The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Read online

  Tomas Tranströmer

  The Great Enigma

  New Collected Poems

  Translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton

  A New Directions Book

  Copyright © 1987, 1997, 2002, 2006 by Tomas Tranströmer

  Translation copyright © 1987, 1997, 2002, 2006 by Robin Fulton

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems is published by arrangement with Bloodaxe Books Ltd., Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland, NE48 1RP, UK.

  eBook conversion by Robert Kern, TIPS Technical Publishing, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1050) in 2006.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited.

  e-ISBN: 978-0-8112-2017-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tranströmer, Tomas, 1931-

  [Poems. English. Selections]

  The great enigma : new collected poems / Tomas Tranströmer ; translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8112-1672-2 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-8112-1672-1 (alk. paper)

  1. Tranströmer, Tomas, 1931—Translations into English. I. Fulton, Robin. II. Title.

  pt9876.3.r3a2 2006

  839.71'74--dc22

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011

  www.ndbooks.com

  Contents

  Foreword

  17 POEMS (17 DIKTER), 1954

  I Prelude

  II Autumnal Archipelago:

  Storm

  Evening—Morning

  Ostinato

  III Five Stanzas to Thoreau

  Gogol

  Sailor’s Yarn

  Strophe and Counter-Strophe

  Agitated Meditation

  The Stones

  Context

  Morning Approach

  There Is Peace in the Surging Prow

  Midnight Turning Point

  IV Song

  V Elegy

  Epilogue

  SECRETS ON THE WAY (HEMLIGHETER PÅ VÅGEN), 1958

  I Solitary Swedish Houses

  The Man Who Awoke with Singing over the Roofs

  Weather Picture

  The Four Temperaments

  Caprichos

  II Siesta

  Izmir at Three O’Clock

  III Secrets on the Way

  Tracks

  Kyrie

  IV A Man from Benin

  Balakirev’s Dream

  V After an Attack

  VI The Journey’s Formulae

  PRISON (FÄNGELSE), 1959

  Prison

  THE HALF-FINISHED HEAVEN (DEN HALVFÄRDIGA HIMLEN), 1962

  I The Couple

  The Tree and the Sky

  Face to Face

  Ringing

  Through the Wood

  November with Nuances of Noble Fur

  II The Journey

  C Major

  Noon Thaw

  When We Saw the Islands Again

  From the Hilltop

  III Espresso

  IV The Palace

  Syros

  In the Nile Delta

  V A Dark Swimming Figure

  Lament

  Allegro

  The Half-Finished Heaven

  Nocturne

  A Winter Night

  BELLS AND TRACKS (KLANGER OCH SPÅR), 1966

  Portrait with Commentary

  Lisbon

  From an African Diary

  Crests

  Hommages

  Winter’s Formulae

  Morning Birds

  About History

  Alone

  On the Outskirts of Work

  After Someone’s Death

  Oklahoma

  Summer Plain

  Downpour over the Interior

  Under Pressure

  Open and Closed Spaces

  An Artist in the North

  In the Open

  Slow Music

  SEEING IN THE DARK (MÖRKERSEENDE), 1970

  The Name

  A Few Minutes

  Breathing Space July

  By the River

  Outskirts

  Traffic

  Night Duty

  The Open Window

  Preludes

  Upright

  The Bookcase

  PATHS (STIGAR), 1973

  To Friends Behind a Frontier

  From the Thaw of 1966

  Sketch in October

  Further In

  The Outpost

  Along the Radius

  Looking Through the Ground

  December Evening 1972

  The Dispersed Congregation

  Late May

  Elegy

  BALTICS (ÖSTERSJÖAR), 1974

  Baltics

  THE TRUTHBARRIER (SANNINGSBARRIÄREN), 1978

  I Citoyens

  The Crossing-Place

  The Clearing

  How the Late Autumn Night Novel Begins

  To Mats and Laila

  From the Winter of 1947

  II Schubertiana

  III The Gallery

  IV Below Zero

  The Boat—The Village

  The Black Mountains

  Homeward

  After a Long Drought

  A Place in the Forest

  Funchal

  THE WILD MARKET SQUARE (DET VILDA TORGET), 1983

  I Brief Pause in the Organ Recital

  From March 1979

  Memories Look at Me

  Winter’s Gaze

  The Station

  II Answers to Letters

  Icelandic Hurricane

  The Blue Wind-Flowers

  The Blue House

  III Satellite Eyes

  Nineteen Hundred and Eighty

  Black Postcards

  Fire-Jottings

  Many Steps

  Postludium

  IV Dream Seminar

  Codex

  Carillon

  Molokai

  FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD (FÖR LEVANDE OCH DÖDA), 1989

