On November 20, 2000, the distinguished Swedish scholar, teacher, and translator Leif Sjöberg died at age 74 in Södersjukhuset in Stockholm after having suffered a stroke three weeks earlier.

He was well known in Scandinavia and in the United States and England as a gifted translator, teacher, editor, and all-round advocate for Scandinavian studies and especially for Swedish literature. For many years he was also a central figure in the Scandinavian community of greater New York, where he lived and worked from the early sixties till the mid-nineties

A memorial service was scheduled in his honor in Stockholm on Dec. 15, 2000, the date of his 75th birthday.

He is survived in Stockholm by his brother Kaj and wife Barbro and their children and by his companion Sara Lidman in Skarpnäck.

HIS LIFE
Leif Sjöberg was born on Dec. 15, 1925, in the town of Boden in Norrbotten and grew up in Avaviken, on the border between that province and Västerbotten.
The son of a stationmaster on the Swedish railway, he attended Fjellstedtska skolan in Uppsala.

According to Swedish writer Folke Isaksson, Leif Sjöberg was "a student with a remarkable zeal for education." While pursuing studies in philology and literary history at Uppsala University, he accumulated numerous credits, earning a master’s in philosophy there in 1954, a Ph.D. in 1968, and an honorary doctorate in 1980.

Later, he set out on a career as a teacher that took him from Vindelns folkhögskola in Sweden to a job as a Swedish lecturer in Newcastle-on-Tyne in England, and then to academic teaching assignments at Columbia University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the U.S.

Many would agree with Isaksson that Sjöberg was "unpretentious, persistent, and stubborn" and known for completing major works. In the U.S. he gained a reputation for being a fine editor with a great ability to make contacts in his work on the Twayne Press World Authors Series on Nordic authors, initiated in 1965. He edited more than 30 volumes including works on Snorre Sturluson, J. L. Heiberg, Søren Kierkegaard, J. L. Runeberg, Knut Hamsun, Johan Borgen, Eyvind Johnson, Östen Sjöstrand, and Lars Gyllensten. Moreover, he successfully supervised the transfer of the series to Greenwood Press, earning the appreciation of many colleagues within the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study.

At an early point Sjöberg had been concerned about "the imbalance of the literary trade" between Sweden and the Anglo-Saxon world ("Editors here don’t want to publish books by writers they’ve never heard of and whose names they can’t pronounce!"), and by the early sixties he had come up with a successful publishing strategy: extensive collaboration with well-known English-language poets on the translation of high-quality literary works from Swedish. He began with W.H. Auden, translating Markings (the best-selling memoirs of former U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld). Then, together with Muriel Rukeyser, May Swenson, William Jay Smith, and Stephen Klass, he interpreted poetry by Pär Lagerkvist, Edith Södergran, Harry Martinson, Artur Lundkvist, Gunnar Ekelöf, Erik Lindegren, and Tomas Tranströmer. Sjöberg’s and Smith’s The Forest of Childhood appeared in 1996, followed three years later by the translation of Martinson’s Aniara, which won a prize from the American-Scandinavian Foundation in 1986. A Swedish rendition of a work by Smith about the Cherokee Indians is alleged to be the last translation Sjöberg completed.

Despite all his learning, Leif Sjöberg has been described as a deeply original person who was "unacademic" and who had an infallible sense for artistic quality.
He had special expertise on the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf (sometimes known as Sweden’s T.S. Eliot) and was one of his closest confidants; a collection of their correspondence, still unpublished, is housed in Uppsala University library.

From 1959 to 1968 Leif Sjöberg taught Swedish language classes as an assistant professor and lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University on the Morningside Heights campus in Manhattan, also offering courses in "Modern Swedish Literature," "Ibsen and Strindberg," "Scandinavian Drama," and "The Scandinavian Novel of the 19th Century." To supplement his classroom presentations, Sjöberg also organized and sponsored some 80 lectures and other cultural programs on Nordic culture, presented at Deutsches Haus, under the aegis of the Department of Germanic Languages.
Subsequently he commuted to Long Island, assuming professorship in Swedish at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he remained until retiring at the end of 1990. But even while teaching at Stony Brook, he resided near Columbia University, where he often attended cultural events at Deutsches Haus and lunched at the Faculty House with friends.

Most students and colleagues of Sjöberg knew he was passionately interested in modern art, and it has been said that such important Nordic artists as Olle Baertling and Björn Erling Evensen have him to thank for their introduction in America; he also helped to establish the American artist Charles Biederman in the U.S. In the past few years Sjöberg also became involved in work to establish a museum in rural northern Sweden in honor of the Swedish painter Per Fredrik Glommé, who also hailed from those parts.

HIS MARRIAGE

While teaching at Newcastle, Leif Sjöberg met an intelligent and appealing Swedish woman from Gothenburg named Inger Wallervik (born in 1931), who was studying English at King’s College and who had worked for Nyman & Schultz and Swedish Lloyd Shipping. They were married in 1959 in New York City, where she worked as an executive secretary for the Swedish-America Line and for several Scandinavian banks in NYC. Inger loved to go to the theater and ballet and to listen to music: she kept track of the dancers, saw ballet companies from all over the world, and had a collection of more than 100 Mozart recordings. The Sjöbergs soon became avid New Yorkers, favoring long city walks from their apartment on Claremont Avenue and proudly declaring themselves "culture vultures" (e.g., visiting art museums almost every Sunday). She served as hostess to many visiting artists, composers, scholars, and performers, helping them to become oriented to the city. She was known for her insights and criticism, assisting in the preparation of Gunnar Ekelöf’s Selected Poems in the translation done by her husband with Auden.

