Airmail (32 page)

1. What is “Kolvattnet”?
   

2. This wave motion, is it being perceived moving across your vision or toward shore?
   

3. The patience and sadness—are they nouns added to the line giving the feeling of the village, or are the clothes washed in rage
   and
   patience
   and
   sadness?
   

4. Did the meeting break up, or was it broken up?
   

5. The soldiers guiding the Mercedes—doesn’t that imply the speaker was a government man? If so then who “carried the loudspeaker away”?—With us, it was usually the police who did that to break up the rally!
   

6. Are those “platsidorna” the sides of the Mercedes? Yes, you idiot!
   

Fondly, your retarded friend,

    Robert

12 Sept. 75

Dear Tomas,

Here it is in the
N.Y. Times

BLESSING!!

Please do write soon—unlike me...

I am enclosing a copy of a translation about which you’ll
have
to reply! I’ll need some new translations to read at the Donnell!

Fondly,

    Robert

Västerås 19-9-75

Dear Robert,

The same day 2 letters from you were humming friendly from the mailbox, I felt it already before I got home. 2 days later the “blessing” arrived—is it really that important what they write in the
N.Y. Times Book Review?
I thought Sweden was the country of Cultural Hierarchy. I hate to admit it but I was very glad to have this confirmation that your translations of me dazzle people over there. For ten minutes I felt like Greta Garbo and Björn Borg. Now back to normal. No, it is not normal. This autumn has blessed me with too many activities. I am a teacher, one or two days a week I drive to the University of Uppsala and give lectures in poetry writing to students, in a new experiment for Sweden, a course called “Skapande svenska.” 20 persons, mostly ladies, overenthusiastic, flooding me with poems. Translations, questions, attacks and all—I have to put them in small groups of 5 to handle them. It is not academic at all. Last week I gave them for homework to
dream
and to write down their dreams as poems. “I have to go to bed now and do my lesson” one student said to another frightened academic teacher. I still don’t believe in Creative Writing as an academic subject (for training people to become authors) but I think the ordinary university courses in Sweden are so dry and dead (e.g. in “Litteraturhistoria”) that a wild creative thing is needed as a counter balance.

At the same time the Royal Swedish Stockholm opera boss phoned me and asked me to translate the libretto of Leoš Janáček’s
Kátja Kabanová
into Swedish. I was persuaded and found out that that commission was the most funny (and also well-paid) thing I have been ordered to do for years. The opera will be staged next autumn, directed by an East German Demon director. The idea to cooperate with hysterical prima-donnas, Demon directors, angry conductors, greedy opera bosses, musicians etc. is exhilarating. And at the same time people went ill in my psychology office so I had to work more there too. Too much, too much. The little U.S. trip will be a good relaxation. And now the schedule for the trip:

I will arrive directly to Boston around Oct 15–16. Two readings in New England. Then New York. I have written to Betty that I agree completely to the “two arias, one duet, plan.” A rather structured reading there. We can do what we like in Bucks County on Oct 24th. I have confirmed the letter, writing to the lady what-was-her-name in Bucks County. I also have accepted a reading or two in Denver “in the last days of October.” Around Nov 1st I go to Tucson and Phoenix (also confirmed). After that I will probably go to California and then back to Sweden from Seattle, where I have a permanent invitation from Birgitta Steene at the Swedish Department. So there will be a reading in Seattle for certain. After that the North Pole and Sweden. As you know I have a perverse longing for the South and if I get an invitation from there for a reading between Bucks County and Denver it will be difficult to resist. On the other hand I am longing to pester the Bly family again with a visit. I am thinking about you so often and even if we have many days together, you and I, you are not Carol and the godson...But it is far away, Madison...Anyhow the best time for a Madison visit is between Bucks County and Denver.

About California I don’t know for certain. But Bert Meyers thinks he can arrange something for Berkeley maybe—because
Baltics
is printed there (just now). I will
not
read in San Francisco this time—the place is overfed with poets. The whole trip will start around Oct 15 and end around Nov. 8.

Comments about the translations will come very soon.

Love

     Tomas

Västerås Sept 21, [1975]

Dear Robert,

a couple of answers on “The Boat The Village.”

“Kölvattnet” is the water, the waves, behind a moving boat. The waves from the boat are going in a fan pattern. My dictionary has the word “wash” for that. I can see translation problems piling up here because in the next stanza you have real washing going on: a village where people are washing clothes etc. So it is unlucky that it is the same word. Maybe there is another word in the U.S.A. for “kölvatten,” something like “track waves” or so. Here the boat is not going too fast but sufficiently fast for leaving visible waves which are rolling back or uncoiling the Atlantic...

In that village you see women washing and washing, on the beach, by the small streams etc....The act of washing, the movements of the arms, the expressions etc. are at the same time aggressive (“in rage”), patient (“in patience”) and also—at least in some of the washers—have a melancholy character. It has been going on for centuries. The Swedish word “vemod” is rather difficult to translate. It is a
tender sadness.
It is a very mild melancholia. I think the Portuguese word “saudade” is very close to it. The sadness of a roe-deer.

