Fifty years ago, on 18 September 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld died in the plane crash near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia). The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation commemorates the event in many different ways, one of which is the publication of this remarkable story of a poet and a diplomat that will interest and intrigue many readers.
The Knight and the Troubadour, which reveals a previously unexplored facet of Hammarskjöld’s life and documents the extent of Ezra Pound’s influence among Swedish poets and writers, marks a breakthrough in literary history and even re-writes history to some extent. For Dag Hammarskjöld, the diplomat, there were no boundaries between poetry and politics, and, with tragic consequences, the same was true for Ezra Pound, the poet.