So Göran Printz-Påhlson is seventy, or will be by the time this appears. Poet, critic, academic, translator, culture journalist – difficult to know in which order they should be put, or in which order he would put them, though the big money says he would put poet first. If the old Victorian term ‘man of letters’ hadn’t lost its cachet, it would have been the right one to use. Born in Skåne in 1931, he graduated from Lund in 1953 and has spent most of the years since then outside Sweden, firstly as Swedish lektor at the University of California, Berkeley, and then as lecturer at Cambridge. Now he is back in Skåne. One suspects that for many years he felt passed by, half-forgotten, marginalized by Swedish cultural life but, for all the breadth of his English vocabulary and register, for all his familiarity with the most obscure corners on the map of English (and most other) literature, he never quite went native: his faith in intellectuality remains firmly European. Though there is a certain Englishness in the evasiveness of his reply to the question "why do you write poetry?": "We are all a bit proud of our vices, aren’t we – if they are sufficiently unusual. Like taking snuff or drinking gin and lemonade with a meal, just to choose two I’ve never been tempted by. Saying that you believe in poetry is more or less the same as saying you believe in taking snuff. There are people who take snuff and let’s just hope that they manage to make snuff-taking a meaningful part of their existence."

Both as poet and as critic his breakthrough came young. With two slim and elegant volumes of poetry to his name, Resan mellan poesi och poesi (The Journey between Poetry and Poetry, 1955) and Dikter för ett barn i vår tid (Poems for a Child in Our Time, 1956) he, together with Majken Johansson and and a few others, were grouped together as the Lund School of poets. (This isn’t a term they seem to have approved of but there are two good reasons to use it. 1. As Jan Olov Ullén has written: "compared with the romantic Fifties’ poets in Uppsala and Stockholm… the Lund poets were ironic, conscious of form, well-read and particularly concerned about the problems of language and writing". 2. Printz-Påhlson and Majken Johansson are immediately recognizable in photographs – the latter being the one in the Salvation Army bonnet – whereas no one can remember what the others look like.) In 1958 he brought out his critical volume Solen i spegeln. Essäer om lyrisk modernism (The Sun in the Mirror. Essays on Lyrical Modernism), which is still considered the most influential volume on the development of Swedish poetry in the twentieth century in that it drew a line under modernism and proposed that poetry go elsewhere. In his own case that was towards metapoetry.

Something that becomes clear when reading Printz-Påhlson’s Säg minns du skeppet Refanut? Samlade dikter 1950-1983 (Say, Do You Remember the Ship Refanut? Collected Poems 1950-83, 1984) is the oneness of his literary activity: the volume contains translations, adaptations and, of course, original poems, but such is the particular nature of the dialogue the poet/adapter/translator is holding with his work that the generic differences between the activities are shaded out. It goes beyond that: if we add in the critical writings, the essays, the interviews, the commentaries, the footnotes, the conversations and random aperçus, all reveal themselves as elements in the same dialogue which, while far from seamless, manifestly speaks with a single unmistakeable voice. Magnus William-Olsson put his finger on it when discussing Printz-Påhlson’s criticism: "One of the amazing qualities in Solen i spegeln is Printz-Påhlson’s ability to keep the ‘right distance’. It never ceases to surprise me how cool and self-evident this young poet’s stance is vis à vis not only his contemporary competitors but also his poetic forebears. I guess that this ability to keep the ‘right distance’ is connected to Printz-Påhlson’s rootedness in the poetics of metapoetry, which is what made it possible for him to view himself as separate from, at the same time as being part of, a tradition." (Dialoger 38,1996, p.23)

Maybe that element of distance is, when all is said and done, what metapoetry is all about. Right from the start of his career in the 1950s Printz-Påhlson has been the consistent proponent and less consistent producer of metapoetry. Well, the label has stuck and he seems not unhappy with it, which is perhaps surprising since it seems likely that the label has served him less than well: made it too easy to categorize him, to put him in the box-file marked 1950s, to marginalize him as an academic critic rather than as a poet. But what is metapoetry and what does it do? It is not, as is perhaps most commonly thought, poetry that discusses itself and its own poetics, rather it is poetry that draws attention to the fact that it is poetry (ie. that it is a construct, an illusion not reality) and, by doing so, it aims to establish a more truthful relationship with its audience which, made aware of the problematically illusory nature of language, will be engaged in a critical discourse from the start. Unlike romantic poetry, for instance, in which the claimed experience of the poet functions as the sole validator of the truth of what is stated, in metapoetry the poet withdraws to a distance, draws attention to illusion, to the ambiguities of language, to artificiality, to tradition, to other possibilities. In one sense this is all very modern, with lines that run both to Brechtian alienation and to Wolfgang Iser’s actualization of the meaning somewhere in the air between reader and author; in another sense it is traditional, reaching back to the pre-romantic poet as craftsman. The enemy is Narcissus, the romantic poet, seeing only his own image in the mirror.

Printz-Påhlson’s own poetry is complex, dense, allusive, filled with a lifetime of reading that is both eclectic and esoteric, and it makes demands on its readers. One of the least likely pronouncements from him is surely the one he made in an interview with Lars-Håkon Svensson in 1981 and quoted in his book of essays about poetry and place När jag var prins utav Arkadien (When I was Prince of Arcadia, 1995): "I have never ceased to be surprised that I have had so little commercial success with my books. Not because I have particularly strived for it but because I have always felt myself to be a fairly straightforward person… all my poems are about sex and politics or, preferably, both of them, and that has usually been an attractive combination with the public." Now the question is – and it’s a question that is just as apposite to the poetry itself – does he really mean this or is he being tongue-in-cheek playful?

