According to the Nobel Committee, Harry Martinson was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature, ‘for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos’. As a poet, Harry Martinson could describe the tension between the gigantic and the miniscule, the close and the very far removed. In Aniara, he depicts the reaction of the people on-board the spacecraft as they come to terms with their own end, with no chance of their being rescued. This story is an intersection between the intimate, individual human perspective and the distant, vast infinity of space.
Popular astronomy was a crucial inspiration behind Harry Martinson’s writing. As humanity ventured out into the galaxies, and the Space Race between the US and USSR defined the 1950s, the science-fiction genre had a more widespread public appeal. Martinson’s interest in astronomy was most apparent in Aniara, but was also noticeable in poems such as Livets lag from 1928, Synen from 1934 and Undergången i Cikada from 1953.
The first 29 cantos of Aniara were published in the Cikada collection of poems under the title, The Song of Doris and Mima. This provided the foundation for Aniara’s final 103 cantos published as, A Review of Man in Time and Space. In the tale of Aniara, a spacecraft transports 8,000 people to Mars, those who have been forced to flee an Earth environmentally ravaged and devastated by nuclear war, as they embrace an uncertain future as cosmic refugees.
Harry Martinson strongly criticises humanity in Aniara. Those on-board the spacecraft, itself referred to as goldonder, are forced to watch as Earth explodes. Soon after, the spacecraft’s supercomputer, named Mima, dies, severing the last connection between the individuals on-board and planet Earth. Aniara’s 27th canto declares, ‘Alas, there is no protection against humanity.’ When viewed in light of the events of the 1940s and 50s, with Hiroshima and the development of the hydrogen bomb, Martinson uses Aniara as an outlet for his dismay at how humanity was employing modern technology.
In Martinson’s Aniara, Earth, or Doris as it is referred to in the tale, becomes a lost paradise annihilated by humanity itself. Environmental destruction has only worsened since Martinson wrote his space epic, and people nowadays are still forced to seek refuge from war and other catastrophes. Despite being written 60 years ago, Aniara is as relevant today as it was in Martinson’s time.
