Airmail (44 page)

May 3, 89

Dear Tomas,

What fun to have your new book! And I have some time! Oh what a pleasure. Here is a draft of the church poem. “Överblick” is a problem for me...I don’t know if I should be looking down from above or just have some sort of wide cultural point of view...which I usually don’t have. Ruth is fine, and sends her best. Politically we are all very shocked here.—Bush has fallen asleep, and he’s dreaming of the Cold War as some people dream of the Middle Ages. More, as soon as I finish (stumbling over) another poem. Love

Robert

A hug for Monica!

Runmarö 14 May -89

Dear Robert,

oh I was happy to get your letter...And your translation of “Romanska bågar” seems to have the right tone. You are probably the only one among my—now rather numerous—translators who has the right feeling for this poem that embarasses certain readers and makes others happy. You understand that this poem is not sentimental, but emotional, and of course documentary.

(You can easily see your Swedish friend, blinded from tears, tottering out from San Marco in Venice, supported by his faithful bodyguard Monica, after suddenly realizing that the human soul is built in ROMANESQUE style.)

Your translation carries the emotion wonderfully (that is how I feel without knowing English...) but there are a few objections.

I share your doubts about “no point of view.” The Swedish word “Överblick” does not stress the above position. You can have ÖVERBLICK of something in front of you. The word can be used both very concretely and symbolically, you can have no ÖVERBLICK of the landscape and no överblick of a situation. Is the word “overview” possible to use in the same way? Or “survey”? In the poem you have to start with the simple fact that in a romanesque church you cannot grasp the interior—in a Gothic church you can see most of what is inside in a single glance, but a romanesque church is more like a labyrinth.

Line 6. “human being” sounds a little cliché-like. Of course it would be dangerous to say “Do not be ashamed to be a MAN!” Can you say “a human”? Well, this is a question for someone who knows English.

At the end: “Herr Tanka” should be “Mr Tanaka.” If you say “Herr” in an English text it will mean that Mr Tanaka is a German. But of course he is Japanese—Tanaka is one of the most common Japanese names. “Herr” in Swedish is “Mr” in English.

“Sunblazing” might be wrong. Or right. “Sjudande” in Swedish means literally almost boiling, but not quite. You can also say “sjudande av vrede, entusiasm etc.” (Tea is best when it has been “sjudande” but not “kokande.”) I don’t know the English word and I think you should be allowed some freedom here. “Blazing” sounds OK, but should not be a cliché.

I have been here in Runmarö for 3 days and I am returning tomorrow to Västerås. It has been a laborious spring, but things are getting better. I will be free for 2 weeks, to do Bible translations.

Love to Ruth and the children you manage to get hold of. Hope to hear from you soon...

Love from Monica

Tomas    

May 27, 89

Dear Tomas,

Thank you for your letter! Sjudande might be “seething”—I’ll have to see. My notes are up in Moose Lake. I’d like to tackle that Alcaic poem too, but it looks hard. Both of us admire that Romanesque poem a lot. I was translating it for Ruth on the way down to Mpls the other day by car, and she thought the whole idea very fine!

I’ll have time this summer. For the first time in about fifteen years, I have all of July and all of August free! Wow!

I’m enclosing a piece from the
NY Times
describing a strange phenomenon: people looking at great art tend to become disoriented, or feel slightly crazy. Someone has to lead them out into the sunlight I think.

I’ve had some fun this week, putting together all my polemic articles on poetry from
The Sixties
and
The Seventie
s...I’ll make a book out of them, called
American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity.
I have the urge to do some more of that...maybe I’ll start the magazine again...Do one issue of
The Eightie
s and then on to the NINETIES!

These Chinese students are beginning the Nineties...Please give a big hug to Monica, and write soon!

Your capital L liberal friend

Robert

Runmarö 30 April (and 5 April) [May] -90

Dear master and buddy,

why do I always have to write to other people than you? So many letters nowadays are written for practical reasons. I am buried under a pyramid of unanswered letters. I wake up under them, I go to sleep under them.

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...

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:

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.