I first came across Göran Printz-Påhlson’s poetry shortly after graduating. Sometime in 1967, trying to keep up to date with what was going on in Swedish literature while undergoing a less than stimulating teacher training in the then wilderness (from the point of view of Swedish books) of Sheffield, Harold Borland kindly arranged for me to have access to the Swedish collection at Hull University. There I came across Göran’s latest collection, Gradiva och andra dikter (Gradiva and Other Poems, 1966), and it left me baffled – not so much the ‘other poems’ but Gradiva itself. I shuffled along the row to BLM to see if the review could offer some enlightenment. It couldn’t: Lars Gustafsson didn’t have much trouble with the ‘other poems’ either, and made all the right positive noises in general ("most interesting achievement", "remarkable poet", "richness of overtones"), but seemed to be little wiser than me even if his confusion was cloaked in a good deal more elegance. And, anyway, what had this to do with the 1960s as I perceived them? Here was a poetry that seemed to revel in its own exclusiveness, full of classical and renaissance allusions, self-consciously literary, playing with complex and obscure verse forms, labelled with Latin mottoes, supplied with its own footnotes, dragging in Virgil and Wittgenstein and just about everyone in between. It was all a long way from "the new simplicity" called for by Lars Bäckström and Göran Palm, with its demands that poetry should move out of what Palm satirized as the "poetry park", should cease to disappear up its own metaphor and should instead dedicate itself to radical political engagement and non-exclusive democratic communication.

When the collected poems, Säg minns du skeppet Refanut?, appeared in 1984 I returned to "Gradiva", the work that had both baffled and interested me most first time round. "Gradiva", subtitled "Pompeian Fantasy in Two Acts after Wilhelm Jensen" is a suite of sixteen poems and prose pieces accompanied by the inevitable footnotes – just enough to whet the appetite but not enough to explain what is going on. For that you have to resort to Freud’s essay "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’", and go back from there to Wilhelm Jensen’s short story "Gradiva" – and then forward to the use of the Gradiva-motif by later psycho-analysts as well as by Salvador Dali and the surrealists. In other words, it’s a typical Printz-Påhlson piece of learned referentiality. What keeps you going is partly obstinacy – but it’s an obstinacy fuelled by the great beauty of some of the songs. So, in "Sestina" the classical nature god Vertumnus is introduced (the sestina, first used and soon deserted by Dante, is a verse form that consists of six six-line stanzas of alexandrines with a complex rolling rhyme scheme):

En krigare som gick stoltserande bland moln,
en såningsman med korg i middagssol:
så föddes den förändring som var jag;
längs bruna låren växte gröna blad
och tårna rann som källor i en dal
för att slå rot i någon sällsam skog.

A warrior who swaggered through the clouds,
a sower with his basket in the midday sun:
thus was born the mutation that was me;
green leaves grew along brown thighs
and tears ran like springs in a valley
to take root in some strange forest.

The obstinacy is perhaps also encouraged by the bawdy humour of some of the other songs:

Vi kommo av ett brusand’ hav
ur Alltets armar ryckta:
kotpelarn är vår vandringsstav
och huvudet vår lykta.
Men högst vi skatta dock den lem
som vet den närmsta vägen hem,
upp i sitt ursprungsmörker.

We came from a roarin’ sea
torn from the arms of the Universe:
our spine is our pilgrim’s staff
and our head our lantern.
But what we prize above all is the limb
that knows the nearest way home,
up into the darkness of its origin.

Printz-Påhlson says that he intended it to be a sort of opera-bouffe, harking back to "the parody romantic tone of the world of Mozartian opera" (Arkadien, p.285). It occurs to me, however, that "Gradiva" is much more Printz-Påhlson’s Faust, with its changing scenes, its hotch-potch of ideas, characters, and themes, its tender lyricism and its cynicism, its baroque burlesque and its grotesqueness, its flight from the sublime to the earthy and then aloft again. The central figure, Norbert Hanold, a dry as dust academic archaeologist, has to venture Faust-like into a world of myth in order to get a life. The scene opens, in a reminiscence of Faust, in the study and should perhaps be a warning to many of us since it starts in academia and ends in a bathetic limbo. "Gradiva" is a rich work, stimulating sometimes in a thought-provoking way, sometimes in a crossword-puzzle sense, but glowing from beginning to end with the humour of humanity. It allows itself to be expansive and makes one feel that perhaps too many of Printz-Påhlson’s poems have – unlike, his essays, for instance – been too tightly controlled, insufficiently discursive. The big, untidy format suits him. In the opening essay of När jag var prins utav Arkadien he writes with some admiration of Dennis Potter’s "mimo-melodramatic" television trilogy "Pennies from Heaven" and one can see why: Potter, without going outside the bounds of twentieth century popular culture was aiming at a similar kind of discursive cultural referentiality. (Printz-Påhlson’s translation – along with Jan Östergren – of the Ohio poet John Matthias’s long poetic suites Bathory & Lermontov likewise shows his interest in that direction.)

The same expansiveness characterizes the long autobiographical poem ‘Gläd dig, du skåning’ (Rejoice, O Skåning) from 1981. Here he returns to his childhood and youth or, rather, to Skåne for still rejecting Narcissus it is the place that stands at the centre. It is, he has said, his Scanian version of "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" with the emblem changed to "en drucken bonde som ser sin gödselstad som en spettekaka" [a drunken farmer who sees his midden as a pyramid cake]. A visit to Sandy Bell’s Bar with MacDiarmid and Printz-Påhlson – now that would be metapoetic.