The Deleted World- Poems Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Introduction by Robin Robertson

  Höstlig Skärgård

  Autumnal Archipelago

  storm / storm

  kväll – morgon / evening – morning

  ostinato / ostinato

  Paret

  The Couple

  Ansikte mot ansikte

  Face to Face

  En vinternatt

  A Winter Night

  Vinterns formler

  Winter’s Code

  Ensamhet (I)

  Solitude (I)

  I det fria

  Out in the Open

  Till vänner bakom en gräns

  To Friends Behind a Border

  Skiss i oktober

  Sketch in October

  Hemåt

  Calling Home

  Från mars – 79

  From March 1979

  Svarta vykort

  Black Postcards

  Eldklotter

  Fire Graffiti

  Från ön 1860

  Island Life, 1860

  Midvinter

  Midwinter

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Tomas Tranströmer

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  For Drenka Willen

  INTRODUCTION

  by Robin Robertson

  Every October for decades, a group of reporters and photographers from all over the world has gathered in the stairwell of an apartment block in Stockholm, waiting to hear if the poet upstairs has finally won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The poet’s wife, Monica, would bring them tea and biscuits while they stood around—but they would always leave, around lunchtime, as the news came in that the prize had gone to someone else. Annually, the name of Tomas Tranströmer came up, and with every year one felt a growing sense that he would never receive this highest literary honor from his own country. The vigil is over now, with the wonderful, almost unbelievable news of October 2011.

  Now in his eightieth year, Tomas Tranströmer is not only Scandinavia’s greatest living poet, but also widely regarded as one of our most important contemporary international writers. He was born in April 1931, an only child. His parents divorced when he was three years old, and he was brought up by his mother within the educated working class of Stockholm: a Social Democratic system infused with the traditional Lutheran ethics of moral compassion and generosity. After graduating in psychology, he took up a career in the field, working in a young offenders’ institute in Linköping. In 1965 he moved with his wife, Monica, and their daughters, Paula and Emma, to Västerås, a small town west of Stockholm, where he continued his work with juvenile delinquents, convicts, drug addicts, and the physically handicapped. It was during this time that his poetry began to reach its full maturity and an international audience, being translated into more than sixty languages and bringing him a host of awards. In 1990, however, his life was changed irrevocably by a serious stroke. While his disability did not end his writing career, it did impair his ability to communicate, and the Tranströmers now live quietly in an apartment in the Södermalm district of Stockholm—near where Tomas lived as a young boy, and overlooking the sea lanes where his grandfather worked as a pilot, guiding the ships through the Stockholm archipelago—and in their cottage on the island of Runmarö, where Tomas spent his childhood summers.

  The landscape of Tranströmer’s poetry has remained constant during his fifty-five-year career: the jagged coastland of his native Sweden, with its dark spruce and pine forests, sudden light and sudden storm, restless seas and endless winters, is mirrored by his direct, plain-speaking style and arresting, unforgettable images. Sometimes referred to as a “buzzard poet,” Tranströmer seems to hang over this landscape with a gimlet eye that sees the world with an almost mystical precision. A view that first appeared open and featureless now holds an anxiety of detail; the voice that first sounded spare and simple now seems subtle, shrewd, and thrillingly intimate. There is a profoundly spiritual element in Tranströmer’s vision, though not a conventionally religious one. He is interested in polarities and how we respond, as humans, to finding ourselves at pivotal points, at the fulcrum of a moment:

  The sun is scorching. The plane comes in low,

  throwing a shadow in the shape of a giant cross, rushing over the ground.

  A man crouches over something in the field.

  The shadow reaches him.

  For a split-second he is in the middle of the cross.

  I have seen the cross that hangs from cool church arches.

  Sometimes it seems like a snapshot

  of frenzy.’

  —“Out in the Open”

  Tranströmer’s is a poetry of sharp contrast and duality—a double world of dark and light, inside and outside, dreaming and waking, man and machine, stillness and turmoil—and he is fascinated by the pressure between the world we know and the hidden world we cannot deny. He continually returns to symbolism that stands in opposition to the natural world: the bureaucratic, the technological, and—most specifically—the car, the driver, the mass movement of traffic. The image of man as a diminished, vulnerable creature—distanced from nature, protected by his machine but open to sudden accident—is a recurring one, and this combination of a natural landscape and abrupt, violent meetings with the mechanical, the unnatural, is a hallmark of his work. What happens at this moment of collision is vividly portrayed: the split second of shock, of vertigo, where the nerves start to register panic and calamity, where the mind starts to fight against the body’s accelerating fear. The eerie coolness and detachment of these poems, rooted as they are in quotidian reality, allow him to present the intrusion of irrational forces as primal threats; the poems can be seen as staged confrontations between the deracinated modern human sensibility and the unseen, unconscious forces—ancient, mysterious, and implacable—that sleep beneath our waking minds.

