The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

by Tomas Tranströmer

  I would rush into the playground just as the bells began to summon us to morning service. I was hardly ever late, for everything between the hours of eight and nine in the morning was well-timed. The spring was firm and tense as the school day began.

  The end of the day at school was, of course, more relaxed, less regulated. Sometimes I went home with Palle. He was my closest friend during my first year at Södra Latin. We had quite a lot in common: his father, a sailor, was absent for long periods, and he was the only child of a good-natured mother who seemed pleased to see me. Palle had developed many of the characteristics of a single child, as I had, and he lived for his interests. He was above all a collector. Of what? Anything. Beer labels, matchboxes, swords, flint axes, stamps, postcards, shells, ethnographic oddities, and bones.

  In his home, which was crammed full of his booty, we would duel with the swords. Together we carried out excavations at a secret spot on Riddarholmen and managed to retrieve bits of skeleton, which my dentist identified as “parts of a human being.”

  Having Palle as a friend was an enriching experience, but we gradually drifted apart. Further on in school Palle was absent for long stretches because of illness. When he was transferred to another class we lost touch. My old friend was very far away. In fact, he was marked by death. He appeared at school now only occasionally, pale and serious, with one leg amputated. When he died I found it impossible to accept. I developed a bad conscience but refused to recognize it. I felt as if I was supposed to suppress the memory of all the fun we’d had.

  I feel I’m the same age as Palle, who died forty-five years ago without having grown up. But my old teachers, the “oldies” as they were collectively termed, remain old in my memory in spite of the fact that the older among them were about the same age as I am now as I write this. We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is “me.” The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones.

  The teachers who stand out in my memory are, of course, those who generated tension or excitement, those who were vivid, colorful, original. They were not in the majority but there were a fair number of them. We were able to sense something tragic about some of them. A critical situation that could be described thus: “I know I can’t be loved by those enviable turnipheads in front of me. I know I can’t be loved, but at least I can make sure I won’t be forgotten!”

  The classroom was a theater. The leading player, the teacher, performed on the stage, subjected to merciless scrutiny. The pupils were the audience and sometimes—one at a time—they would act a part as well.

  We had to be on our guard, unfailingly. I had to get used to the recurring outbursts of aggression. Miss R. had laid a good foundation—she had been strict and heavy-handed. Yet not really theatrical. At home there was nothing like this for me to learn—no scenes, no rows, no bellowing father figure. Mother was spontaneous but undramatic. Giving vent to anger was childish. I had often been furious as a child but now I was a reasonably balanced youngster. My ideals were English—a stiff upper lip and so on. Outbursts of rage belonged to the Axis Powers.

  At school there were choleric prima donnas who could devote most of a lesson to building up a tower of hysterical indignation with the sole purpose of then emptying their vessels of wrath.

  My class teacher, Målle, was hardly a prima donna. But he was the victim of a periodic and irresistible fury. Målle was really a charming person and a good teacher in his more harmonious periods. But, unhappily, what I remember best is his fury. Possibly the more violent outbursts did not come more often than three or four times a month. But it was upon those occasions that his great authority undoubtedly rested.

  In the course of such lessons the thunder rolled back and forth across the landscape. That lightning would strike was clear to everyone, but no one could predict where. Målle did not victimize certain pupils. He was “strict but fair.” Anyone might be struck by lightning.

  One day lightning struck me. We were told to open our German grammars. I couldn’t find mine. Was it in my schoolbag? Forgotten at home? I was lost. I couldn’t find it.

  “Stand up!”

  I saw Målle dance down from his desk and close in on me. It was like being out in a field watching a bull approach.

  The cuffs rained on me. I staggered this way and that. The next moment Målle was back sitting at his desk, frothing with rage, writing out a note for home. It was worded rather vaguely, accusing me of having been “careless during a lesson” or something.

  Many of the teachers hoped those written notes home would lead to interrogations and the infliction of further punishments at the hands of parents.

  Not so with me. Mother listened to my story, took the note, and signed it. She then noticed that I had blue marks on my face, caused by the ringed hand of the pedagogue. Her reaction was unexpectedly strong. She said she would contact the school, perhaps phone the headmaster.

  I protested. She couldn’t do that! Everything had turned out OK. But now “scandal” threatened. I would be called a “mama’s boy” and then persecuted forever, not just by Målle but by the entire staff.

  She dropped the idea of course. And throughout my school days I made a point of keeping the two worlds—school and home—apart. If the two worlds were to seep into each other, then home would feel polluted. I would no longer have any proper refuge. Even today I find something disagreeable in the phrase “cooperation between home and school.” I can also see that this holding apart of the separate worlds that I practiced gave rise in due course to a more deliberately maintained distinction between private life and society. (This has nothing to do with political inclinations, whether to the left or to the right.) What we live through in school is projected as an image of society. My total experience of school was mixed, with more darkness than light—just as my image of society has become. (Although we could well ask what we mean by “society.”)

