by Robert Bly
Affectionately,
Robert
Västerås, Sept. 66
Dear Roberto,
your letter came at the last possible minute, I crashed into the garage, drove 70 miles to Stockholm, burst into the Bonniers building, wrenched open the door to BLM and there, inside, sat Lars Gustafsson bent over the final proof of the September issue. I was just in time to put in the word HÅRJADE for DRAWN—an exact equivalence. Lars was worried. People at the press who had seen the Bly translations and Ferlinghetti’s “Where Is Vietnam?” (his magnum opus without a doubt) had muttered something to the effect that “there could be trouble about this...” It’ll be interesting to see the reactions.
The issue, by the way, contains the now well-known polemic between Weiss and Enzensberger about “engagement”—where Enzensberger with full justification calls Weiss “an MRA from the Left.” The attempt of the Communists to monopolize “engagement” and sail forward on outspread indignation makes me angry, as so much else makes me angry right now.
Thanks for the tip about buying Life. The presentation of Dickey put me in mind of that character in Salinger who thinks he has to crush thirty bones in a person’s hand when he shakes hands, so that nobody will suspect him of being homosexual.
Charles Whitman was in the same issue. Did you see the photo of the little boy standing with his daddy’s guns on the beach? There are secret threads running through that issue of the magazine. What you say in “Plaintiff” (?) about the drift towards masculine brutality goes IN MEDIAS RES. But why should the masculine be so self-evidently associated with the brutal? Come off it! To be masculine is to be a man, period. The rooster has a red comb on his head and goes cock-a-doodle-doo, the hen lays eggs. Why do so many men in the U.S.A. doubt deep down that they are men? Why do authors like Mailer love to hang out with boxers, grateful to be allowed to brush up against them? Monica had bought a little outfit for Sellin’s one-year-old boy. But a good friend who had lived many years in America advised us not to send it because in the U.S. it would be taken for a GIRL’S outfit—a clear distinction between boys’ and girls’ clothing is made at one year old. Later I heard that the Sellins didn’t bother about such things, but by then we had already given the suit away to a little Swedish hermaphrodite. It does seem so far out that at one year old you already have to start getting used to signaling your sex through certain attributes. It’s not enough to rest secure in the fact that you have a penis and all in good time will grow a beard. You have to get off a shot from time to time, hit somebody in the kisser, be “violent,” or make a lot of money. Though I have to say that in my personal experience the American is gentle, friendly and cooperative. And that he’s often short of cash.
But not as short of cash as I’ve now begun to be. Dreadful! Good grief! Despite the fact that I have a salary from the state of 25,000 crowns (about 5,000 dollars) a year as long as I live! This sum is guaranteed. If I earn 10,000 I get 15,000, if I earn 20,000 I get 5,000, and so on. Right now I’m earning about 30,000 from my job, and therefore don’t get an a single öre [smallest coin]. But in 1968 I’m thinking of taking a sabbatical just to write and read and travel and eat...And besides that I now get a secure old age!
One of my old patients at Roxtuna has shot a police officer to death and has been hunted through the whole of Sweden by great throngs of policemen, newspaper reporters, and mobs of people. Another has caused a scandal by publishing a book in which he “exposes” the Swedish prison system. One of his bits of bravado was when he posed as “Tranströmer, a psychologist from Linköping” at a hotel in the country. Who am I really? I’ve been brooding a lot lately about my six years at Roxtuna. I ought to write something on the subject, but what? I can’t get away from the problem of criminality, though it’s extremely nice not to have to work with it professionally any more. The whole business has shrunk down to the fact that I do testing at an institute up in the woods north of Västerås and it’s fantastically pleasant there.
Yseult Snepvangers has not sent Dickey’s book as she wrote she would (Creeley’s came instead). But her name is splendid. Pure baroque. (I also have a weakness for names with grandeur of a more sublimely simple style, classic simplicity: JOE POOL represents a good name in that genre.) Somebody at Wesleyan has also written to inform me that Ignatow, Simpson and Haines are on the way. I’m especially looking forward to Haines.