  The free versions in The Deleted World were never intended as literal translations. Tranströmer has been well served in English with a good reading of Baltics by Samuel Charters (1975), a useful Collected Poems translated by Robin Fulton (1988; updated 1997 and 2006), and a strong American selection by Tomas’s old friend Robert Bly—The Half-Finished Heaven (2001). Despite the apparent simplicity of the diction, he is a complex poet to translate. His exquisite compression and vividly cinematic imagery are instantly attractive, but the elemental sparseness of his language can often be rendered as colorless and bland. The supple rhythms of the original poems are hard to replicate, and, equally, the plosive musicality of Swedish words such as “domkyrkok-locklang” loses all its aural resonance when the word becomes a “peal of cathedral bells.” His empty, numinous landscape is comfortably familiar to northern poets, but his metaphysical parsing of that landscape into minimal Swedish can often prove too challenging.

  In his introduction to Imitations (1962), Robert Lowell writes that “Boris Pasternak has said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone and that in poetry tone is of course everything.” In my relatively free versions of some of Tranströmer’s poems, I have attempted to steer a middle ground between Lowell’s rangy, risk-taking rewritings and the traditional, strictly literal approach. I have kept the shape of the poem, opened out its sense more clearly, and tried—as Lowell rightly ins
ists one must try—to get the tone.

  Though Lowell referred to Imitations as “a book of versions and free translations,” he took his London editor’s advice on the title. T. S. Eliot told him, “If you use the word ‘translation’ in the subtitle it will attract all those meticulous little critics who delight in finding what seem to them mis-translations. You will remember all the fuss about Ezra Pound’s Propertius.” Lowell had only a passing knowledge of the original languages of the poets whose work he re-presented in Imitations. However, the contemporary British poet Jamie McKendrick is surely right when he says, “The translator’s knowledge of language is more important than their knowledge of languages.” Tranströmer himself has remarked: “I perceived, during the first enthusiastic poetry years, all poetry as Swedish. Eliot, Trakl, Éluard—they were all Swedish writers, as they appeared in priceless, imperfect translations … We must believe in poetry translation, if we want to believe in World Literature.”

  The English versions contained in this book have their genesis in Bohus-Malmön, a small island off the west coast of Sweden, where my girlfriend’s family keep a summer house. It was August, but it was raining when we arrived, and the rain continued to fall. Storm-stayed, as it were, in the cottage, there was little to do but read and write, and the first book that caught my eye was the Bonniers collected edition of Tomas Tranströmer. Three decades previously, I had discovered his work in the Penguin Modern European Poets series, so I was intrigued to come to him in the original Swedish, in Sweden, with a Swede—a friend of the Tranströmer family. Karin would write out a prose transcription in English, then recite the original poem in Swedish, so I could hear the cadences. I then produced a first draft—a simple, loose translation—which she checked for lexical or tonal inaccuracies before handing it back. For every day of rain: another poem. By the time we left the island there had been very little swimming and no sailing or sunbathing, but I had a sheaf of versions of poems by a poet I had admired since university—whose work I had met again, there on that Swedish island, with a new, and much more profound, engagement.

  Tomas Tranströmer has said, “My poems are meeting places.” The metaphor is persuasive, and singularly apt. He is interested, as all poets are, in epiphanies: the moments of sudden, spiritual manifestation when we are aware of an intimate connection being made with our landscape, our history, or with one another. But he is also deeply concerned with the dangers of abandoning those “meeting places”—those moments of communication—in favor of something mechanical: faster and more efficient, certainly, but also meaningless, artificial, and ultimately corrosive to the human spirit. As he wrote himself: “The language marches in step with the executioners. / Therefore we must bring a new language.”

  I was nervous about Tomas’s reaction to the versions in this book, but he could not have been warmer. This book was launched in London and Stockholm with the actor Krister Henriksson reading the originals, followed by my own delivery of the English versions. The highlight of both evenings, though, was Tomas playing specially written piano pieces, with his left hand. Subsequently, I and the other trustees of the Griffin Trust invited Tomas and Monica to Toronto so he could receive the 2007 Lifetime Recognition Award: a happy prelude to the slightly grander prize he received this year in Oslo.

  It is an honor to know this man, and to have translated some of his work—and a huge happiness to me that this work will now reach so many new readers. The world of poetry can finally raise a glass to salute this humble man, this magnificent poet.

  HÖSTLIG SKÄRGÅRD

  storm

  Plötsligt möter vandraren här den gamla

  jätteeken, lik en förstenad älg med

  milsvid krona framför septemberhavets

  svartgröna fästning.

  Nordlig storm. Det är i den tid när rönnbärs-

  klasar mognar. Vaken i mörkret hör man

  stjärnbilderna stampa i sina spiltor

  högt över trädet.

  kväll – morgon

  Månens mast har murknat och seglet skrynklas.