  Contact between teacher and pupil was intensely personal, and important personal characteristics were magnified in the classroom atmosphere as the result of the many tense situations. Personal, yes, but not in the slightest private. We knew virtually nothing about the private life of our teachers although most of them lived in the streets around the school. There were, naturally, rumors—like Målle having been a featherweight boxer in his youth—but they were feebly supported by proper evidence and we scarcely gave them credit. We had trustworthy information about two of the most discreet younger teachers, men who never inspired any drama. One of them was poor and eked out his salary by playing the piano at a restaurant in the evening. He was seen. The other was a chess champion. He was in the newspaper.

  One day in autumn Målle came into a lesson with a Russula aerugina in his hand. He set the mushroom on his desk. It was both liberating and shocking to have caught a glimpse of his private life! We now knew Målle gathered mushrooms.

  None of the teachers expressed political opinions. But at that time there were of course unprecedented tensions in the staff room. The Second World War was being fought here, too. Many of the teachers were committed Nazis. As late as 1944 one of them, it was said, exclaimed in the staff room, “If Hitler falls, then I shall fall!” He didn’t fall, however. I had him in German later. He recovered so well that he was able to welcome Hesse’s Nobel Prize in 1946 with triumphant bellowing.

  I was a worthy pupil but not one of the best. Biology ought to have been my favorite subject, but for most of my secondary schooling I had a peculiar biology teacher. At some point in the past he had hopelessly blotted his copybook; he was warned and was now like a quenched volcano. My best subjects were geography and history. An assistant teacher called Brännman taught these classes. Ruddy and energetic, Brännman was a youngish man whose straight blond hair had a tendency to stand on end when he got angry, which happened quite often. He had plenty of goodwill and I liked him. The essays I wrote were always on geographical or historical subjects. They
were long. Regarding this, I heard a story much later from another Södra Latin pupil, Bo Grandien.† Bo became a close friend of mine in the later years of school but what he told me related to an earlier year when we didn’t know each other.

  He said the first time he heard my name mentioned was as he passed some of my classmates during a break. They had just been given back their essays and were dissatisfied with their grades. Bo heard the indignant remark: “We can’t all write as fast as Tranan, can we?”‡

  Bo decided that “Tranan” was a detestable character who ought to be avoided. To me, this story is in a way comforting. Nowadays, well-known for deficient productivity, I was then clearly noted as a prolific scribbler, someone who sinned through excessive productivity, a literal Stakhanov.

  Exorcism

  During the winter when I was fifteen I was afflicted by a severe form of anxiety. I was trapped by a searchlight that radiated not light but darkness. I was caught each afternoon as twilight fell and not released from its terrible grip until the next day dawned. I slept very little; I sat up in bed, usually with a thick book before me. I read several thick books during this time but I can’t say I really read them, for they left no trace in my memory. The books were a pretext for leaving the light on.

  It began in late autumn. One evening I’d gone to the cinema and seen Squandered Days, a film about an alcoholic. It ends with him in a state of delirium—a harrowing sequence that today I would perhaps find rather childish. But not then.

  As I lay down to sleep I reran the film in my mind’s eye, as one does after being at the cinema.

  Suddenly the atmosphere in the room was tense with dread. Something took total possession of me. Suddenly my body started shaking, especially my legs. I was a clockwork toy that had been wound up and now rattled and jumped helplessly. The cramps were quite beyond the control of my will—I had never experienced anything like this. I screamed for help and Mother appeared. Gradually the cramps ebbed away. And did not return. But my dread intensified and from dusk to dawn would not leave me alone. The feeling that dominated my nights was the terror Fritz Lang nearly captured in certain scenes of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, especially the opening scene: a factory where someone hides while the machines and room vibrate. I recognized myself in this immediately, although my nights were quieter.

  The most important element in my existence was illness. The world was a vast hospital. I saw before me human beings deformed in body and in soul. The light burned and tried to hold back the terrible faces but sometimes I would doze off, my eyelids would close, and the terrible faces would suddenly close in on me.

  It all happened in silence, yet within the silence voices were endlessly busy. The wallpaper pattern made faces. Now and then the silence would be broken by a ticking in the walls. Produced by what? By whom? By me? The walls crackled because my sick thoughts wanted them to. So much the worse . . . Was I insane? Almost.

  I was afraid of drifting into madness but in general I did not feel threatened by any kind of illness—it was scarcely a case of hypochondria—but it was rather the total power of illness that aroused terror. As in a film where an innocuous apartment interior changes its character entirely when ominous music is heard, I now experienced the outer world quite differently because it included my awareness of the domination wielded by sickness. A few years previously I had wanted to be an explorer. Now I had pushed my way into an unknown country where I had never wanted to be. I had discovered an evil power. Or rather, the evil power had discovered me.

  I read recently about some teenagers who lost all their joy in living because they became obsessed with the idea that AIDS had taken over the world. They would have understood me.

