by Robert Bly
We may remember that at the time these letters were written, the legitimacy of the prose poem, especially in the United States, was by no means universally secured. Today that controversy is mostly a thing of the past, with the prose poem generally acknowledged as “real” poetry. Eventually both poets’ interest in the prose poem wanes, though form is still a major topic of discussion. In the 1980s Bly recasts some of his prose poems in complicated stanzas reminiscent of Marianne Moore’s (“I am veering back toward form, now,” he writes on February 16, 1980, “with a new view of it, supported partly by my amateur researches on sound”), while Tranströmer makes a limited return to the Sapphics of his work in the 1950s (“We will both end up as neo-classicists!!” he exclaims on June 29, 1982).
One of the more fascinating extraliterary features of the correspondence is the discussion of current affairs—American, Swedish, and international—that emerges as a constant in the letters almost from the beginning. These are, of course, the years of the Vietnam War, in which Bly is instrumental in organizing protest readings under the aegis of the American Writers Against the Vietnam War. Tranströmer’s grasp of American politics as displayed in the correspondence is extraordinary and humbling when compared with the insularity of most Americans. Of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, he observes:
Right after things like that I’m so full of rage and resignation that poetry becomes impossible...to write is to go into reality itself, where the gunsmoke still lingers. Otherwise I was rather skeptical about Robert Kennedy, terribly split. I’ll never know what he really stood for. Maybe he was very good. But I’ve put all my eggs, my American eggs, in McCarthy’s basket. Maybe I should also let Lindsay take an egg. (June 6, 1968, trans. JM and L-HS)
Such examples make clear that a major element in the friendship of Tranströmer and Bly is an absorbing interest in politics and society as viewed through the lens of psychology, however speculative that psychology may be (especially in Bly’s Jungianism, from which Tranströmer stands at an evident remove). A representative instance of Bly’s psychopolitical speculation on the Vietnam War occurs in his letter of January 14, 1966:
People are wrong though when they think this is the first battle of World War III—it is the last battle of World War II. The white race feels guilty and wants to waste now all the riches it took from the Orient, and if it can do so and at the same time kill large numbers of yellow people, so much the better. We are determined to disgrace ourselves, and nothing will stop us. We are doing it instead of the Europeans for them. The Europeans have disgraced themselves so much, they are satisfied now. But we still hunger for disgrace—we howl for it.
We recognize here the psychological dynamic underlying Bly’s antiwar masterpiece “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last.” That Tranströmer, by temperament calmer and less prone to exaggeration than Bly, is willing to abide Bly’s more hyperbolic manner augurs well for their friendship’s resiliency and longevity.
Thus on one level Airmail serves as a vibrant chronicle of a tumultuous time in U.S. and world history. Bly’s running account of his participation in antiwar activities provides a window into the historical moment when many American readers first awoke to Bly’s defiant eloquence. Bly’s December 27, 1967, anecdote of the aftermath of an antidraft demonstration in New York delights in the rebellious high spirits that informed protests of that era:
Galway Kinnell, Mitch Goodman (Denise Levertov’s husband) and I were hauled away with Dr. Spock. We went with Spock first under the barricades (no good) over (no good) around—that worked—and we were all hauled off to jail in the same wagon. Once at the Criminal Courts Building, we were processed, etc. and then tossed in a cell—who should be there but Allen Ginsberg! There were 10 or 12 18 and 19 year old kids in the cell too. When Galway and I came in, they said, Now all the poets are here! Let’s have a poetry reading! So we did, and sang mantras with Allen for a while, Allen had brought his Hindu bells to jail with him, and we all had a great time, singing and chanting.
