antydningarnas tid: samtal under en förintelse, from 2021. A large part of his authorship was dedicated to the translation of contemporary American poetry, some thirty works in all. Claeson also translated Norwegian and Danish poetry.
Other translations by Claeson are, for example, works by William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Donald Hall, Les Murray, Russell Edson, H. D. (Hilda Dolittle), Louise Glück, Joy Harjo, Louis Simpson, Mark Strand and Derek Walcott.
Between 1966 and 2007 Claeson worked as a teacher at various community colleges. He served as principal of the Malung community college, (1973–1987), the Skinnskatteberg community college (1987–1994) and the Kungälv Nordic community college (1994–2007). He passed away in 2023.
Read more
Stewe Claeson on Wikipedia
Stewe Claeson via Norstedts publishing
Obituary from the Malung community college
Obituary from Norstedts publishing
Stewe Claeson in the Nationalencyklopedin
Svenska Akademien tilldelar Stewe Claeson Signe Ekblad-Eldhs pris 2020
Suggested research topics
- An overview of the collection's contents. What is represented here, and how does it mirror the time and context of the material?
- Biographical research
- Provenances and dedications in the collection.
- Translation of American poetry into Swedish.
- Stewe Claeson's writing from various perspectives of literary history.
Please contact us if you have any suggested research topics you would like to share!