Airmail

by Robert Bly

  For the horsechestnut tree shall I use “melancholy” or “sinister”? The first is passive, the second active.

  For “periscopet,” do you want us to see a periscope on a submarine, or some general kind of telescope?

  I’m going off next week now to Indiana and Ohio, to get the money for the next month, and when I get back, I’ll try to absorb your various comments, and type a complete draft, which I’ll send to you to read when you have insomnia.

  I haven’t seen Böckernas Värld. Maybe it was sent by boat.

  On Minnesota elections: Zwach is the man from our county and the neighboring county. He is a total dope. Odin Langen is from the far north, and represents pulp-cutters, Indian-haters, and poachers. Fraser is a pretty good man, representing the university community in Minneapolis plus a lot of suburbs, the kind in which there is always a poster of Che Guevara in the teenager’s bedroom, pinned over Early American Wallpaper.

  Today is Thanksgiving. Nixon had hoped to have the prisoners of war rescued from North Vietnam at a Thanksgiving dinner in the White House today. Wouldn’t that have been marvelously sentimental? An orgy.

  What an operation! Right out of Batman comics! No one can overestimate the effect of comic books on weak minds.

  Love to all,

  Robert

  The Bookcase

  It was moved out of the apartment after her death. It stood empty several days, before I put the books in, all the clothbound ones, the heavy ones. Somehow during it all I had also let some grave earth slip in. Something came from underneath, rose gradually and implacably like an enormous mercury-column. You must not turn your head away.

  The dark volumes, faces that are closed. They resembled the faces of those Algerians I saw at the zone border in Friedrichstrasse waiting for the East German People’s Police to stamp their identity card. My own identity card lay for a long time in the glass cubicles. And the dusky air I saw that day in Berlin I see again inside the bookcase. There is some ancient self-doubt in there, that reminds us of Passchendaele and the Versailles Peace Treaty, maybe even older than that. Those black massive tomes—I come back to them—they are in their way a kind of identity card too, and the reason they are so thick is because people have had to collect so many official stamps on them—over centuries. It’s clear that a man can’t really travel with heavy enough baggage, now that it’s starting to go, now that you finally...

  All the old historians are there, they get their chance to stand up and see into our family life. You can’t hear a thing, but the lips are moving all the time behind the pane (“Passchendaele”...). I think for some reason of that ancient office building (this is a pure ghost story), a building where portraits of long dead gentlemen hung on the wall behind glass, and one morning the office workers found some mist on the inside of the glass. The dead had begun to breathe during the night.

  The bookcase is even stronger. Looks straight from one zone to the next. A faint sky, the glimmery skin on a dark river that space has to see its own face in. And turning the head is not allowed.

  Traffic

  The semi-trailer crawls through the fog.

  It is the lengthened shadow of a dragonfly larva

  crawling over the murky lakebottom.

  Headlights cross among dripping branches.

  You can’t see the other driver’s face.

  Light overflows through the pines.

  We have come, shadows chassis from all directions

  in failing light, we go in tandem after each other,

  past each other, sweep on in a modest roar

  into the fields where industries are sitting on their eggs,

  and every year the factory buildings go down another

  eighth of an inch—the earth is gulping them slowly.

  Strange paws leave a print

  on the glossiest artifacts dreamed up here.

  Pollen is determined to live in asphalt.

  The horsechestnut trees loom up first, melancholy

  as if they intended to produce clusters of iron gloves

  rather than white flowers, and past them

  the reception room—an out of order sign

  blinks off and on. Some magic door is around here! Open!

  and look downward, through the reversed periscope,

  down to the great mouths, the huge buried pipes

  where algae is growing like the beards on dead men

  and Mr. Clean swims on in his overcoat of slime

  his strokes weaker and weaker, he will be choked soon.

  And no one knows how it will happen, we only know

  the chain breaks and grows back together all the time.

  Västerås 27 nov 70

  Dear Master,

  you have now translated 8 of 11 poems. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

  “Preludes”: I think nr 1 and 2 have found very good English solutions.

  The prose part, nr 3, has some mistakes in it. “Saker jag varit med om här” means “events from my earlier life that have happened here”:—this is too long and clumsy but it is the meaning of it.

  Monica and I once visited the inside of a pharaonic tomb (the Sakkara pyramid) and in the very chamber where the dead king was previously put there were paintings on the walls, showing episodes from his life.

  In this text I see the paintings from my life getting more and more vague until they disappear completely. As if you were showing a film and you gradually draw up the black blinds (curtains), letting in the light from outside—when the curtains are completely away you can’t see the projected film pictures anymore—the light is too strong. The text should be something like “but they are more and more effaced, since the light is getting too strong. The windows have grown bigger (larger?)”

  “Kväkarandakt” has nothing to do with “breath.” “Andakt” means “devotion.” As you know the Quakers are silent during their divine service.