If Tranströmer keeps more distance from the front lines of protest, he maintains a passionate critical involvement with the war and the social turmoil it has engendered in America and elsewhere. His letter of September 2, 1968, gives us a less filtered glimpse of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia than was then available to most U.S. observers:
I’ve spent a great part of the past 24 hours in front of the TV and seen tanks roll by from morning till night. I’ve been able to follow the Czechoslovakian drama from hour to hour—it has made an enormous impression here—I doubt whether you in the U.S. have experienced the events more than 25% of what the Europeans have experienced. Honorable leftists of Sonnevi’s type must be having a very hard time. Communists loyal to the party have solved the problem in a radical way by wholeheartedly condemning what’s happening—Hermansson, the party leader, requested that we recall our ambassador to the Soviet Union! (No other party has requested that.)
Humor and politics frequently intersect, as in Tranströmer’s creative and perhap only half-jesting suggestion of August 22, 1974:
putting [Nixon] in jail would be too easy a way to get rid of the really sad fact: that the fellow was elected by YOU, the People, by a landslide victory. I think everyone who voted for him should go to jail for three minutes (of silence) instead.
Wit serves throughout the correspondence as a leavening agent. One can’t help smiling when Tranströmer (referring to Bly’s penchant for designating an easy matter as “duck soup”) wryly signs off as “Duck Soup Tommy.” Likewise, Bly, after indulging in predictions on the Watergate scandal, dubs himself “The Jeane Dixon of Madison.”
Occasional playful jibes in the correspondence over which man would—or wouldn’t—win the Nobel Prize ring presciently now. On December 10, 1975, Tomas writes an acerbic account of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale’s Nobel ceremony. Maybe, Tomas suggests, Robert will get one when he’s eighty.
At times humor masks the inevitable tensions of a long-term relationship. On January 4, 1970, Tranströmer flatly advises Bly to “give up astrology!” Tranströmer’s apologetic tone after a 1972 visit suggests a residual strain:
Sorry to cause harm to your car—how are the brakes now? Better? As soon as I step into your car something happens...This was the main reason for not riding one of your beautiful horses, I was afraid to make it lame or something. Good that I did not burn down the chicken house.
For his part, on March 12, 1974, Bly half-comically apologizes for what one gathers was an especially talk-heavy visit:
After you left, I laughed and laughed to think of all the Jungian fanaticism you had been subjected to in just two or three days...At least half of what I said was absurd, so please do forgive me, forgive all of us—the Sitting Bulls of psychology.
Among the more touching passages of the correspondence are those reflecting the intimate details of the poets’ lives, a family illness, the death of a relative, the birth of a child. After the birth of the Blys’ son Micah, the proud father writes:
We’d like you and Monica to be the new baby’s godparents, by the way! Yes, we do! We would baptize him, if you agree, while you’re here in October, and Monica can be a godparent in absentia. Your physical duties would be light, and, spiritually, all you’d have to do is bless him every once in a while. We’d love it if you’d both agree. (May 30, 1971)
In June, the willing godfather reports:
Monica dreamt the other night that she (as nurse) was called to a woman to help her deliver a child. When she looked into the womb of that woman she found a deep, wide tunnel where a little boy was sitting, serious, waiting. He seemed to be between 6 months and 1 year old. Monica lifted him out but it was impossible to do the usual things you do with newborn babies with him—he seemed too grown-up. He had a very clever look. When she woke up her first association was with your new baby. Congratulations from all parts
of us: ego, superego and id.
Friendships have their rhythms and seasons, fat times and lean times. By the late 1970s we notice a decrease of frequency in the exchange of letters; by the early 1980s the era of intensive translation is over. There is less literary substance in the final decade of the correspondence, evident in the proliferation of newsy travel reports and relative paucity of discussion of poems. Tellingly, when Tranströmer’s book Det vilda torget (The Wild Market Square) appears in 1983, there is no Bly translation. By the late 1980s, the letters are dominated by talk of family and the comings and goings of the two by-now celebrated poets, with fewer glimpses into the inner workings of their poems. In a real sense, Bly and Tranströmer themselves have become family, prone also to the silences and lacunae of family relationships. Later in the 1990s, Bly will stunningly render the greatest poems in Tranströmer’s last pre-stroke volume, För levande och döda (For the Living and the Dead), for inclusion in The Half-Finished Heaven. “Romanesque Arches,” mentioned in Bly’s letter of May 3, 1989, appears to be the last poem of Tranströmer’s he translated before the stroke. Tranströmer’s appreciative response on May 14 is worth noting:
...your translation of “Romanska bågar” seems to have the right tone. You are probably the only one among my—now rather numerous—translators who has the right feeling for this poem that embarrasses certain readers and makes others happy.
