HODELL, Åke. igevär.

Exposing the ‘De-Humanising Agency of Military and Technological Language’

HODELL, Åke. igevär. Stockholm: Kerberos. 1963.

Small oblong 8vo (95 × 200 mm). Perfect bound in publisher’s cream printed wrappers, with the original price of 6 kronor printed to rear wrapper; pp. 51, [1 (blank)]; wrappers lightly toned with a few very small marks; contents bright and clean; a near-fine copy.

Rare first edition, one of 500 copies, of Åke Hodell’s radical work of Swedish concrete poetry, turning a military command into a sound and visual poem, and the first publication of his influential avant-garde press, Kerberos.

Åke Hodell (1919–2000) was a Swedish poet and artist who served as a pilot in the Swedish Air Force. After surviving a serious plane crash in 1941, he became a committed anti-militarist and later turned to experimental poetry. Igevär takes its title from the Swedish military command i gevär (‘present arms’), which Hodell heard shouted every two hours by the guards at Stockholm’s Royal Palace, where he lived nearby during the 1950s. Hodell repeats the letters of the military command across the pages.

He later compared the rows of is to soldiers standing at attention and the rows of äs to soldiers sitting with backpacks. Described as ‘an aural/visual tour de force’ (Olsson, p. 4), the work challenges military authority and exposes ‘the de-humanising agency of military and technological language’ (Andersson, p. 143). Igevär, which was published through Kerberos, the press he founded in 1963 when he was unable to find a publisher for the present work.

OCLC finds four copies in the US (Getty, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Northwestern) and none in the UK; not on Library Hub.

See Andersson, ‘Åke Hodell’s Kerberos’, in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950–1975 (2016), pp. 142–152; Nilsson and Drougge, ‘En dåres försvarstal-möte med Åke Hodell’, Kaspar Hauser, no. 1 (1983); Olsson, ‘Writing Through the Data Banks’, Dichtung Digital (2003), p. 4.

SKU: 2125365