by Robert Bly
I hope all is well with you and the close people. Here the mood is good. Monica and I have returned from a 3-week period as inhabitants in Venice. We were able to borrow a flat there, a real ghost house, and of course the experience of Venice was overwhelming. We returned slowly by train. When we woke up in Stockholm we bought the first Swedish newspaper in almost a month. We read it between Stockholm and Västerås. Suddenly Monica said: “I faint.” She had come across a small note saying that I had gotten the so called “Neustadt Prize.” I turned gray. I had gotten the so called “Nordiska Priset” one month earlier, we had both been to Iceland to receive it. And now this new one. I had the feeling that I had to travel around and apologize the rest of the year. “Forgive me for getting too many prizes...” After half an hour I could see the positive aspects—I had been lifted up from a rather humble existence to something approaching wealth. For the next year.
The Nordic Prize gets a lot of publicity here, but the Neustadt Prize not. The Swedes probably are confused because it is an unheard-of American prize with a German name. “Neustadt”—the Swede shakes his head. This lack of publicity is good for me, but I think Ivar Ivask is disappointed. He wants Norman, Oklahoma, to be known as the cultural center of the Western world. And I want to hide here in the incredibly early green spring—Sweden is the warmest part of Europe right now. Everything is upside down.
(I have the feeling that Ivar Ivask doubts my ability to behave properly during the solemn ceremonies.)
I must tell you a strange episode. In the beginning of February I visited Oslo, for one day and one night. In the morning I hurried to the Oslo railway station—and there—I saw—YOU. Or rather, an old relative of yours. It must have been one of your Bleie relatives. I passed very near, but the person did not show any sign of recognition, so I stopped my impulse to run and greet him, You, or whatever it was...I was tempted to ask the man if he was a relative of yours. But it was too early in the morning for such an attack. Perhaps it was your apparition? But he looked 5 years older than you. Perhaps you have a shamanistic method to fly to the Oslo railway station now and then and relax for a couple of minutes while you are sleeping in Minnesota, or lecturing mankind somewhere...
The other day I had a conversation with Fran Quinn’s automatic telephone answerer. From Bill Holm I recently had a letter. So it is time to hear from you too.
Love from us both.
among daffodils
Tomas
P.S. Would you like your letters to me to be stored by the Uppsala University Library? They want to take care of my papers. Gloomy librarians...
Appendix 1
* * *
Letters
Letter from Monica Tranströmer to Robert Bly on the translation of “Vermeer,” August 6, 1995
Dear Robert,
Thank you for your letter and for your Vermeer translation. Tomas has pointed out what he does not find perfect in the translation. Then it’s my job to understand what he means and describe the problem in my bad English!
And now to Vermeer!
Stanza 1 line 4. “The murderer” is stronger than “the death-bringer.” He makes you unhappy—he makes you feel ill. But he does not kill you!
Stanza 2 line 2. “canals.” In the dictionary “redd” is called “roadstead.” What is sure is that the boats are anchored. And in Swedish “redden” even gives association to “bredden” which means “the breadth.” Could Delft have any real harbour? Only canals I suppose.
Stanza 2, line 2. “ultimatum” seems stronger than “demands”
" line 4. Tomas has written that the flowers are “sweating premonitions of war”
Stanza 4 line 1. “airy” Is there any problem with “clear”?
" line 3. Stopped “smack”—it sounds too funny!
Stanza 5, line 1. I think Tomas prefers “ears sing, from depth or height.”
Stanza 6, line 1. “human beings” is a little too general. Tomas says “It hurts to go through walls, it makes you ill.”
Stanza 6 line 3. “Now to the walls” I do not think Tomas wants to teach us something about the wall! Just tell us that it is there and it’s the same for him, me and for all of us.
Stanza 7, line 1. “airy.” Maybe “clear”?
" line 2. Maybe emptiness instead of “what is empty”?
We have a very busy time now. It’s a lot of coming and going in Runmarö. But the only thing we think of is Emma’s wedding party on August 12. At least 50 guests and maybe rain—help! But after the 12th life will be a little more normal again. Do you have any plans to come to Sweden? We should love that. We think very often on you.
A hug to you both and to the whole family from both of us!
Monica
I send this as a fax to U.S.A. too.
Letter from Robert Bly to Torbjörn Schmidt, February 3, 2000
Dear Torbjörn,
Thank you very much for sending me back the original copies of the letters. I was becoming alarmed at the gap in our correspondence, and I wasn’t sure what was happening. Don’t hesitate to write me about the details in the letters that are not clear.