This is hardly the first time Tranströmer has remarked on Bly’s ability to reconsititute from the Swedish original a successful poem in English. On February 13, 1974, Tranströmer pays Bly a translator’s supreme compliment:
The good thing with your translations is that I always meet again the original emotion I felt just when the poem started. Other translators give a (pale) reproduction of the finished poem but you bring me back to the original experience.
No doubt Bly’s translations have been a major factor in establishing a wide American readership for Tranströmer’s poems, just as Bly has played no small part in raising Tranströmer’s profile internationally, not escaping the notice of the Nobel Prize committee. Christopher Benfey wrote in the New Republic: “For me, a Nobel for Tranströmer, well deserved, is also a Nobel for his close friend, translator, and collaborator Robert Bly.”
As for Tranströmer’s translation of Bly’s poems and their effect on Swedish and Scandinavian audiences, we can infer much from Tranströmer’s anecdote on August 11, 1970:
In a small town where I gave a reading, one schoolboy from the audience suddenly went up and read aloud from your (mistranslated) introduction to [Krig och tystnad] and asked me about my reaction to your ideas. It was very strange to hear him start: “The great American poet Robert Bly has said that...etc.” It was in Karlskrona, in Blekinge. The therapeutic influence comes mainly from the honest and sensible effort to bring the inner and the outer worlds together—people are hungry for crossways now.
This hunger for “crossways” on the part of both American and Swedish readers is also the engine that has driven the friendship and collaboration of Bly and Tranströmer and given us these remarkable letters. Though banked lower, the fire of that friendship has never gone out. Bly’s enthusiastic response to For the Living and the Dead hints tantalizingly that had Tranströmer not suffered his stroke, more mutual translation work might well have lain ahead. One can’t mistake the plaintive note in the final letter of the correspondence (dated April–May 1990). “Dear master and buddy,” Tranströmer begins his last message to Bly, “why do I always have to write other people than you?”
The Book
In the the late 1990s, the Swedish scholar and author Torbjörn Schmidt began the labor of gathering and sorting the correspondence of Tomas Tranströmer and Robert Bly for what became, in 2001, the original Swedish publication of Airmail. Working as Bly’s assistant, I was partner to the process, typing and cataloging both Bly’s and Tranströmer’s letters for our files. To the surprise, I think, of all concerned, Airmail became something of a best seller in Sweden. I remember Bly’s astonishment as he waved a half-inch-thick sheaf of reviews that had just arrived from Bonniers, the Swedish publisher. “We need to do an American edition,” he declared. I gladly accepted the job of editing a collection geared toward readers of English.
Innocent of Swedish, I could avail myself only indirectly of Schmidt’s text; however, he proved an invaluable source of information throughout that initial editing pass. I spent a whole summer pleasurably immersed in the original documents, assembling a selection somewhat different from Schmidt’s, made even more capacious by virtue of a large cache of letters discovered after the Swedish edition had gone to press. In the end, this selection is my own work, reflective of my knowledge of its authors and my judgment of what does or doesn’t fit. The original Swedish volume contains 199 letters—this current version adds close to a hundred “new” letters, twenty or so of which were subsequently included in a Danish edition Schmidt enlarged in 2007. The present volume also includes several previously unpublished Bly translations of Tranströmer’s poems, some of them newly completed for this edition. One poem, “Conflict,” which I discovered recently in Bly’s files, makes its very first appearance in any form in these pages; it is a true find.