  Mother had witnessed the cramps I suffered that evening in late autumn as my crisis began. But then she could only be an outsider. Everyone had to be excluded; what was going on was just too terrible to be discussed. I was surrounded by ghosts. I myself was a ghost. A ghost who walked to school every morning and sat through the lessons without revealing its secret. School had become a breathing space, my dread wasn’t the same there. It was my private life that was haunted. Everything was upside down.

  At that time I was skeptical of all forms of religion and I certainly said no prayers. If the crisis had arisen a few years later I would have been able to experience it as a revelation, something that would rouse me, like Siddhartha’s four encounters (with an old person, with a sick person, with a corpse, and with a begging monk). I would have managed to feel a little more sympathy for, and a little less dread of, the deformed and the sick who invaded my nocturnal consciousness. But back then, caught in my dread, religiously colored explanations were not available to me. No prayers, but attempts at exorcism by way of music. I began to hammer at the piano in earnest.

  And all the time I was growing. At the beginning of the autumn term I was one of the smallest in the class, but by its end I was one of the tallest. As if the dread I lived in were a kind of fertilizer helping the plant shoot up.

  Winter moved toward its end and the days lengthened. Now, miraculously, the darkness in my own life withdrew. It happened gradually and I was slow in fully realizing what was happening. One spring evening I discovered that all my terrors were now marginal. I sat with some friends philosophizing and smoking cigars. It was time to walk home through the pale spring night and I had no dread at all of terrors waiting for me at home.

  Still, it is something I have taken part in. Possibly my most important experience. But it came to an end. I thought it was the Inferno but it was Purgatory.

  Latin

  In the autumn of 1946 I entered the Latin division of senior secondary school (upper high school). This meant new teachers: instead of Målle, Satan, Slöman (slö = dull), and company came characters like Fjalar, Fido, Lillan (the littl’un), Moster (Auntie), and Bocken (The Buck). The last of these was the most important because he was my class teacher and influenced me more than I would have been willing to admit then as our personalities clashed.

  A few years before he became my teacher, we had had a moment of dramatic contact. I was late one day and was running along one of the school corridors. Another boy came hurtling in the opposite direction toward me. This was G., who belonged to a parallel class and was well known as a bully. We screeched to a halt, face-to-face, without managing quite to avoid a collision. This sudden braking generated a lot of aggression and we were alone in the corridor. G. took the chance offered—his right fist slammed into my midriff. My sight blackened and I fell to the floor, moaning like a mademoiselle in a nineteenth-century novel. G. vanished.

  As the darkness cleared I found myself staring up at a figure stooping over me. A drawn-out, whining, singing voice kept repeating as if in despair, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” I saw a pink face and very neatly trimmed chalk-white beard. The expression on the face was worried.

  That voice, that face, belonged to the Latin and Greek teacher Per Venström, alias Pelle Vänster (vänster = left), alias Bocken. Fortunately he refrained from any kind of interrogation as to why I was lying in a heap on the floor, and he seemed satisfied when he saw I could walk away unaided. Since he showed himself to be worried and somewhat helpful, I formed the impression that Bocken was at heart a well-meaning person. Something of that impression persisted later as well, even when we had our conflicts.

  Bocken’s appearance was stylish, quite theatrical indeed. He usually accompanied his white beard with a dark wide-brimmed hat and a short cloak. A minimum of outdoor clothes in winter. An obvious touch of Dracula. At a distance he was superior and decorative, close up his face often conveyed a helplessness.

  The half-singing intonation that characterized him was a personal elaboration of the Gotland dialect.

  Bocken suffered from a chronic arthritic condition and had an emphatic limp, yet he managed to move swiftly. He always made a dramatic entrance into the classroom, throwing his briefcase onto his desk; then, after a few seconds, we knew without a doubt whe
ther his mood was favorable or stormy. The state of the weather evidently affected his mood. On cool days his lessons could be downright jovial. When an area of low pressure hovered over us and the skies were cloudy, his lessons crawled along in a dull and fretful atmosphere punctuated by those inescapable outbursts of rage.

  He belonged to the category of human being that was quite impossible to imagine in a role other than that of schoolteacher. In fact, it could be said that it was hard to envisage him as anything other than a Latin teacher.

  In the course of my penultimate year at school, my own brand of modernistic poetry was in production. At the same time I was drawn to older poetry, and when our Latin lessons moved forward from the historical texts on wars, senators, and consuls to verses by Catullus and Horace, I was carried quite willingly into the poetic world presided over by Bocken.

  Plodding through verses was educative. It went like this. The pupils first had to read out a stanza, from Horace perhaps:

  Aequam memento rebus in arduis

  servare mentem, non secus in bonis

  ab insolenti temperatam

  laetitia, morituri Delli

  Bocken would cry out: “Translate!” And the pupil would oblige:

  With an even temper . . . aah . . . Remember that in an even temper . . . no . . . with equanimity . . . to maintain an even temper in difficult conditions, and not otherwise . . . aah . . . and like in fav- . . . favorable conditions . . . aah . . . abstain from excessive . . . aah . . . vivacious joy O mortal Dellius . . .