  The Forgotten Captain

  Six Winters

  The Nightingale in Badelunda

  Early May Stanzas

  Berceuse

  Streets in Shanghai

  Deep in Europe

  Leaflet

  The Indoors Is Endless

  Vermeer

  Romanesque Arches

  Epigram

  Female Portrait, 19th Century

  Medieval Motif

  Air Mail

  Madrigal

  Golden Wasp

  THE SAD GONDOLA (SORGEGONDOLEN), 1996

  April and Silence

  National Insecurity

  A Page of the Nightbook

  The Sad Gondola

  Landscape with Suns

  November in the Former DDR

  From July 1990

  The Cuckoo

  Three Stanzas

  Like Being a Child

  Two Cities

  The Light Streams In

  Night Journey
>
  Haiku

  From the Island, 1860

  Silence

  Midwinter

  A Sketch from 1844

  THE GREAT ENIGMA (DEN STORA GÅTAN), 2004

  Eagle Rock

  Façades

  November

  Snow Is Falling

  Signatures

  Haiku

  PROSE MEMOIR

  MEMORIES LOOK AT ME (MINNENA SER MIG), 1993

  Memories

  Museums

  Primary School

  The War

  Libraries

  Grammar School

  Exorcism

  Latin

  Foreword

  Over forty years ago Tomas Tranströmer wrote a poem called “Morning Birds,” which concludes with the idea of the poem growing while the poet shrinks:

  It grows, it takes my place.

  It pushes me aside.

  It throws me out of the nest.

  The poem is ready.

  He could hardly have envisaged then how aptly these lines would describe his career. On the one hand we have the private person who was born in Stockholm in 1931, who spent many years in Västerås working as a psychologist, and who has now returned to Stockholm to live in the very area in which he grew up. The same private person has spent as much time as possible out in the Stockholm Archipelago, on Runmarö, an island rich in family associations and a place which, I suspect, he feels is his real home. As part of the private person’s story it has to be recorded that just short of his sixtieth birthday he suffered a stroke which deprived him of most of his speech and partly inhibited movement on his right side.

  On the other hand we have the poet whose gathered work takes up very little space on the bookshelf—as he says in the memoir of his grammar-school days, he became “well-known for deficient productivity”—and yet this poet’s seemingly modest body of work has generated enormous interest. For over half a century, as they slowly accumulated, his poems have attracted special attention in his native Sweden, and in the course of the last three decades they have caught the interest of an extraordinary range of readers throughout the world. The ever-widening response to Tranströmer’s poems has been meticulously documented by Lennart Karlström: the first two volumes of his bibliography, taking us up to 1999, amount to almost eight hundred pages and list translations into fifty languages.

  Tranströmer is perhaps less in need of selection or pruning than any other poet. A new reader, however, might not want to proceed through this volume in a straight chronological manner. Reading back from recent to early work could be more helpful than reading forward (as in the arrangement of May Swenson’s selection Windows and Stones, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972). But whichever direction the new reader wants to take, a few pointers may help.

  17 Poems (1954) gathered pieces written by Tranströmer in his late teens and very early twenties and immediately announced the presence of a distinct poetic personality. The three longer pieces that conclude the collection suggest a kind of poetic ambition which the young Tranströmer soon lost—his notes on my first version of “Elegy,” for instance, contain remarks like: “This poem was written by a romantic 22-year-old!” and “Oh dear, how complicated I was in my younger days. . . .” But the very first poem, suitably called “Prelude,” reveals a quality characteristic of all his writing: the very sharply realized visual sense of his poems. The images leap out from the page, so the first-time reader or listener has the immediate feeling of being given something very tangible. “Prelude” also points forward thematically. It describes the process of waking up (note how this process appears not in the usual terms of rising to the surface but in terms of falling, of a parachute jump down into a vivid and teeming world). And this fascination with the borders between sleep and waking, with the strange areas of access between an everyday world we seem to know and another world we can’t know in the same way but whose presence is undeniable—such a fascination has over the decades been one of Tranströmer’s predominant themes. “Dream Seminar,” for example, from The Wild Market Square (1983) deals directly with certain aspects of the relations between waking and dreaming states, but the reader will soon discover many poems which explore this region.

