Mozart’s Third Brain is the title poem from Göran Sonnevi’s thirteenth book of poems, Mozarts Tredje Hjärna, published by Bonniers, Stockholm, in November 1996. The title poem consists of 144 sections marked by roman numerals and is dated 3 July 1992 – 12 June 1996. As published it was approximately 190 pages long.

Born in Lund, Sweden on 3 October 1939, Göran Sonnevi has published fourteen individual books of poems in addition to three collections, and he has translated the poetry of Ezra Pound, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam and others into Swedish. (A volume of his translations came out in 1992.) He has won numerous awards, and since 1983 he has been a recipient of a lifetime grant from the Swedish government, bestowed on 125 artists in honor of their contributions to the nation’s culture. He resides outside Stockholm.
A chapbook of his poetry, The Economy Spinning Faster and Faster, chosen and translated by Robert Bly came out from SUN in 1982. The first full book-length selection of his poetry in English was published in 1993 by Princeton University Press under the title A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, edited and translated by Rika Lesser. Book-length selections of his works have been published in ten additional languages to date: Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Spanish, Romanian, and Turkish. In April 2005 he received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy, known as “the little Nobel.”