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COLUMBIA SWEDISH PROGRAMS FOR SPRING 2003 FEATURE NORWEGIAN POETRY, SWEDISH FEMINISM, AND SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRATION ISSUES |
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| The Swedish Program at Columbia University has announced its spring 2003 roster of Scandinavian cultural activities including an American translator of Norwegian poetry, a feminist playwright from Sweden, and a historian of Scandinavian immigration. These events are scheduled from February 11 through April 15 at Deutsches Haus, the cultural center for the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia. The center is located at 420 W. 116th Street, New York City (between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive on the Columbia campus). | ||
| The public is invited, and admission is free to all these events, the first of which will be a reading at 7 p.m., Tuesday, February 11, by prize-winning poet and translator Roger Greenwald. Entitled “North in the World,” the program will feature poetry by two of Norway’s major twentieth-century writers: Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970) and Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994). Mr. Greenwald will provide a brief introduction to each poet as well as reading the poems and discussing the works and the translation process. | ||
| A New Yorker, Roger Greenwald attended City College of New York, the St. Marks in the Bouwerie Poetry Project, New York University, and the University of Toronto. He has received many literary awards and prizes and has published numerous translations, including Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas (Princeton University Press), a finalist for the 2001 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen (University of Chicago Press, 2002). |
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| The Feb. 11 reading is being sponsored by the Swedish Program of Columbia University with the assistance of the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the Norwegian Consulate. | ||
| The second event on the Swedish Program’s spring roster is entitled “Mothers and Daughters in My Plays,” a talk in English By Swedish dramatist Margareta Garpe. This program will commence at 7 p.m., on Tuesday, March 11, also at Deutsches Haus, on the Columbia campus, and will be sponsored by the Swedish Program of Columbia University with the assistance of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. | ||
| Regarded today as one of Sweden’s leading authors, Margreta Garpe has created dramas with feminist themes for Stockholm’s Municipal Theater and has also been active as a film director. | ||
| She has written film scripts, cabarets, songs, and monologues, has worked with translations and adaptations of drama classics, and has done reports and interviews. | ||
| In addition to staging her own plays, Ms. Garpe has also directed and adapted Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and Hedda Gabler for Swedish television as well as the drama series “Skilda världar” ”(Separate Worlds) for Swedish TV’s Channel 4. Her drama All the Days, All the Nights was performed at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater in 1992, on Swedish television in 1996, at Copenhagen’s Royal Theater in 2002, and as a staged reading at Columbia’s Deutsches Haus in November 2002. Her most recent production in Stockholm is the play Limbo, premiering at Stockholm Municipal Theater on February 28, 2003. | ||
| The third spring event to be sponsored by Columbia’s Swedish Program will be a talk in English by Swedish historian Ola Fransson of the University of Gothenburg. He will discuss a controversial topic—immigration policies in Nordic countries—and his title is “Immigration and Nationalism in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.” His lecture will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 15, 2003 (also at Deutsches Haus at 420 W. 116th St., N.Y.C.). | ||
| Having lived in Copenhagen for some years, Dr. Fransson has written on the differences in immigration policies in Denmark and Sweden, which for historical reasons are considerable (although both are members of the European Union). The policies of Norway, he observes on the other hand, are marked by the fact that it is not a member of EU. The Swedish historian will review the immigration policies of the three Nordic welfare states in the light of their history in the 19th and 20th centuries. | ||
| Dr. Ola Fransson is lectures on history in the Department of the History of Ideas and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, where he has taught courses on Kierkegaard as well as historical periods ranging from the Renaissance to the 20th century. | ||
| His talk at Deutsches Haus will be sponsored by the Swedish Program in cooperation with Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Europe and with the assistance of the Swedish Institute, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and the history department of the University of Gothenburg. | ||
| For further information about these three talks or about Swedish language courses at Columbia, contact Verne Moberg: Tel.: 212-854-7859; E-mail: [email protected] | ||
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