The Half-Finished Heaven Read online

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  The tugboat is freckly with rust. What’s it doing here, so far inland?

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  The Half-Finished Heaven

  Books by Tomas Tranströmer

  17 Poems (1954)

  Secrets on the Road (1958)

  The Half-Finished Heaven (1962)

  Resonance and Footprints (1966)

  Night Vision (1970)

  Pathways (1973)

  Baltics (1974)

  Truth Barriers (1978)

  The Wild Market Square (1983)

  For the Living and the Dead (1989)

  Memories See Me (a prose memoir, 1993)

  Grief Gondola (1996)

  The Great Conundrum (2004)

  Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer (2013)

  The Half-Finished Heaven

  Selected Poems

  Tomas Tranströmer

  Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2001, 2017 by Tomas Tranströmer and the Estate of Tomas Tranströmer

  Translation copyright © 2001, 2017 by Robert Bly

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Introduction: “Upward into the Depths” copyright © 2001 by Robert Bly

  Introduction to the Expanded Edition copyright © 2017 by Robert Bly

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Some of these translations, a few in earlier versions, appeared in: Twenty Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (1970), Night Vision (1971), Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets, Ekelöf, Martinson, and Tranströmer (1975), and Truth Barriers (1980). Some translations appeared as well in two compilations, Selected Poems 1954–1986, edited by Robert Hass (1987), and For the Living and the Dead, edited by Daniel Halpern (1996). This edition of The Half-Finished Heaven includes an updated introduction, never before published, and fourteen additional translations to include all of Robert Bly’s translations of Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry. Earlier versions of these additional translations appeared in the above sources and as follows: “Lisbon” in Doones (vol.1, no. 3, 1970), “C Major” in Hawaii Review (Winter 1973), and “C Major,” “To Friends behind a Border,” “Sketch in October,” and “Walking Running Crawling” in the Kenyon Review (Spring 2013) and in Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer (2013). “Conflict” also appeared in Airmail.

  Particular thanks are due to Eva Bonnier, for many kindnesses, to Monica Tranströmer and Ruth Bly, and to Thomas R. Smith.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-783-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-975-1

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2017

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952343

  Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design

  Cover art: Johannes Vermeer, Woman Reading a Letter, c. 1663. Oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

  Contents

  Introduction: “Upward into the Depths” (2001) by Robert Bly

  Introduction to the Expanded Edition (2017) by Robert Bly

  1. POEMS FROM

  17 Poems (1954)

  Secrets on the Road (1958)

  The Half-Finished Heaven (1962)

  Evening—Morning

  Storm

  Sailor’s Tale

  The Man Awakened by a Song above His Roof

  Track

  Kyrie

  After the Attack

  Balakirev’s Dream (1905)

  Prison

  The Couple

  C Major

  Allegro

  Lamento

  The Tree and the Sky

  A Winter Night

  Dark Shape Swimming

  The Half-Finished Heaven

  Nocturne

  2. POEMS FROM

  Resonance and Footprints (1966)

  Night Vision (1970)

  Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer (2013)

  Open and Closed Space

  Lisbon

  From an African Diary (1963)

  Morning Bird Songs

  Summer Grass

  About History

  After a Death

  Under Pressure

  Slow Music

  Out in the Open

  Solitude

  Breathing Space July

  The Open Window

  Preludes

  The Bookcase

  Outskirts

  Going with the Current

  Traffic

  Night Duty

  A Few Moments

  The Name

  Standing Up

  Conflict

  Walking Running Crawling

  3. POEMS FROM

  Pathways (1973)

  Truth Barriers (1978)

  Elegy

  The Scattered Congregation

  To Friends behind a Border

  Snow-Melting Time, ’66

  Sketch in October

  Further In

  Late May

  December Evening, ’72

  Seeing through the Ground

  Guard Duty

  Along the Lines (Far North)

  At Funchal (Island of Madeira)

  Calling Home

  Citoyens

  For Mats and Laila

  After a Long Dry Spell

  A Place in the Woods

  Street Crossing

  Below Freezing

  Montenegro

  Boat, Town

  Start of a Late Autumn Novel

  From the Winter of 1947

  The Clearing

  Schubertiana

  The Gallery

  4. POEMS FROM

  The Wild Market Square (1983)

  For the Living and the Dead (1989)

  Grief Gondola (1996)

  The Great Conundrum (2004)

  From March ’79

  Fire Script

  Black Postcards

  Romanesque Arches

  The Forgotten Commander

  Vermeer

  The Cuckoo

  The Kingdom of Uncertainty

  Three Stanzas

  Two Cities

  Island Life, 1860

  April and Silence

  Landscape with Suns

  Midwinter

  Grief Gondola #2

  Haiku

  Introduction: “Upward into the Depths” (2001)

  1.