  The way in which Tranströmer describes, or allows for, or tries to come to terms with the powerful elements of our lives that we cannot consciously control or even satisfactorily define suggests, rightly, that there is a profoundly religious aspect to his poems. In a largely secular country like Sweden such a writer may well be asked about religion in a rather blunt or naive manner (as if “Do you believe in God?” were the same kind of question as “Do you vote Social Democrat?”) and Tranströmer has always replied to such questions cautiously. The following, from an interview with Gunnar Harding in 1973, is a characteristic response to the comment that reviewers sometimes refer to him as a mystic and sometimes as a religious poet:

  Very pretentious words, mystic and so on. Naturally I feel reserved about their use, but you could at least say that I respond to reality in such a way that I look on existence as a great mystery and that at times, at certain moments, this mystery carries a strong charge, so that it does have a religious character, and it is often in such a context that I write. So these poems are all the time pointing toward a greater context, one that is incomprehensible to our normal everyday reason. Although it begins in something very concrete.

  This movement toward a larger context is very important, and it reflects Tranströmer’s distrust of oversimplified formulations, slogans, and rhetorical gestures as shortcuts that can obscure and mislead. It is in similar terms that we can see his response (or perhaps refusal to respond directly) to the criticism of several reviewers of the late 1960s and early 1970s that his poetry ignored current political “realities.” The assumption behind such criticism was that poetry is just another element of political debate, and its use of language is no different from an editorial. Many of his poems do deal with current “realities,” but with a careful avoidance of the simplifications and aggressions of politicized language and with an awareness of a wider and deeper context that seemed beyond the range of the directly “engaged” poetry of the period, with its concern for taking “positions” on a black-and-white and rather parochial political map. See in particular “About History” from Bells and Tracks (1966), and then “By the River,” “Outskirts,” “Traffic,” and “Night Duty” from Seeing in the Dark (1970).

  To return to the religious aspect—the reader will notice how specifically or overtly religious allusions in the early poetry soon disappear from succeeding work. This has been interpreted as a process of secularization: I would rather see it as a way of trying to do without the shorthand of everyday religious terminology in order to try to define for oneself those areas in which a sense of immanence may be experienced. We see something of this attempt in poems like “Secrets on the Way” and “Tracks,” both in Tranströmer’s 1958 collection Secrets on the Way, where a series of contrasts, or similes, or just luminously clear images, are grouped as if around a central space where some kind of epiphany is happening. Such poems end by returning us, perhaps abruptly, to an active world, but they leave us with the feeling that a strangeness has crossed our path.

  Later forms of this development seem to entail two processes. First, we can see some attempt to be more specific about this central space or crossing-point, about this intrusion that can illuminate or disturb our normal way of life: here we can find paradoxes, imagery from and about dreams, speculations about how both past and future can impinge upon the present, investigations into memory, and a fascination with the many ways in which borders, open and closed, may be experienced. Second, we find a gradual move away from the impersonality of the early poetry. Tranströmer can still use the third-person singular as a means of giving distance to what is clearly first-person singular experience—but from the late 1960s and the early 1970s we can watch an increasingly open involvement of Tranströmer’s own personality as an e
lement in the poems. This is partly a matter of allowing more of the concrete starting point of the poem to appear (Tranströmer can name a birthplace for nearly all of his poems), but it is also, more importantly, a matter of letting himself appear in his poems as, in a sense, an actor in his own dramas, both acting and being acted upon or through. This process can be clearly followed in poems such as: “Lament,” in The Half-Finished Heaven (1962); “Crests,” “Winter’s Formulae,” and “Alone” in Bells and Tracks (1966); “Preludes,” “Upright,” and “The Bookcase” in Seeing in the Dark (1970); and “The Outpost” and “December Evening 1972” in Paths (1973).