Nearing Mars, Aniara veers to avoid collision with an unknown asteroid, passes through its trajectory, then speeds on into the outer darkness, abandoned to its doom. This sorrowful voyage, begun in hope of salvation, becomes a journey into cosmic despair. The vehicle is a golcionda (only one of Martinson's many Joyce‐like coiMngs) its name Aniara comes from the Greek word meaning “sorrowful.” Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by the 32nd World War its survivors embark in a spaceship three miles long, a half mile wide, carrying 8,000 passengers. The narrator tells a story of a disastrous voyage by emigrants from earth to Mars at some remote point in time. “Aniara” is a poem of 103 songs, published in 1956 an English translation was published by Knopf in 1963. For my part, the coincidence has been sufficient to send me back to re‐read “Aniara.” I find it possesses, through the dynamism of its myth, much of the same apocalyptic one endures, rather than enjoys, in “The Waste Land.” Indeed, “Aniara” may well be a work of equal power and prophecy.

I'm willing to leave to scholars of contemporary literature the wrangling over whether either of these gentlemen deserves the prize. Imagine my amusement when discovering, just at that moment, that the Swedish Academy concurred in my selection: The 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded jointly to Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson. I then settled back to listen to Janssen and the Vienna Volksoper and to glance at the front page of The Times. On the flip side, my friend and neighbor Werner Janssen conducts a suite from Karl‐Birger Blomdahl's opera “Aniara,” based on the poem by Harry Edmund Martinson. I'd placed a recording on the turntable-Columbia Masterworks’ MS 7176, featuring Ormandy Bernstein and others in music for armchair astronauts.

I experienced a nice coincidence a few weeks ago.

Aniara by Harry Martinson