Your translation of “Open and Closed Spaces” is written in very good Blyish indeed. I’ve got only two changes. The sleeping man is too active in your version (“He takes the darkened house...”) No, the house is not out and the man inside is lying still. Then we have the words “an invisible string which goes STRAIGHT UP in the sky...” That would mean this:
But you can’t fly a kite like that. Correct position is this:
But what “snett up” [on a slant] is in English I don’t know. About “Lamento”: The first section should be present tense: It lies there. TOMRUMMET [void] is a neutral, physical Swedish word. Means a near vacuum but without the scientific associations. I want an “empty” word too. “Universe” is perhaps too rich in associations with astronauts etc. I don’t know how you would characterize “void” in English, but that’s the word you find in dictionaries. KAPPSÄCK [backpack, duffel] can pretty much look any old way, it’s something one has on long trips. It doesn’t have any connotations of luxury though. I was thinking of a fairly ripped, lumpy thing. Not anything “shiny.” Your suggestion works fine. Section 3: “A rustling” could mean “prassel” [rustling]. But I had thought of VISSLING [whistling]. Perhaps a whistled signal from a bird or from an agent or from a football referree—we don’t know. Finally the cherry tree at the end: their branches shake against the trucks in a friendly and at the same time somewhat vigorous way. “Slap on the back” [Klappar om] is what the team in a game does to a runner who makes a goal or what relatives do when they greet one another at the station. The translation that appears in Sweden Writes is bad—“brush” is considerably better. The main thing is to get an impression of robust tenderness, a lightly humorous effect in a dead-serious poem.
Wonderful to move over to blyish. Maybe the poems will actually be as alive in English as in Swedish. The language isn’t the main problem. The problem is the other stuff, the landscape, the associations. A thing like keepsake forever would be impossible to translate, and with it that whole excellent poem. I think it’s your strongest “political” poem, because in an intimately visionary way it propels itself into that which is truly relevant in a modern democracy: collective sin, collective detachment. [------]
Did you know that The Sixties has a counterpart in Norway now? A young man in Lambretta, Jan Erik Vold, who visited me the other day, talked about a magazine called Profil that he and several others publish in Oslo. He is some kind of enfant terrible in Norwegian poetry. I got some copies of the magazine and by God it not only lacked collections of examples of dead and living poetry (waxworks of the sort that used to appear in your magazine) but also had a symbol in the shape of a woollen mitten which is bestowed upon bad reviewers etc. Among the editors was a young American named Noel Cobb, who is evidently a student of yours. Voilà. You ought to look at Vold’s own poetry if you’re preparing a Norwegian anthology. It’s possible that you would find it too abstract, but it means something new for Norway, that’s very clear.
Warm greetings from the whole family are clinging tightly to the underside of the mail plane’s wings, trembling at high altitudes.
Your friend
Tomas
Västerås 1 Oct 66
Dear Robert, deep fisherman,
Each day there comes new mail from The Sixties, Wesleyan, and yourself. There are all sorts of gifts in the exchange of letters—wonderful. It’s as if it is fall and fruit falls from the trees. A special thanks I should give to you for Ducks, which I hope will become a bestseller, something like Gone with the Wind.
In about ten days I will get my new book and send it by boat to you with an issue of the Norwegian magazine which I mentioned to you in an earlier letter. Noel Cobb has been evicted from Norway on grounds of experiments with marijuana!
Will you be so kind as to glance at this poem? Someone has translated three poems of mine which you don’t have. I haven’t sent the Swedish text, so you’ll have to judge it on the basis of the American text alone. Does it sound OK? Also my translation of Lowell’s old Hudson poem. In all haste,
Tomas
P.S. There have been many exciting reactions to the BLM issue. It generally seems to be considered one of the best numbers people have seen.
P.P.S. I have begun to get in trouble with some of my best friends. One supports the American Vietnam politics and other has become so completely communist that he seems eager for indoctrination, declares himself opposed to Amnesty because it points too much at the imprisonments in the East, etc. Both speak with a kind of brutal tone. Our old friendships tend to become thin. That’s the background to this:
Conflict
After a political argument or wrangle, I become lonesome.
