Martinson, now well over seventy, is (or was) a genuine proletarian poet who served for years as a merchant seaman and made his mark in the 1920s and 1930s with splendidly simple yet perceptive poems and prose memoirs, a sort of Swedish W. H. Davies. Sadly, there exists a deep-seated belief among Swedish critics that to achieve top rank a writer must prove himself djupsinnig (literally "deep-minded"), which in practice means writing [a kind of woolly pseudo-philosophy] …, and after the war Martinson turned to this depressing genre, producing novels such as The Road to Klockrike and poems like "Aniara", both of a pretentious emptiness. (But they paid off; had he stayed simple, I am sure he would never have won the Nobel Prize last year.) Fortunately, Mr. Bly [editor and translator of Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelöf and Tomas Tranströmer: Friends, You Drank Some Darkness] has avoided...