It narrates the tragedy of a large passenger spacecraft carrying a cargo of colonists escaping destruction on Earth veering off course, leaving the Solar System and entering into an existential struggle.
[4] Martinson came up with the word years before writing the work while reading astronomer Arthur Eddington, then giving it the meaning as the "name for the space in which the atoms move".
The first 29 cantos of Aniara had previously been published in Martinson's collection Cikada (1953), under the title Sången om Doris och Mima (The Song of Doris and Mima),[7] relating the departure from Earth, the accidental near-collision with an asteroid (incidentally named Hondo, another name for the main Japanese isle where Hiroshima is situated) and ejection from the solar system, the first few years of increasing despair and distractions of the passengers, until news is received of the destruction of their home port, and perhaps of Earth itself.
According to Martinson, he dictated the initial cycle as in a fever after a troubling dream, affected by the Cold War and the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution; in another recounting, he said the first 29 cantos were said to be inspired by his observation of the Andromeda Galaxy.
[7] A major theme is that of art, symbolised by the semi-mystical machinery of the Mima, who relieves the ennui of crew and passengers with scenes of far-off times and places, and whose operator is also the sometimes naïve main narrator.
[14] The accumulated destruction the Mima witnesses impels her to destroy herself in despair, to which she, the machine, is finally moved by the white tears of the granite melted by the phototurb which annihilates their home port, the great city of Dorisburg.
Aniara has been translated to around twenty languages including French, German, Italian, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Czech, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, English, and Esperanto.
"Harry Martinson has not only written a breathtakingly lyrical science fiction story; he has also (...) created a gigantic "Paradise lost", an epic about how human greatness is turned into humiliation and powerlessness".
[It] [t]ranscends panic and terror and even despair [and] leaves you in the quiet immensities, with the feeling that you have spent time, and have been permanently tinted, by and with an impersonal larger-than-God force.
"[19] Writing a guest review for The New York Times, D. Bruce Lockerbie suggested that with Aniara Martinson had, along with C. S. Lewis, "found that an interplanetary setting, light years removed from mundanity" supplied "the esthetic distance necessary for truly profound thought.
In a 2015 review, James Nicoll writes "Martinson’s creative approach to astronomy and related matters gives the work an misleadingly archaic feel.
[25][26] An opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl also called Aniara premiered in 1959 with a libretto by Erik Lindegren based on Martinson's poem; it was staged in Stockholm, Hamburg, Brussels and Darmstadt, and later in Gothenburg and Malmö.
[31] The fourth album from the Swedish progressive metal band Seventh Wonder called The Great Escape (2010) is based on Aniara, the title track last 30:21 minutes and relates all the poem from beginning to end.