  Affectionately

  (I don’t sign—you know perfectly well who is writing)

  (I am sitting in a train, shaking.)

  More about Swedish pronouns in the

  next message...

  Västerås 29 nov -70

  Dear Robert,

  the gossip about May Swenson was invaluable. Do you think I have to visit this conservative, rather decadent, we-like-rich-folks set? Perhaps I can meet some of the Buckleys there and change history. The other day I fell asleep before my TV during a long film made by Peter Orlovsky. It was a film about Peter Orlovsky’s brother, who was just released from a mental hospital. The brother was autistic, sitting so quiet behind Ginsberg on a stage where a poetry reading was performed. I felt much sympathy for the brother. I did not see how the poetry reading ended—I fell asleep. In the night I had a dream about my future readings in the U.S.A., I was surrounded by shouting barbarians all the time. I looked in vain for some holy barbarian (you).

  Tonight I had another dream, probably influenced by your letter about the Swenson set. I was not reading this time, I was listening to another man reading, it was not poems, some sort of prose, interrupted by passages of sheer onomatopoetic noise, sneezings and so on. I did not see the performer first but suddenly I saw him—it was Melvin Laird!

  -------

  “Med älven” (I have to talk at some length about this text, like a professor.

  The Swedish word “älv” is the provincial word for “river.” Especially it is used when speaking about the northern rivers in Sweden, the northern rivers that often are wild currents, with rapids. “At the riverside” is too calm—the nearest translation should be “with the current.” I think the first lines are too calm in your translation. The Swedish text is packed, the statements are simple but the rhythm is rather violent. Listen:

  Vid samtal med samtida såg hörde jag bakom deeras ansikten strömmen

 
som rann och rann och drog med sig villiga och motvilliga.

  It is very irregular, it is like Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung rhythm. It starts with alliterations. By chance it could be that in English too: Conversations/contemporaries

  A word-by-word translation would be

  Conversing contemporaries I saw heard behind their faces the stream going on going on dragging with it the willing and the unwilling

  “Samtida” does not mean “men of my generation”:—it means “contemporaries” (even if in this text I mostly think of my generation, my friends).

  I want to have the “saw heard” together without a “no” (I am both seeing and hearing the current).

  I liked first “what is for and what is against” because it was a strong formulation, but I am doubtful now. Well, it should be WHO are for and WHO are against, of course. But the polarization is not mature yet. The unwilling are not definitely against, they are reluctant. They are taken by the stream, some with enthusiasm, some reluctantly, but the reluctant ones are not actually fighting against. Is “the willing and the unwilling” impossible in English?

  “Varelsen” in the next stanza is singular form, “The Creature.” What sort of creature? Probably I have in mind an allegorical person, the collective mood as a person. It is vague, I admit. I was partly thinking of my old friend X who was so happy at last to have found a reason to let go, to feel hate and 100% enthusiasm in left wing politics (after having spent his years brooding over the construction of Durrell’s Alexandria novels or R. P. Blackmur’s theories of criticism). But “the creature” is probably a thing where you may project many things.

  If you are very convinced that the plural form “creatures” is better I accept that.

  But the line “Allt stridare vatten drar” is mistranslated. “Stridare” is a form of the adjective “strid,” not the substantive. It means rapid. The sentence is in translation: “More and more rapid water is pulling.”

  “Några få människor borta i byn” should be something like “one or two men drown there in the village” OBS: “by” means “village” in Swedish—it is in Norwegian that it means “city.” There was a village situated near this very bridge, and I could see a few men outside their houses far away. (So we are back—after visiting the General Assembly, Kosygin, etc., we are taken back to the village, and the rapids and the bridge...)

  The description of the timber floating is made in 2 stanzas that are terzines à la Dante (with rhymes and everything—you are surprised!). “And huge masses of water plough by under the narrow” is a line of its own, then a gap, then the first terzina:

  förbi. Här komer timret. Några trän

  styr som torpeder rakt fram. Andra vänder

  på tvären, snurrar trögt och hjälplöst hän

  then the second: I am iambic too!

  och några nosar sig mot älvens stränder,

  styr in bland sten och bråte, kilas fast

  och tornar upp sig där som knäppta händer

  of course I don’t dream

  about a translation with rhymes. No reader has yet, by himself, discovered the rhymes here.

  “Vänder på tvären” means “turn cross-wise”—they are floating like B. The A timbers are the “torpedoes.”

  But these logs are not “safe” as you wrote. They are helplessly sluggishly turning in the stream. A Scotsman, Mr Robin Fulton, has translated this poem and his translation of these lines is:

  Some logs

  shoot right out like torpedoes. Others turn

  crosswise, twirl sluggishly and helplessly away

  and some nose against the river banks....

  The folded hands need an explanation.

  The logs are piling up. Like that on the banks of the current.

  The logs often resemble the fingers of folded hands. So the pile is the folded hands. I have the impression that in your translation it is the solitary log that folds its hands.

