by Robert Bly
The magazine Lyrikvännen just arrived, I opened it and found that its theme is “The prose poem.” There are among many other things 2 pieces by James Wright and your prose poem about looking at a cabbage-worm, well translated by Lasse Söderberg. I almost got inspired. It’s such a long time since I wrote something, beside the psalm translations.
What are you doing? New exciting REGULAR poems? Memoirs?
Do you happen to spend the first part of April in Texas?
Hugs from Monica and me!
tomas
AND A HAPPY 1984!
New Year’s Eve, 1983
Dear Tomas,
It is very seldom that I write anyone back the same day! But I am so glad to hear from you. I thought something was wrong; someone had slandered me, or told you some scandalous remark I had supposedly made about all Swedish poets, etc. But I am glad to see it was just that you had forgotten me.
It is New Year’s Eve. Noah, who is a junior in high school this year, and president of his class, which has done wonders for his self-esteem, has his new Christmas cap on, a sort of Welsh farmer’s cap, and is off to the movies and some party where everyone will sit around looking embarrassed. Biddy has gone off to Ohio to visit her boyfriend, who has just taken a job selling and buying grain for Cargill; she is a junior at Harvard and a loyal sort of person; she has some wonderful firmness in relationship. Mary is here, and she and Ruth are playing Boggle at the moment—a game in which lettered cubes are rearranged, and the player has two minutes to scribble down four and five letter words that his feverish eyes see on this contained box of cubes. She has spent the vacation writing a paper on Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot...nothing has changed. The universities still study these old race-horses, now coughing in their stables, covered with old moth-eaten blankets, and on the stable walls the ribbons recalling their old victories: Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, Hugh Kenner, Dinner With Bertrand Russell, Nobel Prize...
Ruth is working hard to pass an examination as a psychologist in April...naturally it was made up by behaviorists, and instead of studying the unconscious, one studies statistics...
So you can see the world is going on in its old way. As for me, I am burdened down with responsibilities, commitments, lectures, seminars and so on. I am writing quite a bit; at the same time preparing a Selected Poems, which gives me an opportunity to rewrite old poems. What fun! I’ve found about thirty iambic poems written before I took the plunge into free verse, and I like some of them quite well. For me, it was a little like dancing in chains, but sometimes the sound of the chains makes a better music than the silence that surrounds free verse! As you can tell, I am longing for form again, and am not so interested in the prose poem.
Please answer these questions: Did I send you The Man in the Black Coat Turns? My translation of Göran Sonnevi? My Selected Poems of Antonio Machado?
I will write tomorrow to John Biguenet in New Orleans. I think he can find something; Calvin Harlan is there somewhere too. I think he was there when we all stayed in the French Quarter. I will be in Taos, New Mexico March 29, 30th and 31st. Have you ever seen Taos? It is marvellous. It is the best preserved in some ways of the old Pueblo culture...D. H. Lawrence loved the area...I’m sure Monica would love to see it. Perhaps we should all meet in Taos the last day of March or the first day of April!
After that I’ll go home, where I’ll be all through April. We’d love to have you visit Moose Lake, if you plan to come north! You’ll have to let me know.
I have your new book, which arrived just as Ruth and I were starting down to Madison to visit my parents, who are now at the Old People’s Home...I am reading it with deep pleasure...
Have I given you news of Micah? He is in the seventh grade, and plays hockey. Each day he straps on his enormous exoskeleton, pulls a T-shirt over it, grabs his long extroverted cane, and is gone...
Love to you both,
Robert
1984
[New York, Excelsior Hotel]
25 march -84
Dear Robert,
this is Sunday morning and I’m writing on the single piece of paper the porter reluctantly handed over. Yes, we are here now, not able to go to Taos, because that day (March 29) I give a reading in Savannah, at something called AWP (Associated Writing Programs). After that Atlanta (no reading), New Orleans (no reading), Dallas (!) (Southern Methodist University, reading April 5–6) Houston (a whole week as a visiting writer—April 9–15 at the university there), then Washington (seeing a Västerås friend) and Provincetown (April 18–20, reading). Then home. The trip is determined by invitations and a cheap round-tour ticket, Eastern Airlines, and it starts tomorrow with Richmond, where Greg Orr will pick us up and take us to Charlottesville for a reading which will give me the economic foundation for the rest. (Oh what a boring letter! I’m only writing this to let you know where I am, if IF you happen to be in the neighborhoods during your March–April trips.)
Now something important: A guy in Gothenburg—Göteborg, I mean—will send you a letter inviting you to go there in the beginning of June. He phoned me and asked for your address, also saying that they probably have some organization paying your ticket to and from Sweden. I pray, ask, demand, drum, urge and press you to say YES to that invitation! I will run to Göteborg and read with you and we could also have 2 hours at the University threatening the students and professors with all the difficulties of translation etc. You could come up to Västerås and be our guest for some days. We could talk about our frog skins! I could pester you with my psalm translations. We both are longing to see you as a living person and not only as a country-doctor photograph. Monica sends her love—she is here too.
Your friend Tomas
1985
26 Jan, 85
Dear Tomas,
I had the most wonderful dream last night. I was living by the ocean, and I came back from the ocean to the pier, and could see very clearly into the water near shore. Then somehow I came by surprise on an “ocean man.” He was small, maybe four and a half feet tall, with a black beard and black hair. I stroked his hair and beard, and said to myself: “I must call and ask Tomas to fly over immediately.” You were the only one I trusted to talk to this “ocean man.” So when I woke up I knew that I had to write you today. The ocean man, by the way, asked to go to the bathroom, and I was a little worried about his finding a way back through the pipes, but what can you do? You have to give a (ocean) man privacy. So that was how the dream ended, the conclusion unclear.
But you are to fly over anyway.
Thank you for your last letter. The shock of Sam’s death was so extreme, and grievous, that we are still in sorrow. I canceled the talks and lectures I was to give in the fall, and recently have canceled all the spring readings also. So I’ll be home until September or October now. As you can imagine, that makes us very poor, but I am doing a new translation of Peer Gynt, and that will help. And it feels right to be home...
[------]
I’m anxious to have some news from you. And also to find out if you’ve had any experience interviewing these “ocean men.” Ruth and I saw Franco Zeffirelli’s new movie of La Traviata. Ruth says it is the greatest movie she has ever seen. You are to see it as soon as possible! Love to Monica,
Yours, Robert
P.S. I’m ready to come to Göteborg late spring or summer or fall. Maybe we can see each other!
20 Feb ’85
Dear Tomas,
I thought you might like to see these music poems that Bill Holm gave me the other day. I like all the details he has gathered about Liszt!
I hope you’re well. Please tell me the gossip from Sweden. Is Göran still writing about Mozart? What if he started on Brahms? John Ashbery is still writing endless poems here, and the Reagan mystique is so powerful no one says a word about politics or the poor. It’s just as when in a pond, the frogs suddenly all stop croaking.
Lo
ve,
Robert
Västerås 10 March -85
Dear Robert,
it was good to get your letters, even if the content was sad. I think you did the right thing when you canceled the spring readings.
I was moved by the Ocean Man. Maybe the Ocean Man is a part of me?
Monica and I and the girls are well. The girls are both so friendly to their old parents. The other day I brought Paula to a lunch with members of the Bible Commission in Uppsala (I had spent 2 days with them presenting my new version of Psalms 19, 20, 21 and 26). Paula works at the Samariterhemmet Hospital. She works 75% and is saving money for a trip around the world. Emma is studying Ethnology. And they live in Uppsala where I spend a few days every month. Monica is busy organizing medicare for refugees again. Young men from Iran and Iraq mostly. Deserters from the war and the Ayatollah. It is not a popular job among ordinary Swedes. The climate has changed since the 1970s, when working with refugees was glamorous. Now it is eccentric. The mood is more egotistical, provincial and conservative now. The institutions that prosper are the body-building centers. Everybody is jumping up and down on a jumping mattress (we have one too). But also shops for selling sweets are popular.
I did not like the trends during the “political” times, and I don’t like the trends now either. I think I am against all sorts of trends.
I wait impatiently for the frogs to start quaking again in the U.S. Pond. What do the new Christian fundamentalists say about obligations to the poor? Do they really read the Bible? Tell me more about this puzzling “Reagan mystique”! Enormous, wide, needle eyes or extremely small camels?
What do you think about Daniel Halpern? He is my new publisher. I mentioned in Provincetown that most of my poems in English are unavailable now. Beacon Press and Ardis—sold out. Somebody told Halpern and I got a nice letter from Ecco Press, asking for the right to do a Selected Poems of TT—they wanted to save translations from the previous volumes and also to publish new translations. I proposed Bob Hass as the editor—he does not know any Swedish so he can really judge the translations impartially. I don’t know if you have heard from Ecco Press, but if you have, answer.
You will hear from me soon. Dear Stradivarius and Norwegian Zorba we send our love: Monica and Tomas
P.S. Bill Holm’s poems gave me much pleasure...
30 March, 85
Dear Tomas,
How good it felt to hear from you! I love to have all the news about Emma and Paula and Monica. The climate for compassionate activity has changed in the U.S. too. Now the poor are regarded as riddled with tragedy-bacteria, and one is liable to catch poverty by associating with them. Reagan promises the citizens that they can go back without conscience pangs to the old American selfishness so noticeable in the time of Mark Twain and Mencken. We are experiencing a swing of the pendulum, and people are immensely grateful for being allowed to be selfish again. Even the blue collar workers voted against their own future and their children’s welfare for the psychic ease of permitted selfishness. I had never seen anything like it—entire towns of laid-off workers, who voted their own joblessness, and now give sad interviews to the papers, talking vaguely about economic unpredictabilities...
Something monstrous is coming, or is already here. It has two heads: bad schools, and the collapse of the ability to read texts symbolically, so that the Fundamentalists have no doubts.
I took Noah to Mpls yesterday with four others from his French class, and his teacher. They are going to France for ten days! Of course they were wildly excited. Did I tell you Mary and Biddy are graduating from Harvard this spring, and I am to be the Phi Beta Kappa poet, and read a poem at those exercises...Now I can show off in front of my daughters, always a precious thing! And have my way paid to the graduation besides!
Bob Hass called the other day, and told me about the project, but said he didn’t know if he was the one to do it, since he couldn’t read Swedish, etc. I told him I thought he would be perfect for it. He’s thinking of taking all of Sam Charters’s versions of the Baltics, all of mine for Truth Barriers, and probably all of Robin Fulton’s for the new book. I promised him some advice on that. What do you think of Robin Fulton’s translation of the Market Place book? I’m really not prepared to jump into it, but he’s very inattentive on sound, and almost all the music and grandeur of the train poem is gone. Has anyone else sent you translations of those latest poems? “Fire-Jottings” on the other hand he does well. I don’t know what to advise you. I think I’ll stay out of this Market Place book, but Robin’s translation of this book does not compare with the clear and fine job that Sam Charters did with Baltics. Maybe Sam would translate a few? It should be called The Wild Market Place, rather than The Wild Square.
Daniel Halpern is a highly alert and responsible publisher, and I think he’ll be fine that way. As a poet he’s not as good as Lars Gustafsson. (Notice the subtlety of this sentence.)
Do write soon.
Love from us all
Robert
Beijing April 10 -85
Dear Robert,
I think you should have a letter from this country. I arrived yesterday from Bangkok after flying 10 hours + 5 hours. I’m not tired, no jet lag. The program started already this morning. I sat for 2 hours conversing with two silver-haired poets in Mao-dresses and drank four gallons of tea. And suddenly I felt such an enormous longing for you, so I had to write this letter.
In a moment I will go out and have dinner—alone—what a luxury!—I have become fluent in chopsticks and can handle even very slippery noodles.
But I’m longing for Monica. She would have liked this. But she has to stay in Västerås, taking care of Iranian refugees.
The reason why I’m here is that the Professor of Chinese at the University of Stockholm was operated on for kidney stones. When he woke up from the narcosis he got—in his dizzy state—the idea that he should translate my latest book Det vilda torget (which he happens to like) into Chinese. He started but it turned out to be too difficult. So he translated it into English (in 3 days—he has lived in Australia for 8 years) and sent it to a young dissident here in Beijing, the gifted poet Bei Dao (remember his name!) who translated 10 poems of mine. 7 of them have been published. [Göran] Malmqvist (the professor from Stockholm) also persuaded the Swedish Institute to send me here, and the Chinese P.E.N. to take care of me. And it is all a great adventure.
Tonight no program. I will take a walk in the bicyclecrowded streets of Beijing, disappear, pop up again, disappear...
Tomorrow we will visit the Great Wall.
Best
Tomas
20 April 85
Dear Tomas,
How lucky you are! The closest I get is Arthur Waley and my chopsticks, which get warped from being left too long in the dish-water. I’m longing to go to China. Michael True, from Worcester, Ma, is over there this year, at Nanking, and he’s forcing his students to translate Silence in the Snowy Fields, so maybe they’ll ask me. But I’m enjoying being home so much I don’t know if I want to wiggle! I feel you will write a poem about the Great Wall...this came to me from an Inspiring Angel...
I’m preparing my Selected Poems and having a wonderful time, though reading over some old poems is rather humiliating. I sometimes use the image to drill into a mountain, or dive beneath the water, but very often too I find myself in trouble in a poem, surrounded by serious people from inside, who want me to face something, or read some passage they have brought to me, and then I find an image, which immediately becomes a fire-bird, I climb on; we fly out of the forest, and back to my comfortable mediocrity with “nothing accomplished / no important victory won / as if life had never begun” (Robert Frost).
So images can be sly ways of escaping from a poem—oh how sly!
This is my confession for today.
Love,
Robert
Shanghai 22 april -85
Dear Robe
rt—
Must send you something also from this place. I met a woman who translates you. That was in Beijing. Her name is Zheng Min. Strange to sit in a strictly Chinese milieu and hear the names of you and other buddies, like Merwin, being dropped.
The other evening I had the terrible experience of drinking a liquor—something like aquavit—from a bottle with a snake in it. It was a viper, probably brought alive into the bottle with liquor. So I drank its last breath. It tasted worse than I had expected. A long, long aftertaste, somewhat like raw fish but with more scales on it. Ugh! I will never do that again. It is said to be very good medicine.
I am longing for Monica—I get no letters here, I just write letters. Shanghai is strange because of the colonial buildings which are now totally taken over by the Chinese. My hotel was very fashionable in the 1930s—the elevator looks like an elevator in early Hitchcock movies. I will step into it now and disappear in the streets. I will walk there together with 11 million Chinese. Sun and dust are wrestling, just now I think dust gets the upper hand. Goodbye now. May peace prevail in Northern Minnesota.
Your friend
Tomas
Västerås 29-9-85
Dear Robert,
The editor of Lyrikvännen sent me your latest book which you did not give me, traitor! I could not resist translating the poem “Night Winds” and will probably translate some more.
Just for knowledge I send 2 poems of my own. And, when you read “Shanghai Streets,” send a thought to the young poet Zhow Zhenhai alias Bei Dao alias Shi Mu who badly wants to have a book of yours. He is one of the most gifted Chinese poets and will publish my poetry in Chinese, a whole volume! (Edith Södergran too.) Now he wants to translate some of your stuff. He visited Sweden, e.g. Runmarö, and Stockholm, around August 1st this year and wrote his name and address on a piece of paper I hereby send to you. Don’t try to copy the Chinese handwriting! Glue it on the parcel with your book(s)! (And add “Peoples Rep. of China.”) I think both Snowy Fields, the prose poems and this Loving a Woman in Two Worlds will be most appreciated in the Peoples Republic of China. I will write soon again.