“Ett möte som skingrades”...the Swedish here can mean both that the meeting was breaking up or was broken up by the authorities. I don’t know what would be most accurate. I arrived just when the meeting was finished. I asked what it was about. It was rather confusing but I am almost sure that it was a strike meeting and that an official man, from the government, had been sent to the meeting to persuade the fishermen to go back to work. At that time—as now—the military men were the strong ones. Soldiers (in berets and camouflage-spotted uniforms) were escorting the government man (who was in civilian clothes, sitting there, stiff, looking straight forward, inside his Mercedes after the speech) while the people around were shouting the last arguments against the steel sides of the car. The meeting broke up but there should be no atmosphere of terror in the scene. An atmosphere of disappointment, excitement, unsolved conflict (and also a trace of hope) but no terror. The Portuguese are
not brutal
if you compare them with Spaniards and South Americans. See how they handled the crisis this summer, it has been a civil war almost, but no blood shed...

Your old friend

    Duck Soup Tommy

P.S. If you look at the stamp on this envelope you will see an old friend.

Västerås Oct 8 [1975]

Old Friend,

I can understand now why your telephone bills sometimes are piling up. The people who arrange readings are not good bureaucrats at all! Yesterday I got a telegram, a long expensive telegram from Phoenix, Arizona where two ladies asked for “confirmation” of a hopeless date (11 Nov), I should answer immediately. But they had forgotten to tell their addresses! Mr Martin from Denver still does not answer. The Georgia man has not written anything. Nothing from Boston. I know by hearsay that Mr Hawley (Oyez boss) is arranging something in Berkeley. I will write to him today. My answer to Phoenix was a telegram to Lois Shelton saying: ARIZONA READINGS POSSIBLE BETWEEN NOV 1 AND 6 TELL PHOENIX PLEASE BEST TOMAS...From the Swedish Institute I have confirmation that they will pay a ticket going from Boston-New York-Detroit-Atlanta-Denver-Tucson-Los Angeles-San Francisco-Seattle-home, so I will order that from the Travelers’ Bureau here. Enough about this.

Here is a confessional poem about my crisis when I was 15.

May I propose a mixture of the 3 versions of “To Home” / “Homeward”?

As you can see you wrote everything (in different versions) except for the word “orienteer” which is, I assume, the correct word. Because I saw in a magazine an article about that particular sport ORIENTEERING. It is from the beginning a Scandinavian sport, spreading out to England, Germany, Canada and in the last years also the U.S.A. It might be rather unknown still but in a couple of years every healthy student in the U.S. will be an orienteer. The need to
run
was clearly demonstrated last time I visited you when students were running naked through the colleges...what was that called? “streaking” or something...Is that out of fashion nowadays?

LATE MAY sounds very well in general. The word “airpockets” must be wrong—according to my dictionary it means “turbulence.” But what I mean is “life-jacket.” Maybe too surrealistic...I see the blooming trees as swelling life-jackets (for me? for the trees?), we are safe, life is good after all etc. I think you could say “sweet, dirty May night”—I mean the air was polluted with gas etc. but at the same time a lovely May night, like a beautiful but unwashed girl. Thoughts go “far away” is the meaning. Solomon is there because of the Bible...Jesus said: look at the lilies of the valley, they don’t work but not even Solomon in all his splendor was as beautiful as they are. I don’t remember the exact words. So the blossoming fruit trees know that they are superior in beauty to Solomon, they laugh discreetly at his efforts...They bloom also in my tunnel (of depression, which is now disappearing). I need them (the trees) not in order to escape reality (to forget the troubles in the world etc) but to
remember
(to remember that basically there is something good in life, which is real...). The message is rather common. You don’t have to think about flowers for the dead more than that the flowers of the dead mean the same thing: the corpse is there all right but the flowers tell you that Death does not have the last word. Did you get that message, Master? What a poem for a Sunday school teacher to translate!

About the citoyens Robespierre and Danton—let us sit together on a sofa in New York City and give them the treatment they deserve. Like we did in Runmarö once. I believe in that type of mutual translation.

I will call you when I arrive in Connecticut. Monica sends her warmest.

Fondly

    Tomas

I put some uncommon stamps on the envelope

Trains and planes if someone in the neighborhood is a collector.

Västerås Dec 10 [1975]

Dear Friend,

this is reportage from the Nobel Prize celebration. I am sitting in front of my TV looking at gloomy people coming and going...Kings and queens...(Where is your Montale article?—I am longing for it...) A professor is talking in English with a 100% Swedish accent...he is introducing Alfred Nobel (is Nobel going to have the Nobel Prize?) Look, there is Montale—he has a metal star on his coat, he looks dignified in a relaxed way, he will not faint...The professor is talking in Swedish now, he is extremely boring, let us talk about your Tranströmer translations instead.
Late May
sounds very good...you seem to insist on
“the tunnel where I am”
—if you really think this makes the poem better, OK. But you must be aware that people can misunderstand the situation, they might think I have moved from the town and into a railway tunnel (what the hell is the fellow doing there?). I still prefer “my tunnel.”

