The Half-Finished Heaven

by Tomas Tranströmer

  and every year the factory buildings go down another

  eighth of an inch—the earth is gulping them slowly.

  Paws no one can identify leave a print

  on the glossiest artifacts dreamed up here.

  And no one knows what will happen, we only know

  the chain breaks and grows back together all the time.

  (from “Traffic”)

  Even in the countryside of Sweden there are hints:

  All at once I notice the hills on the other side of the lake: their pine has been clear-cut. They resemble the shaved skull-sections of a patient about to have a brain operation.

  (from “For Mats and Laila”)

  Swedish society is most famously a welfare society, the welfare society; it is perhaps the first society in history that has had the will and the wealth to insist on the abolition of poverty. But it is also a technological society like ours, and one given to secular solutions. Tranströmer reports how difficult it is in Sweden to keep in touch with certain kinds of tenderness. In “Below Freezing,” he writes:

  We are at a party that doesn’t love us. Finally the party lets the mask fall and shows what it is: a shunting station for freight cars. In the fog cold giants stand on their tracks. A scribble of chalk on the car doors.

  One can’t say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That is why the furnishings seem so heavy. And why it is so difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sun that moves over the house walls and slips over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never set down: “Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you.”

  He returns again and again to a childhood home in Runmarö, an island in the archipelago off the east coast of Sweden; and he is as deeply attached to it as Jean Giono to the Vaucluse, or Hardy to “Wessex.” The long poem “Baltics,” which Samuel Charters translated, draws its images from the landscape and history of that island, out of which his grand father worked as a ship pilot. On his father’s side, he comes from pilots who guided ships among the islands in the Stockholm Archipelago.

  5.

  In his work, Tomas Tranströmer is always aware of something approaching over the border. The title of his fourth book, Sanningsbarriären, literally “The Truth Barrier,” suggests a customs house, or the customs table at an airport. Sanningsbarriären also contains a slight pun on the English phrase, “sound barrier.”

  As “Start of a Late Autumn Novel” begins, he is lying half asleep on the island, and hears a thumping sound outside. It seems to vanish and return. Or perhaps there is some being inside the wall who is knocking:

  someone who belongs to the other world, but got left here anyway, he thumps, wants to go back. Too late. Wasn’t on time down here, wasn’t on time up there, didn’t make it on board in time.

  Dreams surely come from over the border. “Citoyens” rose from a dream Tranströmer had the night following an auto mobile accident (the one he describes in “Solitude”). Danton with his pockmarked face appeared, but the dreamer could only see half his face, as we only see one side of the moon. Danton seemed to be standing on stilts:

  I saw his face from underneath:

  like the pitted moon, half lit, half in mourning.

  I wanted to say something.

  A weight in the chest: the lead weight

  that makes the clocks go,

  makes the hands go around: Year I, Year II …

  A pungent odor as from sawdust in tiger cages.

  And—as always in dreams—no sun.

  But the alley walls

  shone as they curved away

  down toward the waiting-room, the curved space,

  the waiting room where we all …

  The alley walls curve away toward a “waiting room,” which reminded Tranströmer of the hospital lobby where he waited so often to see his mother while she was dying of cancer. “The waiting room where we all …”

  During the eighties Tranströmer wrote a masterpiece centered on the Dutch painter Vermeer and his painting Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. The poem evokes the terror lying behind that calm canvas.

  It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the

  other side of the wall

  where the alehouse is

  with its laughter and quarrels, its rows of teeth, its tears,

  its chiming of clocks,

  and the psychotic brother-in-law, the murderer, in whose

  presence everyone feels fear.

  She is eight months pregnant, two hearts beating inside her.

  The wall behind her holds a crinkly map of Terra Incognita.

  We see a chair covered with a blue fabric:

  Just breathe. An unidentifiable blue fabric has been tacked to

  the chairs.

  Gold-headed tacks flew in with astronomical speed

  and stopped smack there

  as if they had always been stillness and nothing else.

  The ears experience a buzz, perhaps it’s depth or perhaps height.

  It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall,

  And what is empty turns its face to us

  and whispers:

  “I am not empty, I am open.”

  A second masterpiece, from the nineties, is “Grief Gondola #2” (the title is from a piano piece by Franz Liszt). We feel again Tranströmer’s devotion to music. Richard Wagner was married to Cosima, the daughter of Franz Liszt, and the two of them were living in Venice in 1882. The father-in-law, Liszt, came to visit them. There was something heavy in the visit, and Wagner in fact died soon after. In the opening lines, Tranströmer playfully calls Wagner King Midas:

  … King Midas—

  I mean the one who turns everyone he touches into Wagner.