An empty chair opens out into the night sky.
There is no way back. My friend leaves the house.
A heavy moving van rumbles by on the road.
My eyes rest there like wide-awake stones.
(translated by RB)
8 Oct, 66
Dear Tomas,
Your letter just came; let me answer the questions first. The translation of Lowell sounds marvelous. I have doubts only about the very last lines: I’m not sure the pictures in Swedish have the same mood. At any rate, this is the mood in English: the shore of the Hudson rises rather steeply in some places, so the other side, with its factories, sometimes gives the effect of rock-ledges in Africa or some sunny, rocky place, like so:
“Branns” may be a little too active. Oddly, there is no color of red in the lines at all, just a hideous passive yellow, like a huge yellow snake sunning itself in some prehistorical landscape. The landscape is not “ett landskap” I think but rather “the landscape.” For the moment, this landscape is considered to be the entire landscape of America—it stands for the whole countryside. The last line then is a brutal and despairing attack on the United States. What it has done with the countryside the Indians left he considers “unforgivable.”
Thank you for the Dagens Nyheter poems. You know it turns out Hjorth turned down Sonnevi’s translation of “Asian Peace Offers” in April. Sonnevi said, “When I met Lars Gustaffson he was quite embarrassed when he realized that BLM had refused the very same poem in April.” Sonnevi thought your translation of Asian Peace Offers was good, and in fact thought “the latter part of it is better than mine.” He didn’t understand the word “yrseldarrar” in the first part, but that was the only word he disagreed with. I don’t know why he didn’t like it—he didn’t say.
[------]
Would you send me a copy of that BLM with the Vietnam poems in it? They never send me anything, and I would like to see the issue.
The three translations of your poems into English, done by this mysterious “X,” are curious. It’s clear that English is not the native language of the man who translated them. It’s strange—in many cases the rough meaning is perfectly correct, and yet the associations are off, so it is like unintended dissonance in music. The lines go smoothly, and then suddenly shudder, like a car with the brakes on. Phrases like “then there was a fastness” or “news-sheets” (he means newspapers), or “special cast of countenance” (he means a “certain look on the face”) are like boulders that grind against the bottom of the car and, eventually, take off the oil pan.
On the whole, I am surprised at how well they are done—knowing that English is not the translator’s native language—in some ways, amazing—and yet, finally, they are not good translations because an air of unreality hangs over the language all the way—exactly the opposite of the mood you want to give, and do give in Swedish. In short, the poems seem to be accurate, but are not written in English.
I wonder who “X” is? Goran Printz-Påhlson? If I guess right, you have to tell me!
Thank you for “Konflikt.” I know the feeling well. The Vietnam war here has split families, as well as friends, as nothing else in American history has done since the Civil War. About angry tones of voice: of course all Westerners have so much aggression in them that they are ready at any instant to destroy their own psychic balance and friendships by means of fierce abstract arguments. Christian fundamentalists use up their aggression in the U.S. in arguments about love. So everyone fights his own Vietnam, killing women and children right and left. Do you know Yeats’s poem “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz”? Whitman is another poet who really understood how wrong all this was.
Yet all of this doesn’t help reduce the pain.
We gave an anti-Vietnam poetry reading at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor Sunday. Galway Kinnell came in from Portland, and Don Hall read also, and W. D. Snodgrass (who read only poems of Randall Jarrell—bad poems); then we had a great actor named Will Geer, who read sections of Whitman, as well as Mark Twain’s War Prayer, a really powerful piece. My wife was in the audience, and all the time I was introducing and reading “Small-Boned Bodies” a group of male students near her was cursing and grumbling, against me and against the poem. They hate the suggestion that America is being brutalized. The little poem is getting to be well-known, though no one will print it. The last to refuse it was the Book Section of the Herald Tribune and Washington Post this week, who had asked me for poems. So the poem has never been published over here.