(Now the orchestra is playing, the professor at last stopped. The conductor looks like an 80-year-old Leonard Bernstein...A new professor arrives, talks about molecules...)

“Citoyens” Great! The only word I want to rub out is “anyway” (line 3 from the end). Take it away. There are too many anyways in the world...

The physicists now get their prizes. Our playboy King smiles fatherly...A funny chemistry professor is introducing the prize winners in chemistry—the audience is laughing—what a disaster, no the professor cracked a joke...good—these celebrations get more and more relaxed...The prize winner has a good name: “professor Vladimir Prelog”...“Molecules again”...And now mr Montale is given a speech by the 91-year-old Anders Österling (his first book was published in 1902): “The Italian poet Eugenio Montale was born in the province of Liguuuurria...” he is shouting...Montale has tics now, around his mouth. “His Pegasus is an unquiet spirit that does not want to remain in the honorary stable...” Österling goes on and Montale’s tics are now more frequent...the speech is slowing down, approaching its end...“Caro Signor Montale”...the victim is standing up now, his body is surprisingly thin, you did not expect that from his round Harpo Marx face, he walks with difficulty...and NOW the King gives away the prize, Montale is saying something to the King, he is smiling, he looks pleased, relaxed again, no tics. Time for the economics prize—you will never get
that
prize Robert but you might get the literary one when you are 80! I will write soon,

Love Tomas

1. Mr John Walldén.
   

   back
   

21 Jan ’76

Dear Tomas,

Help! An industrious extroverted muscle type named Eva Bruno, from Goteborg, informs me that she has translated all of
Sleepers Joining Hands,
and some weird firm with a Dutch rooster, called Coeckelbergh Förlag, wants to print it in April. She also translated Ted Hughes’s
Crow.
Is she any good? What shall I do? This is probably May Swenson’s Revenge, a melodrama. Eva Bruno sounds a little like Hitler’s mistress—she could still be alive, you know—hiding in Argentina—she probably thought
The Crow
was about her lover...somehow it feels gloomy—Goteborg—

Your interview with Rochelle Ratner is lovely!

Fondly, Robert

I never got your Montale article!

Västerås Jan. 22 -76

Dear Robert,

it was a long time ago...I remember I started a letter and then was interrupted and could not find it again etc....I will try again. I am longing to go back to the U.S.A. where I am not so persecuted by PAPERS, all these bills, letters, forms, reports, questionnaires, they are a pack of white blood-sucking bats covering me even in sleep. With an arm free I will try to tell you this: we are all well and we hope you are all well, we are often thinking warmly about you and Monica goes so far that she is sometimes showing people the picture of her godson Micah as a baby (but I will not be surprised if he is a pubescent boy with breaking voice by now, time goes fast). Business: I have talked to Börje Lindström about publishing a prose poem book of your work in Fibs Lyrikklubb in Stockholm this winter and spring. As you can see from his own little book
Skenet från den andra stranden
he is so much inside your prose poems that he sometimes does not know how to get out...“Hämtar ved” e.g. (page 9) is almost a parody of “Morning Glory.” “Old people approaching their breakfast like Viking ships wrapped up in icebergs” etc. But he is also very gifted I think, he will become something. So, our plan is to put our translations together. Do you agree?

“Boat, Town” seems to have got its English version at last, I thought it was untranslatable because of “rullar upp,” “fattigravinen” etc. But your solutions are fine. One objection: “military police” is not the word. They were ordinary Portuguese soldiers, farm boys in uniform. Also “escorted” misses the parallel to leading an animal, a horse, oxen etc. Probably the word is “lead.” “Walking Running Creeping” is not approved by its author, I mean the Swedish text isn’t. The poem got its present shape too fast, it was probably meant to be some other thing. I don’t know. “Trän” is a popular plural form of “träd.” So the holes resemble the holes from all the invisible trees that have been overturned the last years. Can I use your idea with invisible threads picked out? Not bad. Let us keep our invisible threads unpicked!

Best    Tomas

Västerås 30-1-76

Dear Robert,

the other day the mail told me to fetch an enormous parcel from the U.S.A., it hardly got into my car and at home I opened it. First I found a small message telling me to postpone the opening until Christmas, but after some consideration I decided not to wait 11 months and unwrapped the rest. In a silent burst of surprise I looked at your Indian picture book. What a marvelous gift! We will all disappear in these pictures for some time and come back again, a little better.

+ + +

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.

+ + +

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.

+ + +

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 her 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:

His companion is:

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

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.