by Robert Bly
Write soon! (I will write soon myself.)
Best wishes, happiness and prosperity!
Your friend Tomas T
2 Oct, 67
Dear Tomas,
Here I am sitting, proofs of a little Ekelöf selection in front of me, about to make a ghastly mistake that will make me the laughing stock of the American Scandinavian Foundation forever! Help me!
In Strountes, Ekelöf has a poem about the dead slipping out of the cemeteries at night. The word “knäsatt” is what I don’t understand. What does it mean?
The first six lines go this way:
När de slipper ut genom körgardsgrinden
en pasknatt, en pasknatt
När de döda gar ut och betitta staden
en manskensnatt, en man-natt
Da är det evig hemlöshet some gör sig knäsatt
knäsatt hos andra döda
Now Christina told me the odd word “knäsatt” meant sitting on the knees of. So the last two lines above are now translated:
Then it is the eternal homelessness that is sitting on the knees
the knees of the other dead
But it doesn’t really make sense! Is that what it means? My dictionary seems to say the word means something like “legalize,” as if one would say, “We’re going to get this common law marriage legalized.”
But if that is so, then the eternal homelessness seems to be legalizing itself.
Could it be:
Then the eternal homelessness is taking its rightful place
taking its place with all the dead
Or
Then the eternal homelessness takes its rightful place
Takes its place in all the dead
Did the Harper book, my new one, come yet?
Please answer very soon—I’ll have to commit hari-kari if I make such an idiotic mistake and get the knees in these tangled up...
Thank you!
Robert
Västerås 10-7-67
Dear Robert
you’re getting two letters at once. While I was in the middle of writing the other letter (which is in this envelope), your much-longed-for book arrived, and then two days later this SOS about KNÄSATT. I’ve been reading the book on a recent train trip through southern Sweden (I’ve been lecturing on the testing of criminals), reading and heating my imagination—it is—OH—it is fantastically good...but first
KNÄSATT [knee + set]
a word which is very seldom encountered, a word with a curious, half-bureaucratic, half-aristocratic atmosphere. It is met with most often in parliamentary debates of the more solemn sort, in phrases like “we of the committee have not chosen to knäsatta the principle concerning taxation of...” etc. It means ACCEPT, more or less. MAKE YOUR OWN. LEGALIZE. Originally it must have meant ADOPT—that is, you took a child and sat him on your lap, and that meant you made the child your own. But nowadays the word appears only in its abstract, symbolic meaning. And that, as I said, is rare. The very fact that it appears so seldom, and that KNEE in and of itself is so concrete a thing, makes the effect rather curious. The knee constantly presses through the abstract meaning. This is particularly true in the context in which Ekelöf uses the word. It floats constantly between the bureaucratic-abstract “knäsatt” and the extremely macabre and tangible knees of the dead (skeleton knees?). Besides that, it’s a half-rhyme with “moonlit night” [månnatt]. In Swedish the effect is that of a strange kind of qualified nonsense. This poem can’t be translated. It plays constantly on nuances within the language, that is, the Swedish language. As I fancy the poems of Lewis Carroll can’t be translated. Would you be able to do something with Legalize and Legs? “Taking its rightful place” is of course not wrong in its way, but it would be like arranging a Chopin scherzo for a military band. I hope I haven’t discouraged you? Go on Bob, go on.
It was wonderful to be able to sit reading your book while I rolled forward through a rainy Sweden. I had longed to have it for so long, and imagined that some damn businessman at Harper’s had moved the publication date back six months or so in order to rush Svetlana’s memoirs through, or something else that would sell. But here it came after all. What surprises me a little is that it turned out to be so strong as a whole, that in fact it is a book, with a rich, composite but still integrated spirit. Many little eddies that yet are part of the big whirlpool. Even poems that individually have struck me as strange (for example “Watching Television”) have a strong meaning in their context here. And the poems do not die after many readings, they are resurrected during the night and are just as remarkable when one returns to them. Later on I hope to be able to send you some words of criticism as well, but here at the beginning I only want to trumpet forth my mole-like gratitude.
You must write very soon and report how it has been received. Not that it makes much difference as far as the poems are concerned, but it’s interesting to me to see how literary life of the U.S.A. operates. A man who ought to have certain difficulties (or maybe it’s all too easy for him) in writing his criticism is James Dickey. I was quite shaken by your dispute in The Sixties, it was as if the unhappy fellow was being hurled from the Tarpeian Rock by some majestic lictor clad in a suit of armor made of flowers but with a stern, set face. I’ve never managed to read Buckdancer’s Choice myself. The poems are so swollen, so many words...It’s like being a child and sitting with a gigantic serving of porridge in front of you. Besides which I lost interest in Dickey, a bit, after the interview in Life. Anyway I’m thinking of finishing that poem about Pappa in the hospital window. That’s the end of letter no. 2. Now read letter no. 1.
