Airmail (8 page)

Thank you for your letter! I’ll try the couple of questions about the Lowell poem. I’ve never heard of toasting wheat-seeds. I think the attractiveness of the sound is one thing that drew Lowell to that food. It is definitely not popcorn. The scene is a wharf area, with some unloaded or abandoned freight boxes standing around. I knew a man in New York who used to sleep on the wharf in a large packing-crate. The Negro is probably in the same situation. The only food he is able to pick up on the wharf are some grains of wheat which have fallen out of torn sacks being loaded on ships. He has used some coal fallen out of sacks in the same way, and made a fire in an old barrel.

The most alive word in the poem is the first use of the word “ticking,” which suggests the faint sound of ice-cakes rubbing against each other as they all float downstream.

Stafford is marvelous. I love his poems.

I intend to publish translations of your poems
both
in
Stand
and in
The Sixties
! Their readership doesn’t overlap very much, since very few people in the U.S. read English magazines. I’ll just postpone your publication in
The Sixties
a few months, and all will come out all right.

I like “I det fria” very much, though I am not convinced yet if or how the third stanza fits into the poem. It seems to stand off a bit, but it’s possible I haven’t really understood the movement of the poem yet either. I have to think about it. The center section is strong, with its “rotter, siffror, dagrar,” and the wonderful line with the man leaning over the table. Is he simply shaking his head, as if to say “no” or is it a more violent motion? Or a more ambiguous motion—?

I’m enclosing a translation of your fir forest poem. I’ve probably fallen on my head!

Here is a new poem of my own:

Love to all in your family! Mary, who is four, just came out to my study (an old chickenhouse) and said, “Come back to the nest! It is supper-time!”

So I close here,

Yours,

Robert

Aug 17, 66

Dear old Tomas,

Thank you for the letter and translation! I have chained myself to the typewriter here, with a cache of carrots to keep me in foodstuff, and am going to answer your letter! “the drawn pilot”:

“Drawn” is used in this sense only of the
face,
and it means a face that shows a lot of strain and perhaps fatigue. The face of the pilot shows both fatigue from his flying, and an emotional strain, perhaps from fear of being shot down while he was bombing, perhaps from his awareness of the people he has killed. The word “drawn” was probably applied to faces like that sometimes because when a man is under strain the skin of his face does seem sometimes to be drawn tight over the bones, stretched over the bones like a drum head. It suggests “pale” also.

I have changed the title slightly, and you can adopt the new version if you think it best:

“Asian Peace Offers Rejected without Being Heard”

Changing “without publication” to “without being heard” helps for some people to connect the idea of the poem with the owl at the end, who seems to be the only creature in the U.S. with good hearing, hearing good enough to hear a peace offer.

If you like the earlier version: “Det finns fil kander in departemente” better than the repetition of Rusk, go ahead and use the earlier version for those two lines. Let the rest of the poem go as it is in the final version. I dropped “Liberal Arts graduates” because it was too long in English, a bad mouthful.

The ghost train goes back to a legend of the west. One of the earliest trains that went through the Rockies was buried in an avalanche of snow. Now, when the snow conditions are such that another avalanche might be possible, trainmen swear they have seen the ghost train appear again on its tracks, heading toward the place the disaster occurred, as a warning to the trainmen.

I like the translation very much!

“Snurriga” is a wonderful word. I was thinking of the Walt Disney film about the eccentric or mad professor, and all those Hollywood movies, really anti-intellectual operas.

Did I ever send you this one:

(A Keepsake Forever is the way a diamond engagement ring is advertised in the U.S. So it is as if the Asian body in the ring were something for Americans terribly sentimental, “your bit of eternity.”)

Affectionately,

Robert

Västerås, Sept. 66

Dear Roberto,

your letter came at the last possible minute, I crashed into the garage, drove 70 miles to Stockholm, burst into the Bonniers building, wrenched open the door to BLM and there, inside, sat Lars Gustafsson bent over the final proof of the September issue. I was just in time to put in the word HÅRJADE for DRAWN—an exact equivalence. Lars was worried. People at the press who had seen the Bly translations and Ferlinghetti’s “Where Is Vietnam?” (his magnum opus without a doubt) had muttered something to the effect that “there could be trouble about this...” It’ll be interesting to see the reactions.

The issue, by the way, contains the now well-known polemic between Weiss and Enzensberger about “engagement”—where Enzensberger with full justification calls Weiss “an MRA from the Left.” The attempt of the Communists to monopolize “engagement” and sail forward on outspread indignation makes me angry, as so much else makes me angry right now.

Thanks for the tip about buying
Life.
The presentation of Dickey put me in mind of that character in Salinger who thinks he has to crush thirty bones in a person’s hand when he shakes hands, so that nobody will suspect him of being homosexual.

