Recordings


The following recordings where K.B. reads her own poems are accessible in audio cassettes from Sveriges Radios Programförsäljning, telephone +46 (8) 7848484.

Notice that you can listen to three extracts below (in Swedish). (AU files about 2 - 300 Kb):

  • You are the seed
  • Eternity
  • To the great humiliation
  • How can trust live
  • On the move [The first verse as a sound file]
  • Idyll
  • Of course it hurts [The first verse as a sound file]
  • I want to meet
  • Wish [The first verse as a sound file]
  • Night of wishes
  • Invulnerable


    • In the many visual pictures of K.B. it is first of all one of her roles which has remained: the one as a recorder of her own poems. Her whole figure seemed to go through a magic change, a radiation which strengthened the message of the poem to the listeners. Olof Lagercrantz has described this in his matter-of-fact but intense way in his essay "Memories and studies", published the year efter her death. He begins his description in this way:

    In her poems K.B. is the same person as she was in her recitations. She did not like to place herself behind the rostrum but a bit beside it. She wanted to stand free. It took her a good while before she started to read so that her body had time to get into absolute balance and while she was reading she was standing absolute still with her heels together and her face a bit turned upwards. Her whole figure and her clean open face harmonized in a remarkable way with the poems she was reading. In such moments she was herself one of the symbols that her genius was trying to approach.


    The text has been taken from Björn Juléns article "The changes of the Karin Boye picture" from "Karin Boye's Life and work III" (in Swedish)

    Copyright © (1996)
    Text: Björn Julén
    Picture: Ulf Boye.
    Recordings: Sveriges Radios Förlag
    Layout and presentation: May and Hans Mehlin
    Translation into English: Rune Tideholm

    Publication with the permission of:
    Björn Julén, author and chairman of the Karin Boye Society.
    Ulf Boye, holding the copyright of photos from the family album
    Sylvia Söderlund, Sveriges Radios Förlag, holding the copyright of the recordings.
    Rune Tideholm, translation into English