12-18-67
Dear Robert,
it’s hard to write, since my youngest daughter wants to be here too—she’s spreading herself across the whole table. Well, what I want to say is BREAK YOUR SILENCE and tell me what happened to your wonderful book and what you think about the wonderful book I and (I hope) Bonniers will publish...Is “War and Silence” an appropriate title? Has Bonniers written to you? I’ve heard nothing myself about the project other than that Lars G. was able to get at least one of the press’s mighty editors to go along with the idea. Of course I’m living pretty isolated (snow coming from all sides) but in the morning I’m going to Stockholm to meet some colleagues. The fact is that every year a literary grant is given out by the newspaper Aftonbladet and everybody who ever got a grant (I got one in 1958) is invited to a big lunch that usually breaks up around ten o’clock at night in thick fog and slurred discussions. You get to meet the new grantee—nobody knows who it is but I suspect that this year it’s going to be Sonnevi, who has published a collection of poems and hasn’t gotten any of this autumn’s grants as yet. So if it’s Sonnevi I’ll have a chance to drag him into a corner to discuss the project—we do need to know whether we’re translating the same poems. And if we are translating the same ones, which version should we use? Etc. I have no idea how frequent your contacts with S. are and what you yourself think of our respective translations. I only met S. once (in Lund) and he seemed to me to be an honest and serious fellow. My picture of his own poetry is very diffuse, owing to the fact that I haven’t read his latest book apart from certain political fragments, which haven’t really convinced me. (But his translations of you are good.)
To comfort myself in my own melancholy I’ve been translating yours. Stanza 2 is the problematic one. What does “wooden rail” mean. What does “slip off” mean. Does the crown slide off the chest/coffin or does it sneak away? I’m satisfied with stanza 4—sounds very convincing in Swedish.
What I actually wanted to do was wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. It seems I never get around to sending out my greetings in the snowstorm! I’m standing here waving a lantern.
Together with me 2 spoiled children and one
heroic wife send their best greetings
Your friend
Tomas T.
27 Dec, ’67
Dear Tomas,
Forgive the silence! I spent almost all of Nov. in California, giving readings to make enough money to get the Neruda and Jiménez books away from their respective printers, who (wisely) refuse to send me a single book until they have the soiled American dollars in their inky hands. The trip was hectic and exhausting. Then on Dec. 5th, I went to N.Y. for the demonstrations at the Induction Center there. 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.
I’m sending on a newspaper clipping showing your American translator there at 6:30 AM, just before we started to go under the barricades.
I’ve also enclosed copies of some letters published in the New York Review of Books last week. The whole issue is causing a lot of stir and uneasiness—I was the first writer to turn down a govt grant, and it had the effect of throwing the problem out for public discussion. I’m getting attacked by the right wing for being “ungrateful for the blessings he has enjoyed as an American,” and it’s interesting.
Also a copy of my play—just typed up, and probably very bad. I’m serious, it’s probably awful.
I haven’t heard from Bonniers! Wonderful idea! I’m all for it! I can’t judge the resonances in a Swedish translation, but I hereby give you my Swedish power-of-literary-attorney, I appoint you my Swedish agent, translator, and father-in-law (as you are already my brother), and you decide about the translations—whatever you decide will be fine—will be law!—with me. Take as many or as few of Sonnevi’s translations as you like.
I have two new poems on the Vietnam War which I’ll send you from
N.Y. I got an apartment in N.Y. for my wife and children in Jan & Feb, and we’re leaving tomorrow! So in January & Feb. our address will be
126 East 36th St.
New York, New York
On March 1st, if I have enough money, we plan to jump on a boat and go to Europe. We’ll be in England (at Thaxted) March, April & May, then go up by my relatives in Norway June, July & August. So you must come to see us, or I’ll come to see you! ! ! ! ! ! !
You asked about reviews of The Light—it’s being attacked from all sides so far! The mingling of “inward life” and political or social poetry has really infuriated the reviewers so far. They insist one of the two sides or areas must be false, “affected”—possibly both! They’re willing to accept either of these two sorts of thought in its own book, specialized, etc, but not together, as if there were some connection. I’ll send you some clippings later on.
“Melancholi” is lovely in Swedish! I’m very glad you chose that one. On your questions:
Strophe 2 takes place entirely at a funeral service in a country church. The “wooden rail” is the varnished and polished altar rail, behind which in the old fashioned immigrant churches, the minister stands when he reads the Gospel or preaches, or gives communion. There is a gleam from this polished rail, a reflection from the overhead church lights. I was thinking of a funeral service for an old farmer who had lived on the farm next to ours when my brother and I were children. He was warm and wonderful. At the services in the country, the minister at some point, while the casket is standing in front of the church, will go to the pulpit and read off the date of birth of the dead man, the year he got married, and to whom, and then, strangely, they describe where his life took place. “In 1927 he moved with his wife and children from Brown County to Lac Qui Parle County, where he resided until 1948 when he moved to Yellow Medicine County, etc.” It would be something like “flytta” in Norwegian.
