by Robert Bly
Here’s another:
Starting Down the Mountain After a Long Climb
In my legs is the trembling of the potassium-embers.
Flowers no one sees sown on limber earth.
I come so slowly to the simple open door.
Around my trembling knees the mountain flowers.
Love from weak legs,
Robert
P.S. I love your Mats prose poem so far! I’m reading it while listening to the Goldberg Variations!
Igor Kipnis!!!
Västerås 3-11-76
Dear Robert,
strange, I voted first for Helmut Schmidt in Germany, then for Fälldin in Sweden and yesterday for Jimmy Carter and I won all three times.
A young German poet and editor of Akzente, the only real literary magazine in West Germany, visited Västerås yesterday. His name is Michael Krüger. He wants to translate Baltics into German (yes, Baltics!) and we talked about the sad fact that you are not available in German. He wants to do something about it and I will remind him about that when we meet next time, in January. He is an honest man. I would like to bring a copy of Morning Glory when I visit him there in January, can you send me one? The Germans should read something beside Charles Olson.
My opera adventures never end. The premiere of Kátja Kabanová took place two weeks ago. Some days before a journalist in Dagens Nyheter had written that the opera had run into difficulties because my translation of Kátja turned out to be impossible to use. But a brave team of singers and Mr Joszef Cech had succeeded in the last moment to save the opera by changing my text entirely! Now that was a complete lie—I had from the beginning worked together with Cech and the singers and the problems at the end were caused by the DDR director who wanted changes in details because he did not know Swedish and knew my translation only from a word-by-word translation into his German made by a frightened girl who was good at German. I was furious for two days and wrote to the Information Boss of the opera, asking for an official reaction. He was all excuses but said it was useless to protest to DN. The journalist was a well known well meaning inventor of fables. His name was Marcus Boldeman. At the premiere Monica (in an African dress) and I were approached by a middle-aged lady and the following dialogue was heard.
The Lady: Oh, are you Mr Tranströmer?
Tranströmer: Yes, Madam.
The Lady: Oh, have you met Marcus Boldeman yet, you are supposed to meet him?
Tranströmer: Him! That bastard, who lied about me in Dagens Nyheter! Never!
The Lady: I am his mother.
How good to be back in simple surroundings again. No one could hear the text, by the way, the orchestra was too loud and the singers were acting too violently on the stage so they had no energy left for articulation.
It would be wonderful to hear from you again. What happens to my little godson?
Love
Tomas
P.S. Here is a new copy of the street crossing poem.
[8-11-76]
Dear Robert, have a quick look at this! Wonderful poem. “Band” at the end is very general in Swedish. “Ordenband” would mean the ribbon attached to an order sign. Would be fine here.
Do you really mean that Europe is sober? Never been to France? And all that beer they consume in Munich.
Cheerio!
Tomas
Västerås 11-11-76
Dear Robert,
it is a long time since you wrote to me. What will the Post Office Department think about you?
Here is a small poem of mine. About Schubert, especially his string quintet in C major and his 4-hand fantasia (opus 103) in f-minor.
I had a meeting yesterday with Roffe Aggestam and Börje Lindström. We decided to translate at least 8 more prose poems of yours. Deadline January 15. The little book will be printed and published in late spring. Translators: Tranströmer, Lindström and Söderberg (Lasse). I want to see a bunch of late prose poems from your hand, can you send me some meant to be published in the camphor gopher book? And very important: you should write a foreword, we would love to translate it (before Jan 15!) and print it. (Your mistranslated foreword to Krig och tystnad influenced some freaks over here, as you know.) If you don’t write a foreword we will give the offer to Elizabeth Bishop.
Love
Tomas
Gunnar Harding wants badly to know IF you are translating poems from Sonnevi’s latest book or not. If not, don’t hesitate to tell Harding. You will be discreetly carried away and he will let the poems meet the next gladiator.
18 Nov., ’76
Dear Tomas,
I like your translation of “Frost”! The only faint error I notice is “landstiger”—it isn’t a going on land, an embarking, but a disembarking—an image of a boat leaving land in the dead of winter, the sailors’ hands freezing as they cast off the ropes holding them to land—
Europe is sober, in that it’s always correcting the United States! Now, now, no Vietnam adventures, that’s wrong, no you’re using the wrong spoon, your accent is wrong, your cars are too big...Europe is our superego!
The ribbons are long, I think, perhaps long ribbons girls wear on bonnets, or ticker-tape ribbons, so there are roads crossing roads, as in a frosty window—
Thank you for the new copy of the Street poem! I’ve already done a new draft.
I’m enclosing a foolish little poem. I’m distracted—I have to leave tomorrow for a poetry festival in San Francisco (Östen Sjöstrand is going to read a couple of poems) and then to AN ANDROGENY CONFERENCE in the Holiday Inn in Evanston, Illinois...I’m going—though they don’t know it—to represent the unregenerate, unrepentant male.
I’m writing much, and am all excited over some new poems, and sounds!! There are so many pearls in the ocean, and weeds and “octopuses with unknown Dostoevskyan hands.”
Love to your family and you!