I was able to edit this book successfully in large part because, amazingly, Tranströmer had written all but the first three dozen of his letters in English. Bly commissioned translations of most of the Swedish originals by Judith Moffett with the assistance of Lars-Håkan Svensson, translator of the Swedish Airmail. Interestingly, since the bulk of the correspondence was written in English, this new version of Airmail is closest to the original source documents. I have edited Tranströmer’s English very lightly, correcting only obvious mistakes and leaving intact the general flavor of his prose so that you may enjoy these letters as Bly first did.
This new version of Airmail also is distinguished by being the first substantial publication in English of any of Bly’s voluminous personal correspondence. That makes this book even more revelatory, exhibiting a side of Bly that even his most devoted readers may not know well.
By the end of that first summer’s editing, I had a typescript of over 550 pages. My omissions were mostly of routine notes and repetitive lists, itineraries, and so on. I also left out some material that obstructed the main narrative flow and could have confused the reader by referring to lost pieces of the correspondence. This may not be the most scholarly approach, but then this book is not only for academics, though it will certainly be of great use to them. I cared most about the readability of the conversation for the general reader with a lively interest in the multiple themes that give the dialogue between Bly and Tranströmer its unique character. The source documents or copies of them will be available to scholars and researchers for further study in Bly’s archive at the Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis.
After I had completed my preliminary edit, the manuscript of this chronicle of intelligent, generative, energetic, and irreverent friendship loitered for nearly a decade in my file cabinet, no doubt because of its highly uncommercial nature. But winds do change. On October 6, 2011, came the announcement that Tomas Tranströmer had at last won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first time the Swedes had seen fit to so honor one of their own since Harry Martinson’s Nobel in 1974. That long-rumored and supremely deserved Nobel Prize has sparked a welcome renewal of interest in Tranströmer’s work in the United States. Long in coming but worth the wait, the volume you now hold in your hands is a happy result.
—Thomas R. Smith
A Note on the Translations and Their Presentation
* * *
All of Tomas Tranströmer’s letters after April 18, 1971, were originally written in English. Three earlier letters, on August 8, 1968, June 14, 1969, and November 17, 1969, are Tranströmer’s first English letters to Robert Bly. Tranströmer’s letter of October 1, 1966, is translated by Bl
y. The rest of Tranströmer’s Swedish letters are translated by Judith Moffett and Lars-Håkan Svensson. They are as follows:
May 27, 1964; September 3, 1964; March 23, 1965; October 30, 1965; December 10, 1965; January 30, 1966; March 1, 1966; April 10, 1966; April 20, 1966; June 4, 1966; July 20, 1966; September (undated), 1966; October 29, 1966; January 7, 1967; January 15, 1967; March 4, 1967; May 4, 1967; July 11, 1967; August 8, 1967; September 30, 1967; October 7, 1967; December 8, 1967; February 19, 1968; April 19, 1968; June 9, 1968; July 12, 1968; September 2, 1968; December 10, 1968; January 8, 1969; January 18, 1969; May 18, 1969; July 30, 1969; January 4, 1970; January 30, 1970 (latter section beginning “And there is a boat” originally in English); October 27, 1970.
All poem translations are by Robert Bly except as noted. Poems in Tranströmer’s letters of April 2, 1971, and April 18, 1971, are translated by May Swenson.
Frequently, in his early letters in Swedish, Tranströmer employed scattered English words and phrases. We were not able to indicate these occurrences of English without disrupting the flow of text, so suffice it to say that, before he began writing to Bly entirely in his friend’s language, he had already made many tentative gestures in that direction. Where either poet has used all caps for emphasis, we have retained that feature in our text.
Where occasional excisions have been made by either Bly or Tranströmer in the interest of privacy, I have indicated discontinuities in the text with brackets enclosing dashes. They are not many, and the vast majority of the letters are included in full.