Charles Whitman was in the same issue. Did you see the photo of the little boy standing with his daddy’s guns on the beach? There are secret threads running through that issue of the magazine. What you say in “Plaintiff” (?) about the drift towards masculine brutality goes IN MEDIAS RES. But why should the masculine be so self-evidently associated with the brutal? Come off it! To be masculine is to be a man, period. The rooster has a red comb on his head and goes cock-a-doodle-doo, the hen lays eggs. Why do so many men in the U.S.A. doubt deep down that they are men? Why do authors like Mailer love to hang out with boxers, grateful to be allowed to brush up against them? Monica had bought a little outfit for Sellin’s one-year-old boy. But a good friend who had lived many years in America advised us not to send it because in the U.S. it would be taken for a GIRL’S outfit—a clear distinction between boys’ and girls’ clothing is made at one year old. Later I heard that the Sellins didn’t bother about such things, but by then we had already given the suit away to a little Swedish hermaphrodite. It does seem so far out that at one year old you already have to start getting used to signaling your sex through certain attributes. It’s not enough to rest secure in the fact that you have a penis and all in good time will grow a beard. You have to get off a shot from time to time, hit somebody in the kisser, be “violent,” or make a lot of money. Though I have to say that in my personal experience the American is gentle, friendly and cooperative. And that he’s often short of cash.

But not as short of cash as I’ve now begun to be. Dreadful! Good grief! Despite the fact that I have a salary from the state of 25,000 crowns (about 5,000 dollars) a year as long as I live! This sum is guaranteed. If I earn 10,000 I get 15,000, if I earn 20,000 I get 5,000, and so on. Right now I’m earning about 30,000 from my job, and therefore don’t get an a single öre [smallest coin]. But in 1968 I’m thinking of taking a sabbatical just to write and read and travel and eat...And besides that I now get a secure old age!

One of my old patients at Roxtuna has shot a police officer to death and has been hunted through the whole of Sweden by great throngs of policemen, newspaper reporters, and mobs of people. Another has caused a scandal by publishing a book in which he “exposes” the Swedish prison system. One of his bits of bravado was when he posed as “Tranströmer, a psychologist from Linköping” at a hotel in the country. Who am I really? I’ve been brooding a lot lately about my six years at Roxtuna. I ought to write something on the subject, but what? I can’t get away from the problem of criminality, though it’s extremely nice not to have to work with it professionally any more. The whole business has shrunk down to the fact that I do testing at an institute up in the woods north of Västerås and it’s fantastically pleasant there.

Yseult Snepvangers has not sent Dickey’s book as she wrote she would (Creeley’s came instead). But her name is splendid. Pure baroque. (I also have a weakness for names with grandeur of a more sublimely simple style, classic simplicity: JOE POOL represents a good name in that genre.) Somebody at Wesleyan has also written to inform me that Ignatow, Simpson and Haines are on the way. I’m especially looking forward to Haines.

Your translation of “Open and Closed Spaces” is written in very good Blyish indeed. I’ve got only two changes. The sleeping man is too active in your version (“He takes the darkened house...”) No, the house is not out and the man inside is lying still. Then we have the words “an invisible string which goes STRAIGHT UP in the sky...” That would mean this:

But you can’t fly a kite like that. Correct position is this:

But what “snett up” [on a slant] is in English I don’t know. About “Lamento”: The first section should be present tense: It lies there. TOMRUMMET [void] is a neutral, physical Swedish word. Means a near vacuum but without the scientific associations. I want an “empty” word too. “Universe” is perhaps too rich in associations with astronauts etc. I don’t know how you would characterize “void” in English, but that’s the word you find in dictionaries. KAPPSÄCK [backpack, duffel] can pretty much look any old way, it’s something one has on long trips. It doesn’t have any connotations of luxury though. I was thinking of a fairly ripped, lumpy thing. Not anything “shiny.” Your suggestion works fine. Section 3: “A rustling” could mean “prassel” [rustling]. But I had thought of VISSLING [whistling]. Perhaps a whistled signal from a bird or from an agent or from a football referree—we don’t know. Finally the cherry tree at the end: their branches shake against the trucks in a friendly and at the same time somewhat vigorous way. “Slap on the back” [Klappar om] is what the team in a game does to a runner who makes a goal or what relatives do when they greet one another at the station. The translation that appears in
Sweden Writes
is bad—“brush” is considerably better. The main thing is to get an impression of robust tenderness, a lightly humorous effect in a dead-serious poem.

Wonderful to move over to blyish. Maybe the poems will actually be as alive in English as in Swedish. The language isn’t the main problem. The problem is the other stuff, the landscape, the associations. A thing like keepsake forever would be impossible to translate, and with it that whole excellent poem. I think it’s your strongest “political” poem, because in an intimately visionary way it propels itself into that which is truly relevant in a modern democracy: collective sin, collective detachment. [------]

Did you know that
The Sixties
has a counterpart in Norway now? A young man in Lambretta, Jan Erik Vold, who visited me the other day, talked about a magazine called
Profil
that he and several others publish in Oslo. He is some kind of enfant terrible in Norwegian poetry. I got some copies of the magazine and by God it not only lacked collections of examples of dead and living poetry (waxworks of the sort that used to appear in your magazine) but also had a symbol in the shape of a woollen mitten which is bestowed upon bad reviewers etc. Among the editors was a young American named Noel Cobb, who is evidently a student of yours. Voilà. You ought to look at Vold’s own poetry if you’re preparing a Norwegian anthology. It’s possible that you would find it too abstract, but it means something new for Norway, that’s very clear.