ARTUR LUNDKVIST 1906 - 1991

My first meeting with Artur Lundkvist was in 1979. I knew him well as a writer and his importance as one of our most influential literary personalities, therefore it was with a certain dread I stepped over the threshold of his home. He was tall, impressive and respectable with a strong charismatic radiation. Then suddenly: a big, beautiful smile with warmth and humour. The ice was broken. Later, on numerous occasions I experi-enced his warm smile, which I carry with me as a dear memory.

My errand to Artur Lundkvist was to ask him to write a collection of poems for an edition together with Corneille, whom he already knew. "I will write, but first Corneille has to make the illustrations", he said. When he eventually received the illustrations, he gave me a date when the poems would be ready – and they were. This punctuality of his was also his signum, inspiration had to come from hard work and it was as important to keep a promise to a large publisher as to a small one.

What I have written about Corneille’s illustrations I want you to call texts, a determined Artur Lundkvist pointed out when he delivered the written texts with the title: Women and Birds.

To me this contact with Artur Lundkvist became one of the most important points of my life. It be-came a contact with a "master" and professional writer that eventually developed into a warm friendship. I also met his wife, Maria Wine, whom he even appreciated very much as a poet and writer, and he thought that I should start co-operating with her too. That led to pictures by Axel Olsson (1899-1986) to which Maria wrote poems and Artur wrote a biogra-phy. The book was named "The eye that watches". Artur’s death in 1991 left us with a big emptiness. To Maria he was a husband, friend and working mate, with whom she under almost half a century had enjoyed a long and rich love relation which had been much written about. For Maria this loss was enormous.

The thought of publishing love poems by Maria Wine had been with me for a long time and in 1996 The Daily Love came, with poems by Maria and illustrations by Corneille, collected in a red linen binding. I then got the idea to make a "blue book" with texts by Artur Lundkvist and illustrations by Corneille, but in a new and remodelled version.

Corneille was glad about the suggestion and made a magnificent work with remodelling his "old" illustrations into colour etchings, as well as new pictures accompanying the homogeneous texts of Artur Lundkvist.

My wish was that there would be a unanimity between the two books of poems, Maria’s "red book" with her sensual and warm love poems and this "blue book" with Artur’s more philosophically deep reflecting texts: about creation of man, about birth, about transformation – about the woman in the centre and with her – love.

Artur: You live in my memory with great gratitude. Thank you Corneille for yet another giving co-operation and thanks to everybody who helped me with the realisation of this book.

Malmö March 1998, Siwert Bergström