by Robert Bly
RB September 1, 1981 (second letter)
a letter of yours from late June—This letter is lost.
RB October 10, 1981
Enclosed with the letter is a newspaper clipping about a man who shot his TV thirty-one times.
TT June 29, 1982
A Mr Haba—James Haba.
mecenat—A generous patron, especially of literature and the arts (RT).
The letter included poems titled “Postludium “ and “Svarta vykort,” with TT’s note, “Sapphic!”
RB July 14, 1982
the NERUDA WATCHDOG—Artur Lundkvist.
My latest essay—“Form That Is Neither In Nor Out,” Poetry East 4/5, Spring/ Summer 1981.
Enclosed with the letter is a flyer for “A Conference on Form August 7–11, 1982,” and “Love Poem in Twos and Threes,” published in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, Dial Press, 1985.
TT October 22, 1982
your mysteriously sad and wonderful poem—“Snowbanks North of the House.”
my Bible job—TT’s versions of the Psalms were published as a part of a new Swedish translation of the Bible in 2000.
RB New Year’s Eve, 1983
I have your new book—Det vilda torget, 1983.
TT March 25, 1984
We could talk about our frog skins!—RB discusses the Russian fairy tale “The Frog Princess” in “In Search of an American Muse,” New York Times Book Review, January 22, 1984.
RB January 26, 1985
The shock of Sam’s death—Sam Ray, son of Ruth Bly and David Ray, was killed in an accident in September 1984.
a new translation of Peer Gynt—The play was finished and staged at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, in 2008.
RB February 20, 1985
Included with the letter were Bill Holm’s poems “Liszt” and “Playing Bach’s Orgenbüchlein on the Piano”; also a Minneapolis Tribune story with photo of RB in jail for protesting arms manufacturer Honeywell.
RB March 30, 1985
the Market Place book—Det vilda torget.
TT September 29, 1985
your latest book—Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.
RB October 31, 1985
the first stanza of “Alkaiskt”—in För levande och döda.
TT March 14, 1986
“Älgen”—“The Moose.”
“Nattgrodor”—“Night Frogs.”
by killing Palme—Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated in Stockholm on February 28, 1986.
RB March 19, 1986
“Right here I was nearly killed”—“Ensamhet,” translated by RB as “Solitude.”
Heim—Michael Henry Heim.
RB August 4, 1986
your car-wreck poem—“Ensamhet.”
I have all sorts of questions—Robert Hass was then editing his Selected Poems of Tranströmer (1987), incorporating a number of RB’s translations. RB includes the revisions occasioned by Hass’s queries in The Half-Finished Heaven.
Here are the four questions—The four poems are translated by RB as, respectively, “Guard Duty,” “The Scattered Congregation,” “For Mats and Laila,” and “Below Freezing.”
TT September 11, 1986
STRYKER LÄNGS VARMA ÖGONBLICK—In “Posteringen,” translated by RB as “Guard Duty.”
RB October 3, 1986
eighty-five-syllable poems—RB’s invented form, the ramage, several examples of which appear in Talking into the Ear of a Donkey, W. W. Norton, 2011.
RB January 10, 1988
an essay on the naive male—Part of RB’s work in progress, Iron John, Addison-Wesley, 1990.
RB May 3, 1989
What fun to have your new book!—För levande och döda (For the Living and the Dead).
Here is a draft—“Romanesque Arches.”
TT April 30–May 5, 1990
Neustadt Prize—Annual prize sponsored by the University of Oklahoma, publisher of World Literature Today, edited by Ivar Ivask. WLT featured a special section on TT in its Autumn 1990 issue.
About the Authors
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Robert Bly is the author of numerous books of poetry, nonfiction, translation, and cultural criticism, including The Light Around the Body, winner of the National Book Award for poetry, and the international best seller Iron John: A Book about Men. His many volumes of translation include The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer. His most recent book of poems is Talking into the Ear of a Donkey. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Tomas Tranströmer was born and educated in Stockholm and worked as a psychologist. One of Sweden’s most distinguished poets, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011. He is also the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany’s Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize. He has written twelve books of poems. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden.
About the Editors
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Thomas R. Smith is an internationally published poet, editor, essayist, and teacher. His six books of poems include Waking Before Dawn and The Foot of the Rainbow. He edited Walking Swiftly, a festschrift for Robert Bly’s sixty-fifth birthday, and Robert Bly in This World (with James P. Lenfestey), proceedings of a conference at the University of Minnesota in 2009. He lives in western Wisconsin and teaches poetry at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
Torbjörn Schmidt, born 1955, is Master of Arts at the University of Stockholm and currently preparing a doctoral dissertation on Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry. In 1998 he was appointed editor of the original Swedish edition of Airmail (2001), a book that was followed by an enlarged Danish edition in 2007. From 1981 to 1994, Schmidt worked as editor-in-chief of the major Swedish poetry magazine Lyrikvännen (“The Poet’s Friend”).