  Måsen svävar drucken bort över vattnet.

  Bryggans tunga fyrkant är kolnad. Snåren

  dignar i mörkret.

  Ut på trappan. Gryningen slår och slår i

  havets gråstensgrindar och solen sprakar

  nära världen. Halvkvävda sommargudar

  famlar i sjörök.

  AUTUMNAL ARCHIPELAGO

  storm

  Suddenly the walker comes upon the ancient oak: a huge

  rooted elk whose hardwood antlers, wide

  as this horizon, guard the stone-green walls of the sea.

  A storm from the north. It is the time of rowanberries.

  Awake in the night he hears – far above the horned tree –

  the stars, stamping in their stalls.

  evening – morning

  The mast of the moon has rotted, its sail grey with mildew.

  The seagull makes a drunken sweep of the sea, the charred

  chunk of jetty, the heavy undergrowth in the dark.

  On the threshold. Morning beats and beats on the granite

  gates of the sea, and the sun sparkles at the world.

  Half-smothered, the summer gods fumble in the haar.

  OSTINATO

  Under vråkens kretsande punkt av stillhet

  rullar havet dånande fram i ljuset,

  tuggar blint sitt betsel av tång och frustar

  skum över stranden.

  Jorden höljs av mörker som flädermössen

  pejlar. Vråken stannar och blir en stjärna.

  Havet rullar dånande fram och frustar

  skum över stranden.

  OSTINATO

  Under the buzzard’s circling point of stillness

  the ocean rolls thundering into the light; blindly chewing

  its straps of seaweed, it snorts up foam across the beach.

  The earth is covered in darkness, traced by bats.

  The buzzard stops and becomes a star. The ocean rolls

  thundering on, blowing the foam away across the beach.

  PARET

  De släcker lampan och dess vita kupa skimrar

  ett ögonblick innan den löses upp

  som en tablett i ett glas mörker. Sedan lyftas.

  Hotellets väggar skjuter upp i himmelsmörkret.

  Kärlekens rörelser har mojnat och de sover

  men deras hemligaste tankar möts

  som när två färger möts och flyter in i varann

  på det våta papperet i en skolpojksmålning.

  Det är mörkt och tyst. Men staden har ryckt närmare

  i natt. Med släckta fönster. Husen kom.

  De står i hopträngd väntan mycket nära,

  en folkmassa med uttrykslösa ansikten.

  THE COUPLE

  They turn out the lamplight, and its white globe

  glimmers for a moment: an aspirin rising and falling

  then dissolving in a glass of darkness. Around them,

  the hotel walls slide like a back-drop up into the night sky.

  Love’s drama has died down, and they’re sleeping now,

  but their dreams will meet as colours meet

  and bleed into each other

  in the dampened pages of a child’s painting-book.

  All around is dark, and silent. The city has drawn in,

  extinguishing its windows. The houses have approached.

  They crowd in close, attentive:

  this audience of cancelled faces.

  ANSIKTE MOT ANSIKTE

  I februari stod levandet still.

  Fåglarna flög inte gärna och själen

  skavde mot landskapet så som en båt

  skaver mot bryggan den ligger förtöjd vid.

  Träden stod vända med ryggen hitåt.

  Snödjupet mättes av döda strån.

  Fotspåren åldrades ute på skaren.

  Under en presenning tynade språket.

/>   En dag kom någonting fram till fönstret.

  Arbetet stannade av, jag såg upp.

  Färgerna brann. Allt vände sig om.

  Marken och jag tog ett spräng mot varann.

  FACE TO FACE

  In February life stood still.

  The birds refused to fly and the soul

  grated against the landscape as a boat

  chafes against the jetty where it’s moored.

  The trees were turned away. The snow’s depth

  measured by the stubble poking through.

  The footprints grew old out on the ice-crust.

  Under a tarpaulin, language was being broken down.

  Suddenly, something approaches the window.

  I stop working and look up.

  The colours blaze. Everything turns around.

  The earth and I spring at each other.

  EN VINTERNATT

  Stormen sätter sin mun till huset

  och blåser för att få ton.

  Jag sover oroligt, vänder mig, läser

  blundande stormens text.

  Men barnets ögon är stora i mörkret

  och stormen den gnyr för barnet.

  Båda tycker om lampor som svänger.

  Båda är halvvägs mot språket.

  Stormen har barnsliga händer och vingar.

  Karavanen skenar mot Lappland.

  Och huset känner sin stjärnbild av spikar

  som håller väggarna samman.

  Natten är stilla över vårt golv

  (där alla förklingade steg

  vilar som sjunkna löv i en damm)

  men därute är natten vild!

  Över världen går en mer allvarlig storm.

  Den sätter sin mun till vår själ

  och blåser för att få ton. Vi räds

  att stormen blåser oss tomma.

  A WINTER NIGHT

  The storm puts its mouth to the house

  and blows to get a tone.