by Robert Bly
Yes, master, that is how it ended. It was a healthful trip for me (especially for my economy) and it was necessary to see you again and find out that, in spite of the tragic complications around you, you are the same person and the same irreplaceable friend.
Important: tell me the full name and address of “Calvin” in New Orleans. I lost it. It is important for Swedish music, I have plans to send him some symphonies he could play on his radio programs.
Emma has quit school and is now working as a horseman in Småland. She will start in a new class this autumn. Love
Tomas
23 May ’78
Dear Tomas,
Just a note to tell you that I too returned more or less sane from my reading tour—like you, my last stop was Muncie, Indiana. The audience stared at me as if they had recently seen an inhabitant of a flying saucer, and I was not one, but I managed to get through the reading, and get home. Now Noah and Micah and Biddy (sometimes Mary) and I play softball every evening. Micah is an excellent first baseman, with one exception—he never catches the ball. Outside of that he is fine.
I heard of your refusal of Gov Wallace’s photograph—that has already become legend in the Red Branch Cycle of stories of visiting poets—and I must say the story pleased me! Southern ladies are insistent!
Calvin Harlan’s address is c/o Art Department, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Thank you for receiving my grief and my uncertainties and my shadowy complications without running out the door. I enjoyed our reading together and I have heard nothing but good reports of your readings! I’ll send you a funny report of the Oberlin reading in the next letter—no enclosures allowed in this one!
Carol has a new job with Farmers Union—$2000 a month for three months. I think that will be very good for her.
With deep fondness always,
Robert
Katrineholm 6-9-78
Dear Robert,
as often when in strange circumstances, I like to write to you. I’m longing for an answer.
I am at the training center for civil defense officers in Katrineholm. I am taught sick-care in general and especially to dig out, rescue and transport wounded civilian people under tumbled-down houses. I wear a helmet and institution clothes and everything is rather military except for the fact that we carry no weapons at all. It is not meaningless. Anyone can happen to meet a tumbled-down house! Didn’t you fall from the roof of your chicken house once—if I had had this training I could rescue you very quickly. You would get expert embalming (or what is the word for winding cloth around broken extremities?).
Michael Cuddihy wants to have some letters from me to you but I have to censor them a little first—I mean wipe out things that might insult an innocent reader of Ironwood. Of course if you have burned my letters already, then there is no problem. (I will not take away my stupidities, only the worst gossip.)
And, at last, what happens to you? Is it bad? Is it better? Are the children as irresistible as when I saw them.
Here everything is fine, and I suppose they are saying hello, but I can’t promise because I live in this civil defense camp...I will be back in Västerås 11 days from now. Write!
Your friend Tomas
21 Sept, ’78
Dear Tomas,
Thank you for your letter when out rescuing people from collapsing houses! It’s good to know you could rescue me, if you could only get over here in time...
I’m happy these days—sometimes positively joyful. My life is arranged this way: The first two weeks of each month I’m at my writing cabin at Kabekona—Ruth and her children are nearby—she is working in a home for 350 mental patients, all considered incurable by the State—no psychiatrist at all for them, not even one—and then on the 15th of each month or so, I come down to Madison, and live in this lovely house I’ve bought in Madison, at 127 2nd Ave. Madison 56256. I came down here on the 15th of Sept and the boys have been living with me since, and we’re in the process of furnishing the rooms for Mary & Biddy. All is going well in that area. Don’t worry for your impulsive, prudent friend...and Carol, I think, is doing well too. She’s going to England in a few weeks, and doing a reading tour in Connecticut in late October. I’ll get to work on that letters problem, and send any letters chosen to you before Ironwood sees them...A hug from the Norwegian owl. Love to Monica!!
Robert
12 Nov, 78
Dear Tomas,
I’ve finally gotten the letters together for Ironwood! I had lots of fun doing it—you are one of the greatest letter writers in the literary community at the moment! It’s a community of mumblers, compulsive secret-keepers, stutterers, verbal limpers, balloon enthusiasts of sin, sailing over the “poor details of life”—In any case, here are eight chosen half at random, half from an eye to humor—they are very funny! Cross out whatever you don’t want in, drop out whole letters if you want to. I think they’re all good. The praise of me
[------]
can’t do it in English, because the pun on Sanning and sound-barrier only exists in Swedish! What can I do? Make up a new title? At the Edges of Truth?—How about The Railroad Crossing of Truth?—or The Customs Barriers of Truth? See what I mean?
Do write—your friend
Robert
Love to Monica!
1979
5 Feb, 79
Dear Tomas,
How good to get a letter! You certainly did right to remove that sentence of Monica’s...my enemies would be sure I had added it in proof anyway. My reputation for modesty is not extreme, since occasionally I rewrite Goethe, and this is—I don’t know why—considered immodest by some.