Robert
On Top of a Colorado Mountain
Nearly sunset. I walked up two hours, reading as I paused. Now I am at the tree line. All around there are mountain tops with the light on them! The slight delicate Norwegian grass mountain-covering....How I love its uncertain feminine green, all slopes and snow-pulled rolling valleys, all subtlety and no speech, all delicacy and no insistence, all music and no notes, all intimacy and no daydreams, all lovely absences and no angry presences, all faithfulnesses and no divisions...
The slate-gray mountain face plunges down, into the early heavy forms, (some snow there) as it dives down so sleekly, so calmly, into union...it must be that the descent into the furred ones goes along with the ascent into pure light...
I know there are hills inside me like these, and I want to walk on them, where the glad ones prance, holding on to the manes of horses, as the horses fly through heaven and hell, and turn into petals that fall onto the lap of the man with long ears reading...“The master is reading Sanskrit texts among falling flowers”...
15 Dec, ’76
Dear Tomas,
I’m sending you a new draft of the Street Crossing poem, and a first draft of your lovely island poem! It carries several queries with it.
Meanwhile I’ve read “Schubertiana”! It is a marvelous poem!!! Terr-rrrr-ific, as the American students would say. Solid and full of space.
I’ve just come back from my December-week-showing-off (the fattest wren ever seen to warble “both high and low”) and I found a couple of more places who want you to read this spring—Charleston, South Carolina, and the Transcendental Meditation University at Fairfield, Iowa. There the students know “Allegro” by heart, and it has led to a Haydn revival, I expect. They’re having a Festival in early May, around the 9th–12th.
So far there are five:
Charleston, S.C.
Ohio Univ, Athens, Ohio.
Augustina College, Rock Island, Ill.
College of Art
& Design, Mpls
Univ of Minn, Marshall (nearby)
I’ve told them all $300 plus expenses (which includes airfare inside U.S.). So if you did 10, you’d go home with $3000 this year.
I’m sending along two books for your friend Michael Krüger.
We saw a Barbara Walters interview last night with Carter and his wife, in which she compared him to Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind! There’s no end of wonders. He seems to be a nice man, but more like General Grant than Clark Gable.
I’m home for a whole month. I’ll translate all the rest of the poems you’ve sent me! No, Carter is really a kind of sweet civil servant, as in a Yugoslavian movie...there is no fire coming from his mouth...he is a mammal salamander...
Your friend, General Lee
Novel or Romance?
Start of an October Night’s Romance
The island boat has an oily smell, and something is always knocking like an obsessive thought. They turn the spotlight on. We are nearing the pier. I’m the only one for this stop. “Do you need a landing board?” No. I take a slow wobbling step right into the night, and am standing on the pier, on the island. I feel soggy and unwieldy, I am a butterfly just crept from the cocoon, the plastic clothes-bag in each of my hands like misshapen wings. I turn around and watch the boat disappear with its lit windows, then grope my way up to the sheltering house that stood empty so long. All the houses around here are uninhabited...It is lovely to sleep here. I lie on my back, not knowing if I’m asleep or awake. Some new books I’ve read sail by like old schooners on the way to the Bermuda triangle, where they will disappear without a trace. A hollow sound is audible, a forgetful drum. A thing that the wind again and again thumps against something that the earth is holding tight. At night not only is absence luminous, at night an object really exists, as this sound exists. The stethoscope sound from a slow heart, it beats, is silent a day, comes back. As if some being moved in zig-zags over the Border. Or someone who beats inside a wall, someone who belongs to the other world, but stays here anyway, beats on, wants to go back. Late. He is not down there, not up there, not on board...The other world is also this world. The next morning I see a rusty twig with leaves hanging on, gold and brown. A creeping root. Stones with faces. The forest is full of returned wonders that I love.
version by RB.
Is the one inside the wall a being, a creature, or a heart?
Is it beating on the wall, or is its heart beating?
Tomas: Please check especially five details:
blasten ater och ater; fravaron av lujus, ar nagot
Hann into dit ner, hann inte dit upp, hann inte ombord “rotvälta” is not in my dictionary!
1977
Västerås 18-1-77
Dear Master,
a wonderful snow is covering Sweden and a blue snow of prose poems leaves is covering my desk. Thanks, thanks. I have 3 days now free and I will really do something with the Bly project. The foreword is perfect. (He was a good translator, a marvellous poet and an unsurpassed writer of forewords.)
I have not been writing letters for a long time. Since early December I have been absorbed in a strange duty: writing an essay about early Swedish literature. The Writers’ Publishing house has got into financial difficulties but now everything will be all right (they, we, think) when our real best-seller is completed, called Författarnas Litteraturhistoria—Swedish literature from the runestones to Ekelöf, entirely described by us. So Gyllensten has written a chapter about Linné, Lars Gustafsson about Stagnelius, 2 people have written about Strindberg, Lundkvist about Heidenstam etc. etc. But I chose to write about a certain YEAR, and I took the year 1719, which was the year when it finally became clear that Sweden was no superpower anymore. We shrank from the glorious position at the beginning of the reign of Charles XII, to the humble size of 1719, (a half year since) Charles had been shot and we were at the very bottom of everything. I buried myself in history and had a lot of fun. This period is one of the black holes of Swedish literature, no real research has penetrated it since the 1870s and I could walk on lovely overgrown paths right into virginal archives. Oh the welcoming, smiling atmosphere, the fresh air of dusty libraries, the pure athletic joy when you come across a really mildewy print no one has bothered to look at before!