The couple looked forward to their summers in Nantucket, where Inger designed a vacation home for them at No. 5 Derrymore Rd, in the western part of the town of Nantucket, on a piece of property (a 150-foot frontage, 100-feet deep) acquired from Louise A. Pfeiffer of Cambridge and Nantucket. There they were also neighbors with several Scandinavian couples including Brita and Krister Stendahl from Cambridge (whose house they had rented their first summer on the island). In the Sjöbergs’ simple summer place, they would entertain visitors. The garden was overgrown with weeds with respect for Leif’s conviction that all things in Nature should be allowed to grow free–even poison ivy. Sometimes, stopping by the neighbors’ on an afternoon, he would complain that he was totally exhausted ("Phew! All that gardening!") Swimming was a daily ritual, and the sight of Leif’s long arms slicing the surf was a legend: donning an old blue canvas cap to fend off sunburn, he would swim briskly in one direction and then float lazily back, to the bemusement of some Nantucket neighbors. After struggling with cancer for many years, Inger Sjöberg died on June 17, 1988 in St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan.
She gave three paintings to the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and a translation prize was left by her husband in her name to the American-Scandinavian Foundation. (A detailed article about Inger Sjöberg by her friend Barbara Roth appeared in Nordstjernan on June 30, 1988.)

After her death Leif rented out the house in Nantucket and eventually sold it. (Academic secretary Patricia O’Brien at Stony Brook said it was "so sad" and that he was "one of the nicest gentlemen" she had ever met.) For a few years he remained in their apartment on Morningside Drive, but then he sold it, and in the mid-1990s Leif moved back to Sweden

HIS RECENT YEARS

Like Strindberg and Ibsen, Leif Sjöberg lived abroad for more than three decades. On returning to Sweden, he settled in Stockholm, there resuming a friendship with Norrland novelist Sara Lidman, an author he had interviewed as a reporter on a small-town paper many years earlier. Now they lived together, in the house he bought in Skarpnäck, a suburb south of Stockholm, or in her northern quarters in the village of Missenträsk.
According to the novelist, Leif Sjöberg was a great support to her in recent years, and without his help, she would not have produced her last novels, Lifsens rot (Life’s Root) and Oskuldens minut (The Minute of Innocence). A glimpse of the relationship between Leif Sjöberg and Sara Lidman is evident in a profile of her telecast in the late spring of 2000, with a "cameo" appearance by Leif Sjöberg, who with biographer Birgitta Holm worked on the preparation of the program.

THE RESPONSE IN SWEDEN AND THE U.S.

Several recent articles in Swedish papers included tributes to Sjöberg by Swedish writers. The novelist Folke Isaksson, for example, commented: "As I write this on a dark November day, Leif becomes again visible to me, a man with light above his brow. There was a fresh wind in his life but also consistency, fidelity to the assignment, his way of speaking at once hesitantly and eagerly, as if each syllable had its meaning. There was something pure-heartedly beautiful in him that one never can forget."

Uppsala classmates Thure Stenström and Karl Inge Sandred wrote in an article in Svenska Dagbladet on Nov. 27, 2000: "This apparently awkward and reality-alien man from Norrland . . . always found his way in life through his blinding intuition and liberating humor. . . . A great conveyor and inspirer of culture has passed on. If all the trees in Uppsala’s English Park could dress in mourning, it would be today."

In the United States, many colleagues teaching Scandinavian studies at universities and colleges will miss Leif Sjöberg, as the literature curriculum they teach frequently draws on works commissioned or inspired by him. In and around New York, generations of students who learned Swedish and literature from this academic will remember his contributions. As one such student, I can say that he helped shape my life in many ways and led me to Sweden. I first sat in his classes at Columbia in 1964 and a decade later at Stony Brook, where I was exposed to his original style of teaching based on several principles: 1) say something truly interesting in the target language, and students will want to know what you’re talking about--so much they will even learn declensions, conjugations, and idioms; 2) language is closely connected to literature and the other arts, so awareness of this aesthetic unity enriches the teaching of grammar and enhances language learning with humanist wisdom; 3) the point of acquiring a foreign language is to reach out to the people who speak it and to learn about their world; and 4) in order to "get" literature, one must learn to plow through and decipher texts. Leif Sjöberg filled his life with varieties of knowledge that he expanded daily and shared freely.

Perhaps Leif Sjöberg did more for Swedish and Scandinavian literature in America than just about anybody else in our day. Without his collaborative translations, many of Sweden’s best writers who are now established as classics here would never have passed through the narrow portals of Anglo-American publishing and on to international literary terrain.

He leaves fond friends and admirers in New York and in other American cities, including the many readers of Nordstjernan who occasionally had the pleasure of reading in its pages his articles explicating cultural subjects.