Goran Sonnevi (b. 1939) is the author of fifteen books of poems and a volume of poetry in translation. A new selection of his work, Dikter i urval av Marie Silkeberg (Poems selected by Marie Silkeberg) will be published by Bonniers in March 2008. In 1983 he became a recipient of a lifetime grant from the Swedish government, bestowed on 125 artists in honor of their contributions to the nation’s culture. Among his recent honors are the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy, known as “the little Nobel” in 2005, and the 2006 Literature Prize of the Nordic Council. He resides outside Stockholm.

A chapbook, The Economy Spinning Faster and Faster, chosen and translated by Robert Bly came out from SUN in 1982. A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, edited and translated by Rika Lesser, a bilingual volume, became part of Princeton’s Lockert Library Series in 1993. Book-length selections of his work have been published in eleven additional languages to date: Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Romanian, and Turkish. A new German selection will be out from Hanser Verlag in 2008.

"Mozart’s Third Brain" is the title poem from Göran Sonnevi’s thirteenth book of poems, Mozarts Tredje Hjärna, published by Bonniers, Stockholm, in November 1996. The title poem consists of 144 sections marked by roman numerals and is dated 3 July 1992-12 June 1996. More than one hundred of its parts have been published in Lesser’s translation in print or electronic media.

EPR #8

from Mozart's Third Brain, translated by Rika Lesser:

CVI, CVII, CXI, CXII, CXIV, CXV, CXVI, CXXVIII, CXXIX, CXXX