Warmest
Tomas
[Editor’s note: Internal evidence indicates that the following is a continuation of TT’s letter of 18 January. RB responds on 24 January.]
Comments about “Senhöstnattens roman.” I think your translation is very good, especially considering that you misunderstood 50%. The title means “Start of the late autumn novel.” I don’t know why I called it that, a person here in Västerås congratulated me and hoped that the rest of the novel would be fine. But I want to give the feeling that this is something that can go on for a long time, the island visitor has read the first page of something big he will never understand.
Senhöst could be the last days of October, but the mood here is more of November. So if you hate the words “late autumn,” use November. It is of course very autobiographical, a trip to Runmarö during a time of the year when the island is almost deserted. The sound at the beginning is less knocking than rattling, almost ringing (it was probably a loose screw nut vibrating). “The sheltering house” should be “the familiar house” (the house I know so well)...that is the meaning of the word “förtrogna.” “Again and again” is right. But there is a misunderstanding of “om natten,” because “om” is here not a preposition (“at night”) but a conjunction (“if the night”). So the meaning is: If (the) night is not only (something more than) absence of light, if the night really is something, it must be (is) this sound. “Is silent a day” is wrong. I wrote “ett tag” and that means “for a short while.” So the sound beats, is silent for a moment, comes back. As if it were the heartbeat of a person half-way between life and death, going zig-zag over the Border. “Hann inte dit ner” etc....“Hann” is the imperfect of “hinna” meaning “be in time.” The creature (or spirit) belongs to the other world but visits “our” world at night. But he must be back in time. Now he was too late, he did not manage to get “down there,” not to get “up there” and not to get “on board” in time. He is “akterseglad” (the last line)—så många akterseglade vidunder etc. “Akterseglad” is a sailor’s word for arriving too late for the ship, the ship has left the harbor and the sailor remains, “akterseglad.” I think the English word is “beached.” “Lövruska” is not a twig but a whole branch with leaves on—now most leaves are on the ground but there are exceptional branches. “Rotvälta” is not in my dictionary either. I have to go to the library and look in a bigger one...The word was not in any dictionary, NOT EVEN SWEDISH ONES. Strange, everybody here knows what it means but it is not in a
So “rotvälta” means the up-rooted root system of a fallen tree. The butt-end
“Street crossing” is now so chewed and digested in your wonderful imagination apparatus that I believe it has become a good Bly poem in English. Maybe it has lost some contact with my version. I would prefer “kaleidoscope of tears” to “tearful kaleidoscope”—I am more baroque. “Is aware” is OK if it is not too abstract, the street should not be aware of my existence by thinking or being told about me, but because the street—like some half-blind cave animal—can see luminous things.
24 Jan, ’77
Dear Tomas,
Thank you for the good pile of joyful slips of the brain! We all enjoyed your letter, and Monica’s remark will make me good-tempered for weeks...I’m glad she likes the Father poem...And thank you for your corrections on the Novel poem—it’s not so easy to translate when you’re blind you know...I did realize it was a “romance” in the French sense, that is a roman, I knew at least it was not a romance...I deserve a little credit...
Now to your questions about “Finding the Father.” The word “light” on
the forehead carries more connotations of “full of light” than it does of “weightless.” It is essentially what the visitor sees when he lights the lamp—the eyebrows look dark and heavy, the forehead is apparently rather high, and catches the light.
The whole series of poems could be described as “anti–St. Paul” poems. So they offer various praises of the body he was so suspicious of. For one thing, the body carries us around all day, and charges nothing! That is amazing, when you think of it! I thought of those huge logs that are carried by the sea all the way from the Hawaiian islands to the Oregon coast, floating for months, until left on the Oregon beach. Then there comes an image closely related to those in the Maui poem, which you translated so well. Those crabs might be the same small black hermit crabs, who are listening in Aramaic. A large ocean wave comes and smashes against a boulder half in and half out of water. The crabs are not hurt, but simply slide around the sides of the boulder, and roll around in the water behind it. When it is said the body “wails” with its great energy on certain days—no doubt when the Vitamin E level in the body is very high—it is a good wailing, a kind of joyful humming, as from a big dynamo, or a football player about to go out on the field. (You are right, “longs” are supposed to be “logs.”)
The person in the room does not have time to dress properly for the weather. He is probably wearing a cotton shirt and pajama bottoms, and not having time to dress, that is put on rain gear with hood, and rain boots, just throws on some old coat and goes out in his tennis shoes.
One of the father’s jobs was as a restaurant cook, after work he was an amateur painter...not painting walls, but canvases, as I guess is clear.
The last line should have a floating, almost trancelike feeling, with some tenderness thrown forward to “you.”