  Tomas Tranströmer has a strange genius for the image; image
s rise seemingly without effort on his part. The wide space we feel in his poems perhaps occurs because the four or five main images in each poem come from widely separated sources in the psyche. His poems are a sort of railway station where trains that have come enormous distances stand briefly in the same building. One train may have some Russian snow on the undercarriage, and another may have Mediterranean flowers fresh in the compartments, and Ruhr soot on the roofs.

  The poems are mysterious because the images have traveled a long way to get there. Mallarmé believed there should be mystery in poetry, and urged poets to get it, if necessary, by removing the links that tie the poem to its occasion in the real world. In Tranströmer’s poems, the link to the worldly occasion is stubbornly kept, and yet the mystery and surprise never fade, even on many readings.

  2.

  There is a layer in our consciousness or memory, it seems, that runs alongside our life experience, but is not drawn from our life. It is perhaps older. “With his work, as with a glove, a man feels the universe,” Tranströmer says. “Schubertiana” begins:

  Outside New York, dusk coming, a high place where with one

  glance you take in the houses where eight million human

  beings live.

  The enormous city at night, he says, looks like “a spiral galaxy seen from the side.” And he evokes scenes of coffee cups being pushed across desks, air-moved doors, fire escapes, people slumped over in the subway. Then he says:

  I know also—statistics to the side—that at this moment in

  some room down there Schubert is being played, and for

  that person the notes are more real than all the rest.

  Tranströmer often edges toward ways of containing in words the before-birth intensities, the intensities not entirely ours. After all, what are notes? Sounds shaped by, say, a string quartet contain almost no life stuff. They are pure sound vibrations, yet connected apparently to feelings that resonate somewhere inside us. Tranströmer ends a prose poem, “At Funchal,” saying,

  The innermost paradox, the underground garage flowers, the vent toward the good dark. A drink that bubbles in an empty glass. An amplifier that magnifies silence. A path that grows over after every step. A book that can only be read in the dark.

  Some works of art do cross the line that separates worlds. A poem of that sort might include an amplifier and silence, an underground garage and flowers, the banal outer world and a mysterious underworld. In this double world it is difficult to keep one’s balance, and it’s best to leave all rhetoric out.

  It’s been a hard winter, but summer is here and the fields want us to walk upright. Every man unimpeded, but careful, as when you stand up in a small boat. I remember a day in Africa: on the banks of the Chari, there were many boats, an atmosphere positively friendly, the men almost blue-black in color with three parallel scars on each cheek (meaning the Sara tribe). I am welcomed on a boat—it’s a canoe hollowed from a dark tree. The canoe is incredibly wobbly, even when you sit on your heels. A balancing act. If you have the heart on the left side you have to lean a bit to the right, nothing in the pockets, no big arm movements, please, all rhetoric has to be left behind. Precisely: rhetoric is impossible here. The canoe glides out over the water.

  (from “Standing Up”)

  It was Rilke who created the metaphor that poets are “bees of the invisible.” Making honey of the invisible suggests that the artist remains close to his own earthly history, but moves as well toward the spiritual and the invisible. As an artist, Tranströmer seems to be steadied by such efforts, and by the example of other European poets who have done so.

  Tranströmer’s love of Schubert carries him to the boundary between worlds; and at such a boundary, he sees landscapes ordinarily hidden:

  The five instruments play. I go home through warm woods

  where the earth is springy under my feet,

  curl up like someone still unborn, sleep, roll on so weightlessly

  into the future, suddenly understand that plants

  are thinking.

  Art helps us, he says, as a banister helps the climber on a dark stairwell. The banister finds its own way in the dark. In Schubert, “happiness and suffering weigh exactly the same.” The depths are above us and below us at the same instant. The melody line is a

  stubborn humming sound that this instant is with us

  upward into

  the depths.

  Tranströmer suspects that as an artist he is merely a way for the “Memory” to get out into the world. Even at seventeen he was aware that the dead “wanted to have their portraits painted.” He says we are “lowered” into the past. In “About History,” he says we are like a microphone that has been lowered under the ice of a spring lake.