  OK, do you accept all this? I am a little tired of my poem now. For the ideological background you can look into my letters of 1967–68, if you have kept them. The moral weakness of the poem is of course that I am standing at a bridge, looking at it, and not struggling in the waves. But I was standing that very day, in June 1967, in Floda in Dalecarlia, looking at Väster-Dalälven—it is a documentary. But if you change the title from “At the Riverside” to “With the current” you bring me a little more into the water.

  Your Old friend, professor

  Kenneth Burke

  10 Dec, ’70

  Dear Tomas,

  An annoying thing. You know your book is being handset, so I get no proofs. All is done now but four pages that have the longest poem, “Balakirev’s Dream.” A sudden appeal from the printer, who stopped printing as he noticed one more stanza on the Swedish than in the English. Somehow, I, or a typist, left out this stanza in English:

  Droskan gled dit över isen och hjulen

  spann och spann met ett ljud av silke.

  Neither of us noticed it! You didn’t either! (And your own poem—what a disgrace.) Now my notes are all in Minnesota! So I’ve retranslated the lines so:

  The carriage rolled away over the ice, the wheels

  spinning and spinning with a sound like silk.

  Will you let me know by return mail if that is accurate? With all the problems, you’d think we were printing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire! I’m sorry we’re so slow and hopeless (the printer is worse than I am, honest).

  Your friend,

  Robert

  14 Dec, ’70

  Dear Tomas,

  Thank you for your very good notes on “Traffic” and “The Bookcase.” You’re right about Mr. Clean. I’ll try “brood” and “sitting on eggs” with a couple of wise women, and see what happens. Isn’t the link with thinking odd in both languages?

  I know the power the word “pass” has in Europe. The word “passport” has no power at all in English—I suppose because most Americans travel so seldom over borders. It has the feeling of some honorary document, like a graduation certificate from Sunday School. So if I compared a heavy tome to a passport, they’d just yawn. I will try to get the identity (that’s what our raw nerve is) card enlarged somehow to a book, or pamphlet, at least!

  I was sure that “rummet” was “space!” The idea of space looking at itself in the dark skin of a river is nice. But “the room” makes a good and scary image—horizontal, rather than vertical, and more to the point, in the poem!

  Carol says Louis Simpson will adore this poem, so I must send it to him.

  I’ll do my last corrections and then set about getting them in magazines and a pamphlet. The tour will be duck soup. I’ll have acceptances in a couple of weeks.

  I got up at 5 this morning to work, and my little shack where I work is too cold this morning (temperature went down to 35 Fahrenheit last night, Polar for California stoves, summery for Minnesota), so I’m writing inside, on the dining room table, the floor covered with cheerful toys, and fragments of cotton batting—(Mary and Biddy spent 2 hours yesterday making a Santa Claus costume, with beard, for Noah, and putting him in it—he looked as if he’d just seen the Pope, and would bless us shortly).

  Love, Robert

  Västerås 20 dec 70

  Dear Roberto,

  these lines will reach you after Christmas, so happy (ending of the) Christmas to you and pope Noah and the rest of the good family! I hope to see you in 1971—if, if, the expression “duck soup” means something good. You wrote “your tour will be duck soup” and I have not found an American slang dictionary yet, so I don’t know if the expression means YES or NO.

  Best new year greetings to the Printer (the hand-printer, not the foot-printer). He is no stakhanovite, but observant. I think your translation of the missing 2 lines in “Balakirev’s Dream” is e
xcellent. I hurry to make my confirmation.

  I told a few friends about the translation and they began to look at me with some suspicion now. Recently a young Norwegian truck driver got headlines—he had inherited 1 million crowns from an unknown relative in the U.S.A. He was interviewed etc. A week later he disappeared—it was found out that the poor man had invented the whole thing.

  This translation business is slipping out of my control. What is Leif Sjöberg doing? A student in Göteborg, who has written a small thesis about my poetry for his examen, got a sudden message from Leif Sjöberg (he had never heard about him before) ordering him to send by air mail his thesis, the reason was that Leif needed some inspiration for a “foreword to the translation.” What translation? I have not yet heard anything from May Swenson. You will hear from me soon, I am afraid.

  Love

  Tomas

  28 Dec, ’70

  Dear Tomas,

  I’m on a plane about to land in N.Y., where I’m going to read “Teeth Mother” tomorrow night to a mob of 3000 howling academics—here for a conference of college English teachers—who will no doubt throw their old Miltons at me. The Hilton Hotel (where the conference is) would not give us a room in which to hold this antiwar reading (can you imagine—after all these years), so we are holding it, of all places, in the Ballroom of the Barbizon-Plaza.

  I typed up last night all my work for the last three months on my long poem—the Mss amounts to about 40 pages now. I’ll no doubt, for common decency, have to remove some of the worst pages. The writing goes most of the time very easily like duck soup, but we will have to wait and see if it has as much flavor.