  He goes on:

  Wagner has received the Mark …

  The heavily loaded gondola carries their lives, two return

  tickets and a one-way.

  Tranströmer finds an amazing way to allow those moments in Venice to reach forward into the European future:

  Liszt has composed a few chords so heavy one should send them

  off to the Institute for Mineralogical Studies in Padua.

  Meteorites!

  Far too heavy to stay where they are, they start sinking and

  sinking down through the coming years until they reach

  the year of the Brownshirts.

  Tranströmer doesn’t leave out his own life; he talks of himself:

  I dreamt that I had sketched piano keys out

  on the kitchen table. I played on them, without a sound.

  Neighbors came by to listen.

  Back to Liszt:

  When Liszt plays tonight he holds down the sea-pedal so that the

  ocean’s green force

  rises through the floor and penetrates every stone of the building.

  Good evening to you, beautiful deep!

  6.

  Tomas Tranströmer’s life was interrupted tragically in 1990, when he suffered a stroke. His blood pressure had always been high; he had been traveling a lot and was tired. He survived the stroke, but the right side of his body has remained partially paralyzed. The stroke impaired his ability to find and speak words as well. Nevertheless his spirits remain high; he continues to compose poems, and has recently completed a group of new haikus.

  In 2001, Tomas and Monica moved from Västerås to an apartment in Stockholm, near the old neighborhood where Tomas once lived as a boy. The town of Västerås gave an elaborate farewell ceremony for Monica and Tomas, complete with medieval music and a choir and formal readings of his poems at the old castle. He brought his piano along, and in the Stockholm apartment, he plays that piano brilliantly with his left hand. Composers in Sweden have begun to send him piano works that they have newly written for his left hand. That detail suggests how much affection there is in Sweden for Tomas and his poetry.

  Romanesque Arches

  Tourists have crowded into th
e half-dark of the enormous

  Romanesque church.

  Vault opening behind vault and no perspective.

  A few candle flames flickered.

  An angel whose face I couldn’t see embraced me

  and his whisper went all through my body:

  “Don’t be ashamed to be a human being, be proud!

  Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly.

  You’ll never be complete, and that’s as it should be.”

  Tears blinded me

  as we were herded out into the fiercely sunlit piazza,

  together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Herr Tanaka and Signora

  Sabatini;

  within each of them vault after vault opened endlessly.

  So here we are. We have a funny, brave, affectionate poet of great depth. He fought for his way—essentially a religious way—against enormous opposition during the sixties and seventies from the doctrinaire critics and Maoist skinflints who dominated Swedish intellectual life at that time. He didn’t waver. In “Fire Script” he says to his wife,

  The night heavens gave off moos.

  We stole milk from the cosmos and survived.

  —ROBERT BLY

  Introduction to the Expanded Edition (2017)

  Tomas Tranströmer was the greatest Swedish poet living into the twenty-first century, and he was one of the four great Swedish poets of the twentieth century. He was not fond of the word “great,” and always lived his life near his family with great privacy, away from the popular causes.

  When one first meets Tranströmer’s poems, one is amazed. I was amazed at the first poem of his I translated, which is in English:

  The Couple

  They turn the light off, and its white globe glows

  an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet

  in a glass of darkness. Then a rising.

  The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.

  Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep,

  but their most secret thoughts begin to meet

  like two colors that meet and run together

  on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.

  It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer

  tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.

  They stand packed and waiting very near,

  a mob of people with blank faces.

  One feels an enormous subtlety there in avoiding all the obvious things that could be said in a poem about marriage—added to that is a generous, beautifully balanced heart. How he got that, I don’t know; his father, a newspaper editor, left the family when Tomas was very young, and he was raised by a generous, warm-hearted woman, as the only child in the house. Maybe that’s a part of it. But one is tempted to say that he was born into a genius—there’s no doubt about that, he was a genius—for things in human communication that are half-sensed, half-understood, only partially risen into consciousness, liable, like a fish, to disappear into the lake a moment later. If you are addicted to certainty, there’s no point in going toward his poems—they’ll just lead you into islands that disappear a moment later.

  In general, the Swedish writing community likes everyone to walk in step. Björn Håkansson, a well-known Swedish critic and poet, attacked Tranströmer for having too much solitude. His poetry, “passive and contemplative,” achieves peace, Håkansson said, but “does so at the expense of any impulse to intervene and change the world.” He is really complaining that Tranströmer refused to be crushed to death between the concrete walls of immediate engagement, among them our obligations to the developing world. Tranströmer says:

  After a black day, I play Haydn,

  and feel a little warmth in my hands.