About my Norwegian origin: My great-grandfather came from Bleie on the Surfjord in Hardanger Fjord. It’s a little settlement between Odda and Utne on the west side of the Surfjord. The family is still there. A whole group from that settlement came to Illinois in 1855 and then around 1888 moved up to western Minnesota where I was born. As was typical with second generation immigrants the parents did not teach their children Norwegian. I got a Fulbright Grant in 1955 with the aim of translating Norwegian poetry into English. They sent me three months early to the Oslo summer school for an intensive Norwegian course. I remained there the rest of the year translating Olaf Bull, Rolf Jacobsen, Claes Gill, Paul Brekke, and so on. Brekke published a small anthology of European poets in which I found Gunnar Ekelöf and Harry Martinson. When I got back to the United States, a man named Bill Duffy and I started a magazine called The Fifties—first issue in 1958—which took as its task the introduction of Ekelöf, Georg Trakl, César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Montale, Pasternak and various others to the American poets of my generation. Bill Duffy’s wife was a Swede Christina Bratt, whose grandfather I think instituted the Bratt liquor rationing. I’ve mentioned her in another letter to you. She and I did the first translations in English of Gunnar Ekelöf, called I Do Best Alone at Night.
A few years later I heard about a young poet named Tranströmer and a new book called Den halvfardiga himlen. The University of Minnesota has an excellent Scandinavian collection, so I drove the 150 miles or so to Minneapolis from the farm to find the book, and when I got home there was a letter from Tranströmer on my desk actually addressed to James Wright who often visited, as it happened. Tomas had seen some poems of James’ and mine in the Times Literary Supplement and as he later said to me, he felt closer to those poems than to any poems by members of his generation in Sweden. So there was an instant kind of communion. On my side, when I began to publish English translations from Half-Finished Heaven, my oldest friend in poetry, Donald Hall, wrote me a note saying “How much does it cost to have a mail drop in Stockholm?” He was playful but serious. He thought I had written the poems and then they had been sent to American editors from Stockholm. So Tomas and James and I remained a little community. At about the same time I was, in order to earn money, translating Scandinavian fiction. I did Hamsun’s Hunger and then The Story of Gösta Berling and then some stories of Strindberg. So I got to know Swedish fairly well, but Tomas would make marvelously subtle comments to me about the mood of my English in his poems—he knew English very well—and occasionally he saved me from embarrassing and disastrous things. I recall that it was during the seven-day Jewish war, Europeans had a fear of the atomic bomb being used. Tomas was thinking about that fear one morning while he was shaving, I think in the late 60s. It’s called “Det oppna fonstret.” It goes this way:
I shaved one morning standing
by the open window
on the second story.
The next line said: “Knappte igång rakapparaten.” I was aware that he was imagining a rocket taking off from the Near East. Later in the poem there’s a helicopter and a pilot’s voice saying “You’re seeing this for the last time.” So this word “rakapparaten” which I didn’t remember from Strindberg or Lagerlöf I translated as “the rocket.” After I sent the poem to Tomas, he wrote back, “No, Robert, it’s an electric razor!” So you can see how he saved me from hideous errors, and made it appear as if I actually knew Swedish. But I think it was something unexplainable, something water-like or flowing in our approach to poetry that made our translations of each other full of feeling even with occasional mistakes.
I think I’ve answered your question there about the arrival of Tomas’s letter. Eric Sellin was not connected with this exchange. I’ll look over Tomas’s letters to James Wright in the Wright archives here in Minneapolis and see if I can find that first letter.
About photographs: I think it was probably Carol Bly, my first wife, who took the photograph of Tomas and me standing by the sea. I’ll ask her if she has a copy of that or any other photographs. I’m sure we can find something. If I do find them, I will send them on to you.
I love those doodles of Tranströmer, the kerosene lamps, the memories of Africa. If I were you I would include tons of those, as many as you can. They are really wonderful!
I’m going to send on to you a couple of books about my august self. Maybe you’ll find something there helpful. In one of them, Of Solitude and Silence, Leif Sjöberg has an essay called “The Poet as Translator: Robert Bly and Scandinavian Poetry.” And there’s a photograph next to it of myself and my two daughters on Hardanger Fjord with Bleie in the background. And then four drafts of Tomas’s poem “Övergånsstället” with a letter from Tomas from Västerås dated December 2nd, 1979, commenting on that and other translations. Do you have that letter of December 2nd, 1979 in your book so far?
I do have a couple of such books, and I’m going to try to find extra copies to send to you. If I succeed, I’ll ship them by air next week. I’m glad you’re back to work again on the book. I think we have a good chance of publishing a version of it in English as well.
With good wishes as ever,
Robert
P.S. Please give my love to Monica and Tomas.
Appendix 2
* * *
Poems
Snowfall in the Afternoon
I
The grass is half-covered with snow.
It was the sort of snowfall that starts in late afternoon,
And now the little houses of the grass are growing dark.
II
If I reached my hands down, near the earth,
I could take handfuls of darkness!
A darkness was always there, which we never noticed.
