by Robert Bly
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The next day I got your letter about Eva Braun. I was not shaken. Her project does not interfere with our prose poems project, and besides I have the general principle of approving many translators of the same writer. But I cannot tell you if she is good or bad. I will try to find Crow. Coeckelbergh is a new publisher, publishing translations of poetry on a large scale—Artur Lundkvist supervises the project. I think Gary Snyder was published recently by them. I think you should exchange a few letters with her and find out if she likes Jung or not.
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Monica has been fasting for a whole week, in order to get the poisons out of her body and soul. She became very energetic and her eyes became very clear but she did not change much, thank goodness.
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Justo Jorge Padrón—a Swedish speaking Spanish poet—phoned me and told me that a Spanish publisher has accepted 43 of my poems for a book. Justo is also the best tennis champion of the Canary Islands. He did not mention that when we met but I saw it in a paper. His own poems, translated by Lundkvist, will be published by Coeckelbergh this spring!
Love Tomas
Västerås 17-2-67 [1976]
Dear Robert, my Spanish translator and your Coeckelbergh colleague Mr. J. Jorge Padrón, who is a good poet, wants to have the address of Hardie St. Martin—he wants to send his books of course.
*
I now appear with my left arm in a cast of plaster after a beautiful somersault on the slippery winter ground outside Emma’s stable. Life becomes more simple when you have to do everything with one hand.
Love from
slippery Sweden
Tomas
26 Feb, ’76
Dear Tomas,
You’ll notice it’s your left arm!—the arm of feeling—that means, says Moo goo Gai Pan, the famous Pygmy sorcerer, that you’re doing too much bureaucratic work. And since you already wrote me that in your last letter, that proves again the wisdom of wearing overshoes when you walk on ice.
Hardie St. Martin’s address is c/o Rodriguez, 166 East 56th St., Apt. 4A, New York 10022.
I must go to El Paso tomorrow for a reading! Hooray—into Mexico for one hour!
I’m overworked like you—it must be something in the stars—
Your friend, Robert
Hotell Viking: Stay away from this hotel—too expensive
Trondheim
8-4-76
Dear Robert,
I have to send you a few lines from Trønderlag! This is my last stop on a 6-day reading tour in Norway (Bergen-Oslo-Tromsø (!) and Trondheim). Norway is wonderful and exotic. I am reading for students as shy as the Swedish ones but I have made them speak out except in Tromsø where the North Pole was too close. You seem to be fairly well-known and loved in this country but so far I have not met anyone who knows where your ancestors came from. (I have a vague memory of you pointing at some place just south of Trondheim.) The trip was organized by Willy Dahl (university lector in Oslo), a brave man who recently made people furious—he published a history of modern Norwegian literature. He put me on nonexistent planes etc. so the trip has been chaotic enough. I had a dream one night that I was sent to Greenland by mistake.
Have you translated a poem called “Gullhanen” by Olav H. Hauge? It gave me the best poetic shock I’ve had for many months. (But it is a sonnet...)
Norway is watching you! And your friend Tomas
Love to
Monica!
And Paula & Emma!
18 May 76
Dear Tomas,
I did my last reading for the year yesterday, and now I can return to being an irascible birds-nest-staring-into introvert again. In New York I corrected a cut version (Frank McShane prepared it) of the conversation you and I had at Columbia. I took some of your sentences and put them under my name, because it seemed you had the best lines! (And I gave you several “urr”—“umm—” “That’s not true!” shouts and moans.) The Swedish king has been here and gone—he resembles Dairy-Whip. Carter is exactly like James Dickey. Rolf Jacobsen came to Madison, Wis. (by bus from Austin, Texas)...I read with him...A fine evening!! Everyone loves to have a decent, sensitive grandfather. We are all well. Carol is papering the inside of her stilts-study. I sold Peanuts (the spotted pony) today for $35. The pound is down to $1.80. We have had no rain all month. I went to the Jung Conference this year, and attacked the Jungians! They were astounded. I tried to get them to promise never to use the word “archetype” again...
Your fighter for lost causes—
Robert
Västerås 7-6-76
Dear old companion,
thanks for the new sending of astonishing magazines. I had a good time with your interview, prose poems and with James Dickey’s interview. I want to translate “The left hand” too, tell me more about it. What do you mean by PROTECTIVE lamp-lit etc....?
It is something disarming with Dickey, he lays himself open, probably without knowing it. What is disturbing with most writers is their desire to be BIG at all costs. So when you meet this longing undisguised in this naive muscle-man-way it looks almost like humility. A target so big that you cannot miss.
I was slightly scandalized the other day in the evening paper Expressen. Lars Gustafsson was defending me—absolutely with the best intentions—in a review of Lars Bäckström’s book Bildningsroman. Bäckström had attacked me for being employed by PA-rådet. The organization where I work was once founded by the employers’ organization in Sweden but the employers have as little to do with my work as, say, the King has to do with the duties of a postman. But for Bäckström I am a toady of the capitalists. So Lars Gustafsson gave a dramatic anti-picture of that in Expressen, describing me as doing “slave work in a subordinate position,” in a “module,” with “constant attacks of migraine,” concealed in spite of my growing reputation in the world etc. I had to go around in Västerås for days with a permanent smile to contradict that gloomy picture. We all end up as laughing-stocks, one way or another, it is comforting to know that. What about attacks on you lately? In America the women seem to be the most aggressive. I heard a story about Adrienne Rich...she was giving a reading but refused to start until all the males had left the room! Is that true? I hope not.
My trips to Norway and Denmark have been refreshing. Our publisher Koed Hansen in Aarhus is a young boy, very kind, once a student in Minnesota. One occult thing: when I met him he had his left arm in plaster like I had one month earlier. So it is not without risks to touch my writings nowadays.
Rumors tell that you have been translated and described in a new magazine here, called Ett Tärningskast. I will try to find it in Stockholm when I go there next week.
Write soon! “They often write to me, but because of my heavy schedule I almost never have the time to answer.” (Dickey).
Love
Tomas
[Editor’s note: Tranströmer included drafts of two poems in Swedish, with the following commentary:]
1) “Övergångsstället”: A relapse in the old Tranströmer style, but less flabby I hope. It was good to be able to finish something at last. All my other things now seem to have no end. But summer is before us. We will go to the island 10 days from now.
2) “Hastig promenad”: I was very fascinated by this wonderful piece. Should not be kept away from the Swedes. Read this first version and please comment. “Mil” are Swedish miles. “Burning” could be both “brinnande” (burning itself up) or “brännande” (burning others—also you talk about “brännande smak etc.,” sharp taste).
A poem about what it is like to be middle-aged?
17 July 76
Dear Tomas,
There are several phrases in this mysterious poem which I don’t understand well! That following after is one, and the idea of “skum” is another.
It is Sunday among the pines. Carol and I went for a short sail after breakfast in he
r new sailboat—a “Laser”...Loon #6 is here, a magazine in California named after this place (Cry of the Loon), in it there are two poems of yours, translated by Don Emblen. One poem is about the world going round in circles...Bill Booth, who owns this resort, has written a companion to my loon poem. Mine goes:
From far out in the center of the naked lake,
the loon’s cry rose:
it was the cry of someone who owned very little.
His companion is:
From far out in the center of the naked lake,
the loon’s cry rose:
it was the cry of someone who owned seventeen refrigerators, eight boats, four of whom need repair, nine garbage cans, four cars plus one jeep, whose back tires are bad, one hundred and twenty two sheets, twenty one beds, ten boat motors etc etc....
Love, Robert
P.S. I need help!
Gunnar Harding is doing a new Swedish anthology in English as you know, and has taken lots from the Beacon book of yours—I think he is omitting Martinson!
[------]
Love, Robert
Place to Cross
Ice blows in the eyes, and many suns dance
in the tear-kaleidoscope as I cut across
the street, which comes dawdling after, this street
where Greenland’s summer shines in the puddles.
The whole energy of the street seethes around me—
it brings up nothing into the mind, and it never will.
Under the traffic, deep in earth, silently,
the unborn forest waits for thousands of years.
I get the idea that the street can see me.
Its glance is so gloomy that the sun itself
becomes a gray ball in black space.
But for this instant I give off light! The street sees me.
18 July ’76
Dear Tomas,
We’ve just come up to some cool pine woods in Northern Minnesota, oh how lovely it is! Almost as good as Runmarö! Except of course we are not connected to the great belly-button of the Sea, only to the small flat stomach of the inland lake. (A kind of day-care center, I suppose.) But we inland people have lower standards, so a crayfish in fresh water makes us as excited as an octopus in salt water! I caught one yesterday—when I put him on the boat seat, he compressed his tail three or four times and was astounded that he didn’t shoot backwards instantly into cool weeds—he just remained where he was on the wooden seat! It is like being a journalist...
I’m glad that Gustafsson has told the world that you are only a wage slave of the capitalists—a bug crawling on the wall—rather than one of them. At least you’re not the wall.
That story about Adrienne is true, I expect. One has to expect to be singled out at a woman’s poetry reading now—There’s one! He’s right in the middle!—I have a wig I take along for such occasions.
I like your translation of “Walking Swiftly” (I’m not sure “promenad” is right—the title refers back to the swiftness with which the konstnaren walks to his ateljé in the last sentence).
The word 2x4’s you probably know—it is the standard word for the piece of wood roughly two inches thick by four inches high which are used for the inner skeleton of walls, and all such things. It’s there to contrast with stone and granite—and the numbers (2x4’s) makes it all still more nervous.
The “kejsaren” should suggest a Chinese emperor.
You can take out the colon after “anda” in the second sentence if you want to—I’ve done it in the English.
The hens should sound as if they are continuing a patrol (of watchfulness) which they have been doing as a gift for a million years or so. There is a tense change there: Round him the wasps kept guard, the hens continue their patrol (it comes into the present now), the oysters open and close all questions. (It is entirely in the present with the oysters.)
“Viljan” is burning in the sense that it is ignited—it is no longer cold, but has heat that it draws from its own burning...Savonarola’s will was a burning will.
You are right. It is about being middle aged!...if the necessary introversion has been held on to!...
We all send our love to you and Monica and the children. I notice we have with us one of the cups Monica gave us on our last trip...and the other day, poking about my record player, I found a package with 3 records in it! One was of the Västerås Choir!! It must be a gift from you or Monica! Thank you! How strange it was to hear them sing Hallelujah! They have the Swedish pronunciation of the “oo,” which transfers the whole song from Palestine instantly to Värmland—
Ingegerd Friberg did send me Ett tärningskast and it has my Montale piece in it—which I’ve been looking for a copy of in English to send you!
Thank you and Monica so much for those records!
Love,
Robert
Middle aged American meditating in the north woods, trying to forget 2x4’s.
P.S. I will send you tomorrow a translation of the new cold wind poem!
Västerås Sept 19 -76
Dear Robert,
this is election day in Sweden, I have voted and I am waiting for the computers to start counting the votes. But 20% have voted by mail so the final outcome will not be clear until the day after tomorrow. I did not vote for Palme this time.
Thank you for working with “Övergångsstället.” I have the translation in Runmarö but I remember it, I think. It has a wonderful élan, typical of you. But I think there are slight liberties (misunderstandings?) here and there. That “gatan”...“följt mig så länge” does not mean that the street has been “dawdling.” I simply mean that 1: I have walked along the street for a long time before crossing it. 2: it is a street I’ve known since my childhood (actually it is “Skånegatan” in Stockholm South, where I lived as a child), so the street has been with me during my life. It is a day in March, in thaw time, the sun present after many weeks of grey weather. But still cold. Strong light. The traffic in the street is experienced as something almost organic, as a state of mind, full of energy but without purpose. It is a force without memory and without purpose (som ingenting minns och ingenting vill)—it has nothing to do with my memories and what I want. But the unborn forest under the ground has purpose and is waiting patiently. Then, when I cross, I find that, after all, there is a glimpse of perception in the street too, it is not just blind forces rushing by, it can see me, but only vaguely, because the street is so dim-sighted (like the eyes of certain animals living in caves etc.), it can only glimpse me in the moment when I am on fire with sunshine, and the sun itself is perceived by the street as a grey “nystan,” and here is a problem because “nystan” means a ball of yarn in Swedish, the English “ball” is so general. I am thinking of a ball of wool here. Is there an English word for that? Good luck!
What happened to your Sonnevi translations? Did you succeed? Translations, translations...I am touchy about that now. It is because of my opera translation, Janáček’s Kátja Kabanová. The Royal Opera accepted my first translation with pleasure but some singers complained and I had to change a lot of things. Then, 10 days ago, the stage director arrived at last, Herr Joachim Herz aus DDR (East Berlin, or Leipzig, I don’t remember...) and he started to change my translation without knowing Swedish! once again without telling me. By chance I was aware of it and rushed to the meeting. I was allowed to take part in my own translation for the remaining part—the last act—and I found it possible to work together with the authoritarian Prussian. It was necessary not to fall flat but to be very enthusiastic all the time, then I could convince him. But when I protested about the previous changes he had made he went furious, shouted “NOT ONE SINGLE SYLLABLE CAN BE CHANGED” and ran out. I was in a dilemma: should I withdraw and make a scandal or be patient? I succeeded in sneaking in some alterations in the score of the leading soprano and as almost 100% of my text for the la
st act was accepted (because I was there and could be enthusiastic in front of him) I decided to stay. I have never been on such a switchback railway as this opera work before—touring the U.S.A. is like living in a sleepy country boarding house compared to that.
I send you a prose piece too. “Mats” is Mats Dahlberg—who has written to you and also got some old Fifties from you—and “Laila” is his fiancée. They live in Molkom, Värmland, almost as pleasant as Norway, but a landscape partly destroyed by the big wood companies who clean-cut vast areas and use a lot of poison.
I would love to have a letter from you, Uncle!
Love
Tomas
24 Sept., ’76
Dear Tomas,
Thank you for your letter! In the chaos of the summer, I’ve lost the Swedish for “Övergangsstället.” Would you send it to me once more? In return, I’m typing a tiny little depressing poem to overcome the good cheer caused by too many Eastern gurus and peanut Christians in this land. (The debate starts tonight.)
Brutal men invading the Farallones with clubs, the psyche in torpor, the Empire dying in its provincial cities, no one to repair the Baths, the judges corrupt. The wagon behind bouncing, breaking on boulders, leaping from side to side empty, slowly being smashed to pieces. All this crumbling darkness is a reality too, the feather on the snow, the rooster’s half-eaten body nearby. And other worlds I do not see...the Old People’s Home at dusk, the slow murmur of conversation.
The Farallones are the Farallones islands near San Francisco, whose seals were clubbed to death in the 19th century. The second image is of a runaway team of horse pulling a wagon.