  Our friendship began with a curious coincidence. I read somewhere a notice about his 1962 book of poems called Den Halfvärdiga Himlen, or The Half-Finished Heaven, and I thought, that is the sort of heaven I would like, half-finished, with a lot left to do. So I drove to Minneapolis to retrieve that book from the University of Minnesota library. When I got home from that seven-hour trip, I found a letter from him on my desk. He had seen some of James Wright’s poems in London Magazine, and was sending a note of appreciation. Jim Wright and I were struggling to create our own half-finished heaven, by which I mean not put together from the bricks of fact or the stones of optimism, but with poems whose language was still entangled in what some would call the mists of childish fancies, or the mysterious roots of language, with bits of sleep still clinging to it, or language that has not given in to corporate closing up of possibilities, but holds on to the playfulness that loves to skate near open water. I had run up against such language in the half-finished hell of Georg Trakl’s war poems and those sweet moments that Juan Ramón Jiménez experienced while talking to his donkey, and here it was again, in a young Swede.

  I gave his note to Jim and wrote back to Tranströmer myself. It seems strange to me, and a bit wonderful, that the very sort of “naked poetry” that he wanted to write—poems without political or philosophical baggage—should be attempted as well by a couple of young guys from the other side of the ocean.

  We began to write each other, and continued our correspondence for twenty-six years, until his sudden and disastrous stroke in 1990. Our letters back and forth have been published in the book Airmail. In 2011 Tranströmer deservedly won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which had been anticipated by the Swedish press for many years.

  The last time Ruth and I saw Tomas and Monica was in Västerås, where they lived for some years. While we were there, the town had a special day devoted to his poems. They took four short passages of his poetry, three to four lines each, and had them engraved on four pieces of paving stone, which they then embedded in four popular walkways in the city. The city created a sweet ceremony around that, devoting a whole morning to it, so as to make clear their gratitude for his and Monica’s many years in Västerås. The party included an honorary dinner at the old Governor’s Castle.

  Tomas’s stroke took away his power of speech, but not his mental power. His judgment in his last twenty-five years was as good as ever. Sometimes he would locate in old notebooks a few discarded lines and then join some of them to create a new poem. He responded very actively to things other people said, and Monica was able to put into words what she saw in his face. There was something curious in it: even though he couldn’t express himself in words, his face had become even more expressive than it was before. When someone talked on interesting subjects like poetry or family, six or seven expressions ranging from amazement to delight would pass over his face in quick succession. Everyone grieves the absence of the poems he would have written, and grieves his death in March 2015, and yet we are glad for the poems he has written and his gratitude for the life he and Monica had together.

  —ROBERT BLY

  The Half-Finished Heaven

  1. POEMS FROM

  17 Poems (1954)

  Secrets on the Road (1958)

  The Half-Finished Heaven (1962)

  Evening—Morning

  The moon-mast has rotted, and the sail crinkled.

  A seagull sails drunkenly over the sea.

  The thick cube of dock looks charred. Bushes crouch down in

  the dark.

  On the doorstep. The sunrise pushes again and again

  through the gray stone-gates of the ocean, and the sun sparkles

  near the earth. Half-suffocated summer gods grope in the sea mist.

  Storm

  The man on a walk suddenly meets the old

  giant oak like an elk turned to stone with

  its enormous antlers against the dark green castle wall

  of the fall ocean.

  Storm from the north. It’s nearly time for the

  rowanberries to ripen. Awake in the night he

  hears the constellations far above the oak

  stamping in their stalls.

  Sailor’s Tale

  There are
stark winter days when the sea has links

  to the mountain areas, hunched over in feathery grayness,

  blue for a moment, and then the waves for hours are like pale

  lynxes, trying to get a grip on the gravelly shore.

  On a day like that wrecks leave the sea and go looking for

  their owners, surrounded by noise in the city, and drowned

  crews blow toward land, more delicate than pipe smoke.

  (In the Far North the real lynx walks, with sharpened claws

  and dream eyes. In the Far North where the day

  lives in a pit night and day.

  There the sole survivor sits by the furnace

  of the Northern Lights, and listens to the music

  coming from the men frozen to death.)

  The Man Awakened by a Song above His Roof

  Morning, May rain. The city is silent still

  as a sheepherder’s hut. Streets silent. And in

  the sky a plane motor is rumbling bluish green.—

  The window is open.

  The dream of the man stretched out sleeping

  becomes at that instant transparent. He turns, begins

  to grope for the tool of his consciousness—

  almost in space.

  Track

  2 A.M.: moonlight. The train has stopped

  out in a field. Far-off sparks of light from a town,

  flickering coldly on the horizon.

  As when a man goes so deep into his dream

  he will never remember that he was there

  when he returns again to his room.

  Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness