by Robert Bly
Tell me about your new trip! I leave next week for Ann Arbor, where I’ll be a writer in residence for the students for 2 weeks—mainly I’ll fill their minds with thoughts about the Great Mother.
STUDENT FILLED WITH GREAT MOTHER
THOUGHTS BY R BLY, FLOATING OVER
DETROIT...
Write soon—
your friend
Robert
15 Feb, ’70
Dear Tomas,
Check this over, will you? It’s a paragraph I added to the introduction made for your book. The rest of the introduction is in Field, which you’ve—I hope!—seen by now.
Are these facts and details right?
As ever,
Robert
P.S. Can you get me a copy—glossy—of that elegant undernourished photo of you taken by the Italian dame for your German book? I like it! And maybe we can work it into your American book!
Praise praise praise
(see Field )
New section
I feel in the poems an increasing psychic depth as they go on. The poem called “After a Death” is surely some sort of brief masterpiece, and more moving than any poem written by an American poet on President Kennedy’s death. Tomas Tranströmer’s foster father died at nearly the same time, and Tomas has said that both deaths became mingled in the poem. He mentions in the last two lines the Japanese armor that stands in the Stockholm museum near a model of the warrior who fit into it. To say of a man’s death, “The samurai looks insignificant beside his armor of black dragon scales” seems to me magnificent.
I think “Out in the Open” is a weird and interesting poem also. It is neither a nature poem, nor a political poem, nor a religious poem. One of the poem’s purposes, evidently, is to draw from all these three sections of psychic experiences without choosing between them; and Tranströmer has said as much in a note he wrote for a Scandinavian anthology that included the poem.
more
Praise
(see Field)
Signed
Coleridge
Västerås 27-2-70
Dear Robert,
I am a little shocked by this Tranströmer boom that suddenly comes. I got a nice letter from my Latvian translator the other day, the letter was certainly read by many censors but went through...And this morning Field arrived (airborne—the previous sending was lost in the Sargasso Sea). And the other day some fellow wrote a praising piece about me in Dagens Nyheter, without provocation—my first thought was: “By Jove, I must have published a book again!” I have not the right stomach for taking in PRAISE in large quantities but I will try to read your beautiful introduction again and make the necessary cold comments...Well, I was born in 1931, not 1930 (I am still young!—Life begins at forty and I am not there yet). I have some doubts about your line “Someone sent me a clipping recently, which recounted the adventures of a youth” etc....I want to see this clipping! Mythomania could be good for Field, but not for an introduction in 70s Press. Actually I have only read the story in a police report and not recently (5 years ago). Maybe “recently” according to Sixties standards (when will the next issue of your wonderful magazine appear?). In the new section of the introduction—the part you sent in the letter—you must change “T.T.’s foster father died at nearly the same time.” It was not my foster father, it was my uncle. My biological father, who is still alive, would be very hurt. (My parents were divorced when I was 3 but my father has followed my development from a distance and I am going to send him the book when it appears.) About the Japanese armor. I don’t know if there is a model of the Japanese himself beside the armor in the museum. I think I imagined him standing there. So far the corrections.
Nothing written about my poems has made me so glad as your railway station metaphor—it is so beautiful in itself, a poem, and I can only hope that it is true too. I have always loved your characterizations of this type in the Crunk pieces.
The problem is that the railway station is empty for the present, the trains are delayed and the station master attacked by angry passengers. So I hurry to give my
APPROVAL
of the old Balakirev-poem. A few details. “and the plough was a bird just leaving the ground” is much better than the original text, where it stands “en fågel some störtat” (a crashed bird). So use your version. “The crew came up from below” is more doubtful because it is written “ice-locked, lights out, people on deck” in the previous stanza. “Besättningen kom fram” means they were coming towards him. As a whole it sounds good in the English version—yes I have read all the lines, if you have dropped a few it could not have been important ones.
I have been very busy the last weeks, doing testings and interviews with cerebral palsy children in an institution up in the woods. It is the most interesting part of my present job, it has a little of pioneer scientific work in it and the contact with the patients there is rewarding too. We write long reports about every individual case, trying to make a map of his, her, particular brain. It is a good institution, friendly, even tolerating sexual relationships between the handicapped. They are often glad to be brought there—some have been more or less hidden by their parents and isolated in many ways. Modern urbanized civilization is less tolerant than the old village society.
Spiro Agnew troubles me.
Your effete station master
Tomas
Västerås 19 April 70.
Dear Robert,
many thanks for wonderful sendings of books, magazines, ghost-portraits of famous Americans etc. A special thanks for the poem “walking in spring ditches”—this type of poem (almost impossible to translate) is for me, together with the big, passionate Teeth-mother-poetry, your unique contribution...to...MANKIND. The old boards, old ditches, old cows, old shoes eating the grass, whales, gods! (My English is not good enough.)
I have just arrived from [the Soviet Union]. The Swedish Institute again paid the trip: Stockholm-Leningrad-Riga-Tallinn-Leningrad-Stockholm and the idea was that I should establish contacts on different levels (primarily personal) with people in the former Baltic countries and try to start some cultural exchange. We are nowadays almost completely isolated from these countries that are so geographically and historically close to us. After all Estonia and a big part of Latvia once belonged to Sweden and the people there have a favorable memory of us because we abolished feudalism there in the 17th century—feudalism was reintroduced after the Russian occupation in 1710. (These facts are of course suppressed in the offical Soviet history-writing.) The countries were independent from 1918 to 1940 when they were given to the Soviets after the Hitler-Stalin pact. After a period of deportation came the Germans, a new ruthless occupation followed and after the war the Russians were back and they are now Soviet Republics. Yes, you know all this of course. But you can imagine how strange it is to BE THERE, to see the “old town” of Riga that—from some distance—looks exactly like the “old town” in Stockholm and to realize that in the 1930s regular boat-trips went from Stockholm to Tallinn 3 times a week, and now it takes 15 to 20 days for a letter to arrive. (The censors are many.) To get to Riga I had to take a flight to Leningrad, stay there overnight and the next day take Aeroflot to Riga together with enormously mesomorphic Russian military men and to be housed in a hotel famous for its hidden microphones.
It started with some poems. A man in Riga translated me into Latvian and 2 poems “Telpas: Kas vala, un telpas, kas ciet” (Öppna och slutna rum) and “Par vesturi” (Om historien) were printed together with some Lindegren and Ekelöf in a poetry book Dzejas diena—printed in 30,000 copies and sold out in a week in a country with less than 2 million Latvian-speaking inhabitants. My translator was sent to Sweden in 1965 to study Swedish for a year and after that to work on the Riga radio—they have regular sendings in Swedish. When he returned he was not sufficiently cooperative so he got fired and now he is playing viola in a musical comedy orchestr
a for 85 rubles a week. He is married to Vizma Belševica, the most gifted poetess in Latvia, now dangerously in disgrace for something she has written. So they are a controversial couple and I love them. She is very heroic, he is more simply human. He had translated many poems of mine that could not be published for the present (“Allegro” e.g. is impossible of course but more astonishing is that “Den halvfärdiga himlen” is suspected—because of the line “våra istidsateljéers röda djur”!) So at last I am regarded as a dangerous political poet! They arranged an unofficial reading in their home and I met some 15 poets, musicians etc. from Latvia. The next day I was identified and Swedish-speaking official people came to the hotel to take care of me. One was a very nice chap, the other was like a character from an early Graham Greene novel. We talked about cultural relations, ice hockey etc. Every night in Riga the telephone called, at midnight!, and when I lifted the receiver someone rang off. That did not happen in Tallinn so I regard Estonia as less controlled than Latvia. Another difference: in Tallinn the churches are still churches, in Riga most of them are transformed into cafés, planetariums, lecture-rooms (or other would-be-wise temples). (They say the Estonians are more willing to enter the Party, climb, and rule it from within—they are more practical than heroic.) Anyhow the voyage was useful, I think, some ways for communication have been opened (for books, records and ultimately persons). Surprisingly many were studying Swedish more or less by themselves, from old books. They are longing for contact with us and we have been indifferent for so long—with exception of a few crusaders operating with reactionary exile organizations. Unofficial contacts are opposed both by the reactionary part of the exile organizations (who look forward to the “liberation” of the countries through a third world war) and by the Soviets who want to keep them isolated, inside Russia. I will give you a probably bad poem I wrote there, functioning within the special emotional situation. I gave it to my friends before leaving Riga, for them to read when they get colorless letters from me in the future. It is very important that the receivers could not be identified so I called it simply:
To Friends behind a Border
I
I wrote sparsely to you. But everything I couldn’t say
swelled up like some old-fashioned hot-air balloon
and disappeared finally in the night sky.
II
Now the censor has my letter. He turns on his light.
My words, alarmed, fly up like monkeys in a cage,
rattle the bars, hold still, and show their teeth.
III
Read between the lines. We’ll meet two hundred years from now
when the microphones in the hotel walls are useless
and can finally fall asleep and be trilobites.
(translated by RB)
“Ortoceratiter” is a special type of fossil, often found in Baltic limestone; they are a little like fossil microphones (from the Silurian age). This is the end of the travel report. Love to Carol and the children! I will send you a new “book” (11 poems only) before the end of the month—it is not printed by Bonniers, we have made it ourselves in the so-called “Författarförlaget”—a death-blow to commercial, capitalistic, feudalistic book-printing. Good night.
Yours Tomas
26 April, ’70
Dear Tomas,
Thank you for the marvellous letter about the Latvian trip! It’s all so strange—the telephones ringing late at night in Riga...and no one there—The Europeans really have developed these claustrophobic anti-people technological harassments far beyond what we have done here. I think it’s because Europe became over-populated first. More and more I think that many curious events such as burning down banks, telephone harassment at night, seemingly rational, are actually rat-reactions that come when the cage gets too full of rats. As Neruda said in 1934:
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
I like “Till vänner bakom engräns,” but I long for more anguish between Parts II and III, anguish as clear as that marvellous hostility made clear in II with the ordene sum “visar tänderna” to the censors.
I don’t want to take the long view, and be rocked asleep, that soon.