During the reading of those dates I imagine the dark funeral wreath suddenly slipping off the shiny coffin and falling to the floor.
In strophe 3—we are someplace like Italy or Spain—an entirely different kind of church. Catholic, run by the rich—the poor outside are sitting around the outer walls of the cathedral, with their knees drawn up,
They are leaning more onto their knees, out of hunger, than the man I’ve drawn here but that is the idea.
I don’t find any changes at all to suggest in “Direktorens död,” “De som äts av Amerika,” or “Förtryckt av världen”—they all sound wonderful.
I know in “Smothered by the World” the “death outside the death” is not very clear. But for the purposes of the poem, physical death is regarded as almost comforting compared to the other death, that takes place in life, with the executives and others being shoved out of inner life, and forced to live on the other side of the wall, in the cold, in the outer world. So the hairy tail that howls should give a true feeling of anguish that the executives feel, who know of their own spiritual death, and are not numb, but howl with anguish.
Write us in New York! Love to your sweet wife and children
Robert
* * *
And slow—replies come at 14-day intervals in papers in both Sweden & Finland.
back
A result of the England trip.
back
Do you have log driving in the U.S.A.?
back
1968
Västerås 2-19-67 [1968]
Dear Robert, defender of the barricades,
I must pull myself together now and write to you, whom I think of so often. Monica and I ABSOLUTELY WANT TO SEE YOU THIS SUMMER—it’s one of the few good pieces of information from the world, that you’re coming to Scandinavia. Please try to stay out of jail! Here comes another bit of news (which by now is a month old): Bonniers will publish the book with your poems in translations by me, Sonnevi and Lasse Söderberg. It will probably be out this fall—we being speedier than other, larger countries, once we get rolling. You ought to write the foreword yourself. We can look through the whole thing together one last time if you come here early in the summer. (I’ll drive to Norway and pick you up!) Shall we all have a big children’s party?
Thanks for the play! I am shaken. It’s such a horrifically inspired thing. Whether it’s “good” or not I can’t tell. I hope it’s good! At any rate there’s poetry in it that’s as strong as poems of a similar sort in The Light ... I have one reservation. It concerns the idea of people in different colors. They can’t change their color, they are like that from beginning to end. I’ve become hypersensitive to such things of late. There’s a totalitarian streak in that kind of coloration, though it’s fine from a dramatic point of view.
I think your book can also mean something positive for the poor Swedish poets, who lead a withering existence. The climate here is completely different from the one that seems to hold sway in the U.S. When I read your attacks on THE NEW CRITICISM etc. it’s like a message from another planet. Here it’s the other way round—what’s wanted is political poetry, which doesn’t mean that poetry should take political reality as its subject but that poetry, no matter what it’s about, should speak a language of political cliché. Just now the always-latent contempt for poetry is booming right along. When you appear before students these days you’re always accused of “taking up a reactionary attitude” if you read a poem with some animals or blades of grass in it. And if you write a poem that touches on politics, that’s wrong too, because you haven’t used the correct political clichés. Some of the most influential debaters in Sweden sound—when they make their declarations—like prosecutors in the Sinyavsky trial—it’s completely grotesque. At the same time the whole country is becoming mor
e and more bourgeois! Intellectual life is getting to be a sort of totalitarian reserve. The moral motivation is of course the Vietnam war and let us lay on top of all LBJ’s other—and significantly grosser—crimes this little one that he has made the air hard to breathe for someone who wants to work through sensibility, imagination, and self-knowledge in poetry. I hate this damned war with all my heart but I haven’t therefore begun to declare myself a fighting Marxist or begged forgiveness for writing about blades of grass and animals. I haven’t given any money for weapons to the NLF either, only to humanitarian or peace movements, which the real NLF-warriors despise. Of course I believe that the Vietnamese people prefer the NLF to the marionette generals of the Saigon government many times over, and of course I want the U.S.A. to withdraw from the country. But to join an NLF group here in Sweden means that one doesn’t primarily desire peace but victory—never mind how many people are exterminated, or that one is affiliating oneself with a program that wants “more Vietnams worldwide”—the program of the Havana Conference, in other words. It also means that one condemns all compromise and approves in advance the bloodbath of the opposition that can follow a total NLF victory. What I believe in, would like to fight for, is a coalition solution where the NLF plays a large but not a total role (that’s actually the NLF’s own recent official line). But that sort of standpoint is considered “lukewarm.” In this climate it’s all or nothing. Anybody not 100% for is “self-evidently” 100% against. Have I given you a little picture of the climate? All you can do is follow your own crooked conscience, wait for the moment of truth and hope you won’t need to be ashamed one day of how you lived through these years. God damn it, how I long to see you by the way! Let me hear from you as soon as possible—I’ll write soon again but want to get this off in time to catch you before you leave for Thaxted. Monica and the kids are fine—I hope your family is the same. And write poems!
