My Mother Gets Married

Although it suffers from some awkward and didactic prose, Martinson's (1890-1964) first volume in her autobiographical trilogy is a potent, wrenching portrait of the impoverished Swedish working class. Mia's mother gets married for the first time when Mia is six years old, and through the child's piercing eyes are revealed ``neverending hardships like mean teachers, bad men who beat their women, and `aunts' who got big and moaned and groaned about it.'' As Lacy, who also translated Martinson's Women and Appletrees , notes, the narrative style is shaped by an oral tradition that blends fairy tale and folklore with realistic events and detail. Except for the principals, the characters are emblematic and therefore universal: ``the red-haired woman''; ``the farmer.'' Martinson's reputation as a champion of the proletariat is here affirmed as she reimagines through her persona Mia her own grievous roots in a male-dominated, largely aristocratic society: the stigma of illegitimacy, poverty's attendant ostracism, filth, illness, hunger and superstition, and her frequent brutalization by alcoholic and philandering men. (Jan.)