III
As the snow grows heavier, the cornstalks fade farther away,
And the barn moves nearer to the house.
The barn moves all alone in the growing storm.
IV
The barn is full of corn, and moving toward us now,
Like a hulk blown toward us in a storm at sea;
All the sailors on deck have been blind for many years.
—Robert Bly, from Silence in the Snowy Fields
Three Presidents
Andrew Jackson
I want to be a white horse!
I want to be a white horse on the green mountains!
A horse that runs over wooden bridges, and sleeps
In abandoned barns....
Theodore Roosevelt
When I was President, I crushed snails with my bare teeth.
I slept in my underwear in the White House.
I ate the Cubans with a straw, and Lenin dreamt of me every night.
I wore down a forest of willow trees. I ground the snow,
And sold it.
The mountains of Texas shall heal our cornfields,
Overrun by the yellow race.
As for me, I want to be a stone. Yes!
I want to be a stone laid down thousands of years ago,
A stone with almost invisible cracks!
I want to be a stone that holds up the edge of the lake house,
A stone that suddenly gets up and runs around at night,
And lets the marriage bed fall; a stone that leaps into the water,
Carrying the robber down with him.
John F. Kennedy
I want to be a stream of water falling—
Water falling from high in the mountains, water
That dissolves everything,
And is never drunk, falling from ledge to ledge, from glass to glass.
I want the air around me to be invisible, resilient,
Able to flow past rocks.
I will carry the boulders with me to the valley.
Then ascending I will fall through space again:
Glittering in the sun, like the crystal in sideboards,
Goblets of the old life, before it was ruined by the Church.
And when I ascend the third time, I will fall forever,
Missing the earth entirely.
—Robert Bly, from The Light Around the Body
Preludes
I
I shy from something that comes scraping crossways through the blizzard.
Fragment out of what is to come.
A wall gotten loose. Something eyeless. Hard.
A face of teeth!
A wall, alone. Or is a house there,
even though I can’t see it?
The future...an army of empty houses
feeling their way forward in the falling snow.
II
Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside,
and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.
The man who sees what’s about to take place cries out wildly: “Stop!
Anything, if only I don’t have to know myself.”
And a boat exists that wants to tie up on shore—it’s trying right here—
in fact it will try thousands of times yet.
Out of the darkness of the woods a long boathook appears, pokes in through the open window,
in among the guests who are getting warm dancing.
III
The apartment where I lived over half my life has to be cleaned out. It’s already empty of everything. The anchor has let go—despite the continuing weight of grief it is the lightest apartment in the whole city. Truth doesn’t need any furniture. My life has just completed a big circle and come back to its starting place: a room blown out. Things I’ve lived through here become visible on the walls like Egyptian paintings, murals from the inside of the grave chamber. But the scenes are growing fainter, because the light is getting too strong. The windows have got larger. The empty apartment is a large telescope held up to the sky. It is silent as a Quaker service. All you can hear are the doves in the backyard, their cooing.
—Tomas Tranströmer, from Night Vision,
translated by Robert Bly
C Major
As he stepped out into the street after a meeting with her
the snow whirled in the air.
Winter had come
while they were making love.
The night was white.
He walked fast from joy.
The streets slanted down.
Smiles passed—
everyone smiled behind turned-up collars.
How free it all was!
And all the questionmarks started to sing about G
od’s life.
That’s how it seemed to him.
Music was free at last
and walked through the blowing snow
with long strides.
All things around him on the way toward the note C.
A trembling needle pointing toward C.
An hour risen above anxieties.
How easy!
Everyone smiled behind turned-up collars.
—Tomas Tranströmer, from Den halvfärdiga
himlen, translated by Robert Bly (unpublished)
Notes
* * *
About these Notes
Endnotes take up twenty-two pages in the original Swedish edition of Airmail edited by Torbjörn Schmidt. I had hoped to make do with substantially fewer notes in this American edition, and perhaps proportionately I have achieved that goal. But it soon became clear to me that an American edition would call for numerous clarifications not needed by the Swedish audience. Also, the significant additions to the present edition opened up many more questions and issues to be resolved.
We live in an age of powerful search engines, and my policy has been not to include a note for anything a curious American reader can readily find online. This has spared me many, many elucidations of the obvious. On the other hand, I found it essential to a general comprehension of this book to do everything I could to help the reader understand casual but meaningful allusions to works, published, unpublished, or in progress, of the two poets that form the consistent connective tissue and ostensible subject matter of their conversation. I have also chosen to illuminate what the reader might otherwise assume to be offhanded whimsy on the part of Bly or Tranströmer. For instance, when the latter tosses off, on March 24, 1984, “We could talk about our frog skins!” he is in fact referring to a piece Bly has recently published in the New York Times Book Review discussing the Russian fairy tale “The Frog Princess,” though no mention of it by its author has been preserved in the correspondence.