Would you do me a favor? A publisher is interested in my translating from the Swedish a novel by P. C. Jersild called Calvinols resa genom världen. Is this novel any good? Would you give me your opinion of it? I don’t want to translate anything unless it is really good—otherwise it is a waste of time. I’d rather not even spend the time looking at the novel unless there was some possibility of real quality; so your opinion would be very valuable to me.
You didn’t mention in your letter if you wanted the new translations into
English returned to you or not. I’ll keep them here, meanwhile, and if you do want them, just write me a note and I’ll return them immediately.
Write soon!
Robert
Västerås 10-29-66
Dear Robert,
In a fit of recklessness I’m sending the book by air mail so you won’t have to wait till Christmas. As you know, literary life in Sweden is played out in the daily papers and where well-known authors are concerned you get reviewed the same day the book comes out. In other words my sentence has been pronounced. In the most influential paper, Dagens Nyheter, one of the younger critics wrote that I was unalterably the same, somewhat worse now however than in my first book from 1954. He praised me too, but for the initiated it was immediately clear that I’ve been knocked off my pedestal. It’s like in China—if Chou suddenly stands number 5 after Mao instead of number 3, it means that Chou is half dead. The expert understands that. However, the stupid general public2 has bought my book (1100 copies were sold the first two weeks). In Aftonbladet Björn Håkansson wrote a critique that gave rise to a small debate. The headline of his contribution was “The Solitary Picture Collector” (which has certain associations with somebody who collects pornographic pictures). He moralized quite powerfully. My poetry strolled through the world “like a well-heeled tourist. But are we what it wishes to find? No, not us. It wants to find pictures; pictures for a solitude which is populated with pictures. If one of us gets to be there too, it’s as a blob of color.”...and later “If one sees only the general in the individual and in history only things and conditions, one legitimizes a passive, contemplative attitude toward the world around oneself, which perhaps provides a yearning experience of amazing distance and cosmic peace but at
the cost of all motivation to engage in events and change the world.” The whole thing culminated in an accusation that I was legitimizing the idea that “the world might be contemplated as a poem.” As you notice, I very nearly fell victim to the Cultural Revolution there! Generally speaking the young Marxists in Sweden have little tolerance for poetry. One should show decency and stop writing. I’m also sending you a considerably more benevolent review—you’re mentioned there too, probably owing to the fact that Hedin is a good friend of Sonnevi, who may have gossiped. Outside Stockholm the better critics have generally observed that the new book contains a lot of new subject matter, something that often conduces to artistic uncertainty. But they have in fact noticed that it isn’t exactly the same book as “17 Poems.”
This has been an egocentric message. I hope to get one just like it when your book is published. It feels good anyway to be able to get out and confront “the intellectuals.” They turn their serious, reproachful faces toward me: YOU ARE NOT SOCIALLY ENGAGED. I reply, stammering, that I have worked full-time for 6 years in social work on an unstable front in society. Doesn’t count! they answer—YOU HAVEN’T WRITTEN ONE SINGLE ARTICLE DECLARING YOUR POLITICAL POSITION; YOU ARE—O U T.
Thanks for your comments about Lowell—I will take at least two of your remarks ad notam.
With good wishes
Tomas
P.S. When I’m feeling strong I’ll read Jersild. But it is very desirable however to start reading novels in old age.
20 Nov., 66
Dear Tomas,
Thank you for your book! I have been eating it up like those wonderful dates that come with pictures of camels on the package—in one of your earlier lives you were a camel—(that’s why you’re able to go for miles through the desert) (that’s why you know where the oases are—cf your Monica!) Anyway the book is very good, and I’m enjoying it tremendously. As I read in it I say, “Well, look at all the things I haven’t done yet!” So it reminds me of poems I might write sometime in the future, so it’s a future book, the kind I like best. You do some very strange things in this book. I translated for Carolyn [Bly] your poem about walking in the woods, and evil shaking his head across a desk, and the modern building with so much glass, and finally the airport scene. She was startled and moved. And with her true sense, which never fails, excited by something new, that is moving forward, just at the edge of the forest. The trains that meet in the (station of this) poem come from such long distances, each of them! That is what is good! One train still has snow on it, another one has a palm leaf caught in the undercarriage—