I’m getting tired of being a speaker—but I only have two trips left—one to N.Y. this week, and then to Honolulu in May. Enclosing report of recent reading with Senator McCarthy. We became good friends. At one point he said, “Just think! If I had been elected President, you would have been at the prayer breakfasts instead of Billy Graham! What a loss!”
I’m looking forward to your new “book”—write soon! Our love to all your flickor, especially your wife, whose luminous face I often see.
Your friend,
Robert
P.S. Carol is deluged with requests from Sweden for the “Teeth-Mother” folder—evidently Gunnar Harding had a note about it in Expressen. (The teeth-mother is really Pat Nixon) (The foreign poets at a recent conference at the Library of Congress, by the way, got at a White House reception: This, a copy of The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, signed by Pat Nixon! How’s that!) (The mind boggles)
Göran says that you and he may do a Swedish version of the teeth-mother. It would be nice to have it in a similar folder, free, or at a very low price. But whatever you decide is fine...The Swedes are rich anyway...love, Robert
Västerås 2 May 70
Dear Robert,
one of the reasons why ectomorphs seldom succeed in politics is THE PHYSIOLOGICAL OVERRESPONSE. Nixon’s Cambodia speech is sitting like a FISHBONE in my throat, I simply can’t eat these days, only small amounts, I feel sick, I can only hope that you and all wise people have strength to take up the fight, without desperation, with a quiet, effective, white-hot fury against this latest bestial stupidity.
My life is confused just now. Today I got my new book. I’ll send it in a week. I absolutely don’t give a damn what they write about it. Tomorrow I’m going to Budapest—invited to attend a “Journées de la Poésie à Budapest”—the Hungarian Writers’ Union thinks I’m a big cultural personality in Sweden! What a mistake! But they’ve sent plane tickets and I’m going. My fugitive friends have urged me to go—otherwise they’ll just invite some Party poet from Bulgaria. I’ve never been to a deluxe conference of this kind before; it makes me ashamed. Voznesensky is coming too. The discussions will be carried on in French, Russian, and Hungarian. Since I am phenomenally bad at French, I’ll just sit there like an idiot. But I hope to be able to sneak away from the program and see my friends from the earlier visit.
Maybe my appetite will come back. In any case I want to live long enough to see Nixon lose the next presidential election. He darkens the sun. Otherwise there’s plenty to be happy about in the family circle.
Our household has been augmented by two dwarf rabbits. We escaped a dog this time. But how it will be when summer comes I don’t know. Probably the house is going to resemble Noah’s Ark more and more. Your son would feel at home here.
I LOVE YOU ALL.
Tomas
Västerås 10 June [1970]
Dear Robert,
I am longing very much for news from you. Good news, I mean, to hear that you and Carol and the children are well. In the meantime take this little book and these clippings from the Swedish scene. I am in the ridiculous position of being FAMOUS again. They love me again, even the Marxistic hard-hats. Why? The small book is now printed in 7000 copies, about 5000 are thought to be sold already. It is full summer—I rush directly from my poor clients into the water.
Love from all of us
Tomas
20 June, ’70
Dear Tomas,
I keep waiting for your new book, but all I get are new books of Göran Sonnevi! That’s OK, but his books don’t have enough lairs, mole-nests, skulls full of wet straw, interiors of horse-ears, soggy cities under wet stones etc. (Man does not live by air alone.) Oh, how wise I am!
Tell me how the Budapest journey was! Did you see Voznesensky? I’d love to write to him, and tell him how much I like his poems.
I postponed my new book three or four months, while I struggle this summer with yet another draft of my long poem on Great Mother Fears.
If you send me some new poems, I’ll send you some! We are all well, staying home. J Wright has gone to Vienna, Louis Simpson to England.
Blessings, Robert
29 July, ’70
Dear Tomas,
Your new book did come! And I like it very much! So much that I’m thinking maybe I should just translate the whole thing, in the same order you have it, and have it printed as a little pamphlet. Then, when you come over here next, on a triumphal reading tour, like Charles Dickens, you’ll have two books on the market!
I enjoyed the reviews also—the Marxist critics seem to have collapsed, and have stopped attacking you as a medieval pope—That is ominous—bad news for the Left—I’m afraid they’re losing their morale.
Only the small town critics, as in Örebro, are still malicious, holding up their poisoned end, or pen, or whatever it is.
You asked how we are—we’re all very well! I go swimming every afternoon with the children, teaching them to dive, and I resemble Julie Nixon more each day.
Tonight there is a parade—of pets for the children, who must dress their pets. Mary is taking an extraordinary chicken we have—extremely interested in the human race, contemptuous of the company of other chickens, insists on roosting each night on one of the outdoor stairs, alone—his name is Orville. So Orville’s wildest dream comes true tonight—he’s going to be dressed as a human being! Or nearly so—he gets some Raggedy Ann doll clothes...I suppose this piece of good luck will completely unbalance him, and we’ll have to send him to the psychiatrist. Hubris is no doubt dangerous in chickens, he may end up as a delinquent, a demonstrator, a “bum”...probably able to make love only in garderoben...