  His poem, “December Evening, ’72,” begins:

  Here I come the invisible man, perhaps in the employ

  of some huge Memory that wants to live at this moment.

  And I drive by

  the white church that’s locked up. A saint made of wood is

  inside,

  smiling helplessly, as if someone had taken his glasses.

  Tranströmer is an elegant and humorous servant of the “Memory.” In “Guard Duty” he says:

  Task: to be where I am.

  Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd

  role: I am still the place

  where creation works on itself.

  Dawn comes, the sparse tree trunks

  take on color now, the frostbitten

  forest flowers form a silent search party

  after something that has disappeared in the dark.

  But to be where I am … and to wait.

  I am full of anxiety, obstinate, confused.

  Things not yet happened are already here!

  I feel that. They’re just out there:

  a murmuring mass outside the barrier.

  They can only slip in one by one.

  They want to slip in. Why? They do

  one by one. I am the turnstile.

  Even after hard work during the day, he has high spirits:

  Allegro

  After a black day, I play Haydn,

  and feel a little warmth in my hands.

  The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.

  The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

  The sounds says that freedom exists

  and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.

  I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

  and act like a man who is calm about it all.

  I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:

  “We do not surrender. But want peace.”

  The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

  rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

  The rocks roll straight through the house

  but every pane of glass is still whole.

  3.

  Tomas Tranströmer was an only child, born in Stockholm in 1931, on April 15. His father and mother divorced when he was three; he and his mother lived after that in an apartment in the working-class district of Stockholm. As a student, he pursued music and psychology.

  The early fifties were a rather formal time, both here and in Sweden, and Tranströmer began by writing highly formal poems, some in iambic and Alcaic meter. His first book, 17 Poems, published in 1954, which glowed with several baroque elements, contained only seventeen poems, but people noticed the power of it immediately. Tranströmer decided to make his living as a psychologist. For some years he worked at a boys’ prison in Linköping. The boys he counseled in that prison evidently took in a lively impression of him. Someone sent me a clipping from Sweden during that time, which recounted the adventures of a youth who had escaped a short time before from the Linköping reformatory. It transpired that he registered in various Swedish hotels and motels as “T. Tranströmer, psychologist.”

  In 1965 he moved with his wife, Monica, and his two daughters, Paula and Emma, to Västerås, a town about forty miles west o
f Stockholm. He continued to work as a psychologist, this time for a labor organization funded by the State. He helped juvenile delinquents reenter society, persons with physical disabilities choose a career, and he counseled parole offenders and those in drug rehabilitation. Once, during a reading in New York, a member of the audience asked him if his work had affected his poetry. He did reply, but mentioned how odd it seemed that so few people asked him: “How has your poetry affected your work?” In a printed interview later, he remarked that he had early learned to admire active syntax when composing a poem. When counseling juveniles, he urged them to do likewise. If they were liable to say, “I found myself in this apartment …” or “As it happened, I …,” he urged them to say, “I broke the window and crawled in.”

  His wife, Monica, who was trained as a nurse, has accepted various jobs during their marriage, sometimes with newborn children and their mothers; for a time she was in charge of Vietnamese refugees who were resettling in Sweden. When one sees Monica and Tomas together, one can still glimpse in the room the freshness of their first meetings.

  Tranströmer’s poems have been translated into many languages, something like thirty-eight so far. During the seventies and eighties, a number of American poets translated his work, including May Swenson, Samuel Charters, Joanna Bankier, Eric Sellin, and in Great Britain we might mention Robin Fulton and John F. Deane. Robert Hass edited a selected poems for Ecco Press in 1987.

  In Europe the praise for his poems has steadily grown. He has received almost every important poetry prize in Europe, including the Petrarch Prize in Germany, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Pilot Prize in 1988, the Nordic Council Prize in 1990, the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize in 1991, and the Horst Bieneck Prize in 1992.

  4.

  Tomas Tranströmer’s poems are a luminous example of the ability of good poetry in one culture to travel to another culture and arrive. As Tranströmer said in a letter to the Hungarian poets, published in the magazine Uj Iras in 1977, “Poetry has an advantage from the start…. Poetry requires no heavy, vulnerable apparatus that has to be lugged around.”

  Tranströmer writes playfully about technology. He has remarked that when he first began to write, in the early fifties, it still seemed possible to write a nature poem into which nothing technological entered. Now, he says, many objects created by technology have become almost parts of nature; and the fact that Sweden has a highly developed technology is always visible in his recent poems. He doesn’t exile technology, nor does technology dominate the poem: