The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

by Tomas Tranströmer

  The lines of development I have roughly indicated reach a peak—or perhaps a wave crest may be more appropriate, for it is something in motion—in Baltics (1974), Tranströmer’s longest poem to date and one that marked a new expansiveness in his manner. Note the plural of the title: here we have not one Baltic but a whole series of them, reflecting the very different experience of those in whose lives that particular sea has come to play a part—some of these Baltics overlap, while some apparently contradict each other. The poem seems to have been under way by about 1970, and two external stimuli helped as starting points. One was the finding of a logbook kept by Tranströmer’s maternal grandfather in the 1880s, listing the ships he piloted. The other was his reading of Edward Lucie-Smith’s English translation of part of Jean Paul de Dadelsen’s Jonah, which suggested to him a manner or tone of voice for a long poem less monumental than the accents of Eliot in Four Quartets. A third element should be mentioned, and that is Tranströmer’s lifelong interest in poems whose growth parallels musical development: for instance, the three long pieces that conclude 17 Poems (and which were originally meant to constitute one long poem) were intended to represent a parallel to passacaglia form, and “The Four Temperaments” in Secrets on the Way aimed to echo Hindemith’s Theme and Variations: “The Four Temperaments” for piano and string orchestra. Reference to specific musical works plays an important part in poems like “Schubertiana” in The Truthbarrier (1978) and the title poem of The Sad Gondola (1996). Tranströmer himself has claimed that the writing of Baltics was his “most consistent attempt to write music.” Besides its pattern of thematic return and variation that recalls similar patterns in many musical works, Tranströmer has further remarked that it is in part a polemic against his earlier self, against the way in which his earlier poems from the Stockholm archipelago treated the area as a protected oasis or reserve, whereas Baltics treats the landscape and its life as open to the threats of the surrounding world.

  The more relaxed manner of Baltics does not imply a more casual structure, however. It is not difficult for the reader new to the work to notice the archlike patterning of themes, as outlined by the Danish critic Steen Andersen:

  Part Six, about the grandmother . . . is a parallel to Part One, about the grandfather; in both cases there is documentary knowledge about the family (photo, logbook) and in both cases the poet himself must inquire his way forward as regards other details of this past. From Part One, the sea, we are taken, in Part Two, to the land, but with many references to the life which Part One introduced and described to us; the churchyard stones seen by the I-figure unite past and present. In Part Three the I-figure is more present still, but here, too, mainly through observations of things left by the past (the font, a photo). Parts Four and Five describe immediate observations, as distinct from the family and historical memories we otherwise find in the book. And finally Part Six carries us back to the past (the grandmother) and to the present, especially in the closing lines. . . . It is thus a matter of people in a particular place.

  In its amplification of this outline, Kjell Espmark’s account of Baltics lets us see the sequence as a climax in Tranströmer’s work up to the early 1970s, and Espmark argues that we must look to its themes to get to the heart of the poem. On the one hand we have distances, obstacles or frontiers; on the other we have attempts to overcome these, and even instances of spontaneous contact:

  The distance or blockage can change from one section to another—from historical and geographical distance to emotional isolation and the inability to articulate what “wants to be said.” The, bridging-over theme is modulated accordingly. The tension between the limiting and the uniting movements condenses in one point—a genuinely Tranströmerian oxymoron—“the open frontier.” It is toward this epiphanously charged point that the movements of the poem strive.

  Baltics was not followed by anything quite so extended, but the freer use of long lines can be seen in several poems in subsequent volumes. Ideally, such poems ought to be printed on broad pages so that the long lines can be seen to be long, not broken off and carried over. These volumes contain also a dozen or so prose poems, but what is more interesting is the presence (especially in the 1980s) of an increasing number of very short and sometimes cryptic pieces. The brevity of the poems written in the 1990s may well be related to the effects of the poet’s illness, but it does seem that a tendency toward such compression was already in evidence before 1990.

  In order to illustrate some of the foregoing, and also to give some idea of the poet’s own approach to his poems, it may be interesting to give a few examples of Tranströmer’s own comments:

  The Journey’s Formulae (Secrets on the Way)

  Here is a man plowing. It means something. Why have I now for half a year seen this man plowing? No, it’ll soon be a whole year. What does it mean? A month ago I finally understood what would happen. It’s in Yugoslavia. At first I thought it was in a Swedish landscape in autumn—I was tricked by the lighting. No, it’s Yugoslavia, in the middle of the day, and the sun is burning. It has something to do with the war. Or at least there are many dead people in the background—they move away later but what is really going on? It’s no epic, it’s a bagatelle, five lines perhaps. Yet terribly important to me . . . [Letter to Göran Palm, 1956]

  In the Nile Delta (The Half-Finished Heaven)

  In the first place it is a direct description of something I actually experienced. It is not something I invented—I recount in the concentrated form of the poem the experiences of a day in the town of Tanta in Egypt in 1959. I and my wife (who was only nineteen then and had never before been confronted with the reality of a poor country) had with difficulty managed to escape from the tour guides—there was never any help available if it was a matter of making one’s way into parts of the country which the authorities did not want to show foreigners—and there we were in Tanta. It could be asked why I use “he” instead of “I” in the poem—I think it is a way of giving distance and generality to a difficult and troubling experience. I have tried to write as unsentimentally and nakedly as possible and mainly with monosyllabic words. Well—we went to sleep in the indescribably dirty ex-hotel and then I dreamt what is in the poem. The words which a “voice” said were somewhat different—as often happens in dreams the words were nonsense words, but they had the meaning I’ve given them in the poem. The dream helped me, it created a change of mood from negative feelings and hate toward something else—not to a “reconciliation” with the suffering around us but toward a way of seeing such suffering without running away. If I were to philosophize about this, I would say that I believe hate and rage are a first and natural reaction to the plight of poor countries but they don’t give much inspiration to do anything about the situation. In the dream there was a strong positive element, a sort of GOOD WILL. My immediate reaction to this experience was of a religious nature and a trace of this can be seen, for instance, in the third-to-last line, in the words alluding to the Gospel account of the sick people around the pool in Bethesda—when the water was stirred, the pool received its miracle-working power (John 5:2). [In reply to a question from Mats Dahlberg, 1968]

  Night Duty (Seeing in the Dark)

  That bell-ringing at the end of “Night Duty”—when I was walking around in the old Västerås churchyard, which was in the process of being dug up, and caught sight of the digging machine’s scoop, bell-ringing broke out from the Lutheran cathedral tower and it seemed to wrap the whole experience in something that each reader can interpret as he pleases, but which for me is in part something fatefully apocalyptic but also something like the sponge of religious faith reaching down from above to swab one’s face as one sits like a beaten boxer in the corner of the ring waiting for the next round (the last one?). [Letter to Göran Palm, 1970]

  The Outpost (Paths)

  It began almost as a joke. It began very modestly. There was no intention it should become such a serious business; it was more something I passed the time with.
This is the situation: I’m on a military exercise and get posted out to a heap of stones, a situation one experiences as quite absurd. And to cheer myself up a little I wrote the opening lines. I didn’t mean for any poem to come out of it. These first verses were written very easily just because I didn’t have any feeling of “now this is serious, you must achieve something.” But then gradually the poem came to deal with how I find myself in an absurd situation in life generally, as I often do. Life puts us in certain absurd situations and it’s impossible to escape. And that’s where the poem becomes very serious, in the fifth verse, which ends: “I am the place / where creation is working itself out.” This kind of religious idea recurs here and there in my poems of late, that I see a kind of meaning in being present, in using reality, in experiencing it, in making something of it. And I have an inkling that I’m doing this as some sort of task or commission. It recurs further on in the book at the beginning of “December Evening 1972”:

  Here I come, the invisible man, perhaps employed

  by a Great Memory to live right now. . . .

  It’s a purely personal experience really, that I fulfill some function here, in the service of something else. This sounds pretentious and so the tone in such circumstances often becomes a little frivolous. [Conversation with Gunnar Harding, 1973]

  Citoyens (The Truthbarrier)

  In 1970, I had an old Saab that had just been tested for roadworthiness. The verdict was that everything was in splendid order, including the brakes. Then, when I was on the highway, I found myself in a lane where everyone was driving fairly fast. Suddenly the cars in front of me slowed down. I stepped on the brakes but nothing happened. I drove straight into the back of a Mercedes. My poor little car was like an accordion. I survived. I stepped out. All I walked away with was a shirt, a pair of trousers, shoes, and a book about the French Revolution. It was quite a shaking experience. I had a dream that night, which is what I have recounted in the poem: I have not invented anything. Except perhaps the image of “the plummet/ that makes the clocks go . . .” [Conversation with Robert Bly, 1977]

  The Gallery (The Truthbarrier)

  “The Gallery” is the poem I’ve carried around longest. It began some ten years ago with a particular experience. I was in Laxå as a teacher on a course for social workers, teaching interview techniques. One evening I went to the motel to sleep and then had a sort of Judgment Day experience: what is it I’m really doing? I’m a psychologist, after all, so I ought to be an expert in interviewing people. Playing one’s professional role comes easily, and in that role one is to a high degree protected. But now it was as if I was confronted with what my job really meant. It was a very disturbing evening. I lay there and watched the images of a whole crowd of people I had met in my job unwind like a film, and suddenly I seemed to experience them as a human being, not just as a professional. The poem is quite simply a coming-to-terms with this professional role, even if I started writing it as a rhapsody on authentic life stories. Yes, all those fates glimpsed in the poem are authentic, and I myself am there too, in the passage beginning “An artist said . . .” There you find a self-portrait, which was actually written in quite another context but which I inserted here. I thought that I, too, belonged in the gallery. [Conversation with Matts Rying, 1979]

  Female Portrait, 19th Century (For the Living and the Dead)

  I amused myself making a rhythmically exact version, perhaps in very bad English. It turned out like this:

  Strangled by the clothing, her voice. Her eyes are

  on the gladiator. Then she herself is

  out in the arena. And free? A gilt frame

  bear hugs the picture.