I was most alarmed when you began to plunge into the subject of your health; but relieved to find it is only high blood pressure. That is not serious. And I now understand the Danton poem...if I might start a new school of Medical Imagery Examination I would say that Danton’s being on stilts is a sure diagnosis by the unconscious of high blood pressure. But no one listens to me...the poem says you have to become more like Robespierre, take long baths, spend hours on your toilette, etc. My poems say that I spent too much time in the snow, and I must move out of my teepee.
I think I will try to use the word “customs” in the title of your book. I’ll try to think of a casual expression for those custom benches and desks and check out counters that one finds in the European airports...Did I ask you to send me a copy of whatever translation you’ve been using of the Schubert poem? It will save me many questions of you, but on the other hand...I can figure it out if you’re willing to correct my stanzas without humiliating me too much. I’m sensitive, being Norwegian...By the way, I met that dear man, Lou Camp when I read in Pennsylvania recently...(At Wilkes-Barre, when I was being driven back to my bed, I saw a movie theater marquee, with the words
FLOOD INNOCENT
on it. I thought it was a movie about a flood, but it turned out that the famous representative Flood had helped so many in Wilkes-Barre with his numerous crooked schemes that the theater owner put the phrase up there as a sort of primitive magic...the verdict is not yet in from the jury.) Lou Camp’s wife has left him, Bobbie...I was astounded at that, but it seems that she really wanted a career, and felt that Lou’s presence was a drawback in that area. He’s not very happy at all with the situation. He said something like “Now she has a career, and I am suffering!” He is still at Bucks County Community College.
I am finishing an anthology for the Sierra Club, of “nature poems.” I decided to make it a polemical anthology, dividing the poets who believe there is no consciousness outside the human brain from the poets who sense a consciousness out in the trees and countryside. Work on it is very exciting. I’ve put in Harry Martinson’s “Havsvinden.” I am going to put in a poem of yours, for sure, but I haven’t decided which one yet. Do you have any thoughts on this? Perhaps “A Section of Woods”...or an earlier poem?
> The situation with the family seems to be all right. I enjoy deeply the two weeks that I spend each month with the children in my new house in Madison. And Carol and I are quite friendly, in literary matters, and in attempts to care for the children, and that is very helpful. She has finished a new story, and has established her crossword puzzle business. It all seems so strange...I can’t really take it all in yet. I vary between depression and elation. The moods, and even the events, are by no means completely under the control of my will.
I send you both my affection and love.
Robert
April 2, 79
Dear Tomas,
Thanks for the news! It sounds as if Monica is coming out of retirement. Ellen Goodman is publishing a book of interviews with various American women who have been changing their lives, and one woman said that when she got married, it was like agreeing to retire. “I went into retirement right away”—How odd! So they get younger as they leave retirement—how strange!! I think Monica must be doing very well.
I’m enclosing my translation of your marvelous Schubert poem—please pick its poor nappy head for fleas, muskrats, porcupines, whatever creatures are living there unjustly. Is the end right?
I plan to send it to the New Yorker just to see what they will do.
We are all well here, quivering a little over the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant—but otherwise cheerful.
I’m thinking of coming over to Scandinavia during the first two weeks of August. Do you think the Swedes would want me to read anywhere? Was it Svenska Radio who was looking for me last spring?
Saul is sitting here with me, on the lake shore, at Kabekona, and sends his best!!
Love from your friendly
“animal helper” as in the
fairy stories—
Robert
Västerås April 14 -79
Dear Roberto,
Thanks for a good letter, and a translation which is magnificent in tone (but with minor howlers...I will return later to them). Monica is back, after working for almost 3 weeks in Skåne with the Viet Nam refugees, or rather not directly with them but with establishing a medicare center for them in Perstorp, where most of the families will be housed. I visited her once. Perstorp was a gloomy place and could be much helped with a Chinese part of town. Now she is back in retirement for the next weeks, and around May 1 we will go to Corfu for a week. And Emma has left us. She is living together with a young man called Kenneth Karlsson! She looks happy, so I hope he is a good fellow, but rather shy—he gets very nervous when he catches sight of me or Monica.
I am happy to hear that you will come to Scandinavia in August. It is not exactly the season for cultural activities, but the Radio is always open. I will warn them in advance this time, so you can be invited to talk endlessly to the Swedish people, and also get paid for it! John Gardner was here recently and they had a 2 hour “conversation” with him. I remember a part that went like this:
Interviewer: And who is, in your opinion, the most important prose writer in America just now?
Gardner: Well, I know it sounds a little arrogant, but actually I think it is me.
etc. It is also possible that a cabaret in Malmö, called “Fredagsbarnen” (or is it “Mandagsbarnen”?) is active. They have readings and music etc. I have been a guest there once (in 1974). This cultural cabaret is handled by Lasse Söderberg and Jacques Werup, and I suppose Lasse would be happy to have you read there, if you come to Malmö, and the cabaret is not closed. Write to him! I will figure out who is the best person to warn at the radio.
Love
Tomas
[Editor’s note: Continuation of April 14th letter]
Let me praise you first. The sound, the music the strength in your translation made me happy...
SCHUBERTIANA, comments.
Part I.
There are 2 places where I put a question mark. The first is “holding out a begging cup,” which might be too drastic, Oriental, old fashioned, medieval. Maybe the begging of department store windows is more of a modern salesman teasing type. (I don’t know how it sounds...) I mean, I don’t want the reader to see a leprous hermit sitting there in the window, holding out his cup. “Whirlwind” is a little too strong too. Why not “swarm”?
The other thing is “catacombs in motion,” which for me sounds almost like “slow motion.” What struck me in New York was the violent rushing of the subway cars. Now a catacomb is static, calm, lifeless. A catacomb rushing forward is a paradox, but a ghostly and dangerous paradox. If “in motion” gives that impression it is OK. But the risk is that the motionlessness of the catacombs takes over the word “motion,” so it becomes “slow motion.” Why not “rushing catacombs”?
Part II
“Treeless” is unnecessary, maybe dangerous. If you mention a tree, even in connection with “-less” you see a tree in front of you, and I don’t want to have those trees in my brain!
“Hundred-footed notes”...I say “tusenfotingar” which is a small animal, in my dictionary called “centipede” or “millipede.”
Do you see the similarity??? I want to have the animal kept in your translation. If you are allergic to centipedes you might use your version. But you have to give a reason.
For part V you say “Nor their music,” but I suppose “Nor” is a misprint for “NOT.”
Part III: perfect.
Part IV:
(Most of it I have to take on trust.) But “the Western Union message” is too Middle West! “Olyckstelegram” is probably untranslatable. It means a telegram with bad news, maybe fatal news. Can you say “calamitous telegram”? Probably not. Charters has “telegram about the accident,” which is too long. Well, you have to think more about it.
(The talk about the ax blow from within is probably a presentiment of my high blood pressure...)
I am also against the “string musicians.” I know that you cannot use “the bows,” but maybe you could say “string instruments,” or “bowinstruments.” I don’t want to have the musicians talking to me, I want to have the music.
Part V:
The part with our hands moving weights is a little disturbing. First, I don’t think you should repeat “It looks,” because it sounds as if it belonged to what looked “ridiculous” (previous line). No, the hands moving weights are not ridiculous. (What is ridiculous is the position of 2 men on the same stool, two drivers for the same carriage.) So start with the hands. They are moving weights etc. not in order to make the arm of the balance stand in a position of 50% happiness and 50% suffering. NO, we are trying to change it a little to the happiness side (probably without success). As if we moved the counter-weights, in an effort to alter the frightful equilibrium of the balance arm, where happiness and suffering weigh exactly the same.
Annie did not say “awfully heroic.” She said “This music is heroic” (I am, as you know, almost always documentary) and she said it neutrally, or with estimation.
A question mark for “the higher / depths.” It might be good. Difficult for me to know. But you should know what it means in Swedish
uppför = uphill
djupen = the depths
a paradox here too, or rather an unexpected turn. up / the depths...
25 April, 79
Dear Tomas,
Thank you for your letter, and the comments! Goodness, how strange, that Emma has leapt out of the nest! It seems to me they are both children...do you mean that my daughters will fly the coop too? Oh dear, that’s not right.
There is so much talk here now about the special “TRANSTRÖMERNUMBER” of Ironwood. I’m jealous of course. “No one ever does that for me!” I whimpered that to myself when it came, but I have recovered now, and enjoy greatly the American poets’ puzzling as to why you don’t fit into the neat categories of American poet-making. You carry some sort of European authority as well, and they believe what you do or say..
.I feel a Goethe-complex approaching.
I’ve sent “Schubertiana” to the New Yorker, and if they accept it, we’ll both get a little money! I think you’re right on “begging cup” and I’ll change that.
“Catacombs in motion” is declared by all hearers as a lucky phrase, full of energy and very ominous. It is the repetition of the long “o” that gives it its mystery, I think. “Catacombs in motion.”
I tried “centipede” and it is terrible! In Swedish you actually see the feet, in “Tusenfotingar” and I have to have a way in English for the reader to see feet also. If I say centipede, he sees a cellar, dirty, with broken linoleum, old orange peels, backed up sewer, etc.