  Proper sapphic meter! But we don’t have to be so pedantic. We could forget about the sapphics and write something like this:

  Her voice is choked in the dress. While her eyes

  follow the gladiator. Then it is she who

  stands on the arena. How free? A gilt frame

  strangles the painting.

  “. . . it is she who / stands on the arena”—to me it’s important to get in this idea “she herself” somehow. After all, she does in a way change places with the gladiator. If you write only “Then she’s out in the arena,” the only way of emphasizing she is to italicize the word, and that looks silly. Another problem is “bear hugs.” “Björnkram” in Swedish sounds quite pleasant and suggests a strong and jovial fellow heartily embracing someone. . . . “Gastkramar” is of course not at all hearty. It is almost the worst expression of anguish that Swedes have. We’ll have to discuss this. What a dreadful amount of talk about this little poem. But it’s the poem I myself like best in the whole book. Hence the hypochondria. [Letter to Robin Fulton; July 8, 1989]

  •

  I have been trying to make English versions of Tranströmer’s poems for at least thirty-five years. The many translations published in a wide variety of magazines are enumerated in Karlström’s bibliography. Every now and then a gathering was published in book form. First came a selection from Penguin Books in 1974. A larger one was published by Ardis Books (Ann Arbor) in 1981. The first collected edition was brought out by Bloodaxe Books in 1987, and ten years later replaced by the New Collected Poems, from the same publisher. The latter contained, as additions to the previous book, two recent collections of poems, from 1989 and 1996, as well as the autobiographical chapters “Memories Look at Me.”

  All the poems Tomas Tranströmer has published in book form are contained in this revised and expanded New Directions edition. This includes Tranströmer’s 2004 volume The Great Enigma—a group of five small poems followed by forty-five even smaller haiku—as well as a group of nine other haiku, Prison, written in 1959 and previously uncollected. Whether a Japanese haiku master would feel on common ground with the mentality behind these Swedish examples of the form, I have no idea. I prefer to regard them simply as a set of syllabic poems (whose syllabic count I have matched) with an ability to surprise and puzzle that far exceeds what we might expect from their miniature dimensions. I would particularly like to record my thanks to Tomas Tranströmer for his unfailing help over the years.

  Robin Fulton [2006]

  17 POEMS

  17 DIKTER

  1954

  • I •

  Prelude

  Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams.

  Free of the suffocating turbulence the traveler

  sinks toward the green zone of morning.

  Things flare up. From the viewpoint of the quivering lark

  he is aware of the huge root systems of the trees,

  their swaying underground lamps. But aboveground

  there’s greenery—a tropical flood of it—with

  lifted arms, listening

  to the beat of an invisible pump. And he

  sinks toward summer, is lowered

  in its dazzling crater, down

  through shafts of green damp ages

  trembling under the sun’s turbine. Then it’s checked,

  this straight-down journey through the moment, and the wings spread

  to the osprey’s repose above rushing waters.

  The Bronze Age trumpet’s

  outlawed note

  hovers above the bottomless depths.

  In day’s first hours consciousness can grasp the world

  as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.

  The traveler is standing under the tree. After

  the crash through death’s turbulence, shall

  a great light unfold above his head?

  • II •

  AUTUMNAL ARCHIPELAGO

  Storm

  Here the walker suddenly meets the giant

  oak tree, like a petrified elk whose crown is

  furlongs wide before the September ocean’s

  murky green fortress.

  Northern storm. The season when rowanberry

  clusters swell. Awake in the darkness, listen:

  constellations stamping inside their
stalls, high

  over the treetops.

  Evening—Morning

  Moon—its mast is rotten, its sail is shriveled.

  Seagull—drunk and soaring away on currents.

  Jetty—charred rectangular mass. The thickets

  founder in darkness.

  Out on doorstep. Morning is beating, beats on

  ocean’s granite gateways and sun is sparkling

  near the world. Half-smothered, the gods of summer

  fumble in sea mist.

  Ostinato

  Under the buzzard’s circling point of stillness

  ocean rolls resoundingly on in daylight,

  blindly chews its bridle of weed and snorts up

  foam over beaches.

  Earth is veiled in darkness where bats can sense their

  way. The buzzard stops and becomes a star now.