Airmail (17 page)

From the other poem [“Open Window”]: “I kamerans barndon” means the early days of camera when we had to sit still for many seconds to get pictured. This is a beautiful expression in Swedish—we often say “the childhood of the car” etc., it gives an atmosphere of tenderness to these technical things. I have never heard the expression “the childhood of the atomic bomb” but it could be possible. In Swedish.

I went through The Teeth-mother together with Monica this afternoon. (a prima vista translation) The words I did not know I replaced with my own inventions, I read aloud. We were very moved. The only thing I am skeptical about is the title.

(Monica has large front teeth but she is definitely not a teeth-mother.)

(Cartoon caption: A memory of Africa has just popped up...J.M., trans)

About the Hen poem (its title is now “Upprätt”—“upright”). The African memory is authentic—I have been to Chad and I must tell it! Few Swedes have been there. (I have longed for such a long time to tell it.) I am glad you have the right sense for hens. I had 4 hens last summer. “Enligt reglerna” is “according to the rules”—the poultry house is a society with strict rules, and the poor birds follow them in an almost neurotic rigidity. They are our sisters.—“sannigar från 1912” is simply “truths of 1912,” those years before World War I, when ladies had large hats with (ostrich) plumes, bourgeois rules etc. “Balansnummer” is “balancing act.” The poem is partly a protest-poem against the prevailing mood in Swedish intellectual life. What I say is that finding the truth, being honest etc. is a difficult individualistic act of balance, you have to put off the rhetoric, all slogans and mustaches and prejudices and...Just like being before Death. (But I did not introduce Charon in the poem.)

Thank you for telling the
Field
people to send their magazine (it has not arrived yet) For some strange reason I am always published in NR 1 issues. Are you starting a whole plantation of magazines around U.S.A.? I like to be present in the babyhood of a magazine. Tell Carol the kindest greetings from us. Give everyone a royal HUG [KLEMM], as it’s certainly called in Norway. Your confused

friend

Tomas

Västerås 4-2-70

Dear friend,

since you are my impresario I must have some orientation about all these magazines you have. I love the effete snob magazines I have seen and am very happy to be buried in them. Yes, if we had only ONE of them in our poor country! The enthusiasm you see in a line like this—from Mr DiPalma—“I want to make
Doones
nr 3 something more than just another collection of contemporary poems and translations,” this enthusiasm is real, it is good, not the usual tired businessman attitude of most people in the book-publishing trade. Another thing he wrote made me a little nervous: “what you had to say about Tranströmer interested me.” What have you written? Have you tried to make me interesting? Until I get
Field
I expect biographical notations like this:

After many years of silence Leif Sjöberg sent me a letter and told me that he was working for a magazine called
Stony Brook.
From some advertisement-quotation he sent I understood that this was the best thing ever printed, anywhere.

Your translation of “Outskirts” seems to be excellent. The last line is probably not a quotation from King James Bible (it sounds to me more like the uttering of a New Jersey mafia leader) but it is good anyhow.

It is almost midnight. Good night!

Yours

aff. Tomas

9 Feb, ’70

Dear Tomas,

Would you check this translation, oh master? It is wonderfully exciting in English. I recited it to Carolyn, and her eyes shone like children’s eyes listening to pirate stories...of course we love to hear about the Russian Revolution over here—it makes us shiver deliciously in our beds...But it is a marvellous poem!

“imperfect step” is a typing error by my forbannade typist, R.B.; he should have typed “in perfect step.”

Your remarks on the new poems were very helpful. Of course I understand how it is with you world travellers—your memories of Africa just come bursting out, they can’t be stopped, it’s like a person with a high fever shuddering, he just can’t stop it...like pain in a gall-bladder attack...

Of all things, a check came today from Bonniers for 100 English pounds, for the “advance” on something called
Poems
. It must be
Krig og tystnad
they are talking about. And here I thought the Swedes were efficient!

Thank you for your words on “Teeth-Mother.” (The Teeth-Mother is the Great Mother in her Medusa, or teeth side, positively a metaphysical being, and no slander of living women intended!) (Monica is the Great Mother as
GOOD
Mother, anyway, she is the Mother With The Blue Cloak the old painters used to paint in the 16th Century.) I appreciated your words on the poem so much. I worked on it so long, that now I am indecisive about it, and lack confidence.

Tell me about your new trip! I leave next week for Ann Arbor, where I’ll be a writer in residence for the students for 2 weeks—mainly I’ll fill their minds with thoughts about the Great Mother.

STUDENT FILLED WITH GREAT MOTHER

THOUGHTS BY R BLY, FLOATING OVER

DETROIT...

Write soon—

your friend

Robert

15 Feb, ’70

Dear Tomas,

Check this over, will you? It’s a paragraph I added to the introduction made for your book. The rest of the introduction is in
Field,
which you’ve—I hope!—seen by now.

Are these facts and details right?

As ever,

   Robert

P.S. Can you get me a copy—glossy—of that elegant undernourished photo of you taken by the Italian dame for your German book? I like it! And maybe we can work it into your American book!

Praise praise praise

(see
Field
)

New section

I feel in the poems an increasing psychic depth as they go on. The poem called “After a Death” is surely some sort of brief masterpiece, and more moving than any poem written by an American poet on President Kennedy’s death. Tomas Tranströmer’s foster father died at nearly the same time, and Tomas has said that both deaths became mingled in the poem. He mentions in the last two lines the Japanese armor that stands in the Stockholm museum near a model of the warrior who fit into it. To say of a man’s death, “The samurai looks insignificant beside his armor of black dragon scales” seems to me magnificent.

I think “Out in the Open” is a weird and interesting poem also. It is neither a nature poem, nor a political poem, nor a religious poem. One of the poem’s purposes, evidently, is to draw from all these three sections of psychic experiences without choosing between them; and Tranströmer has said as much in a note he wrote for a Scandinavian anthology that included the poem.

more

Praise

(see Field)

Signed

Coleridge

Västerås 27-2-70

Dear Robert,

I am a little shocked by this Tranströmer boom that suddenly comes. I got a nice letter from my Latvian translator the other day, the letter was certainly read by many censors but went through...And this morning
Field
arrived (airborne—the previous sending was lost in the Sargasso Sea). And the other day some fellow wrote a praising piece about me in
Dagens Nyheter,
without provocation—my first thought was: “By Jove, I must have published a book again!” I have not the right stomach for taking in PRAISE in large quantities but I will try to read your beautiful introduction again and make the necessary cold comments...Well, I was born in 1931, not 1930 (I am still young!—Life begins at forty and I am not there yet). I have some doubts about your line “Someone sent me a clipping recently, which recounted the adventures of a youth” etc....I want to see this clipping! Mythomania could be good for
Field,
but not for an introduction in 70s Press. Actually I have only read the story in a police report and not recently (5 years ago). Maybe “recently” according to
Sixties
standards (when will the next issue of your wonderful magazine appear?). In the new section of the introduction—the part you sent in the letter—you must change “T.T.’s foster father died at nearly the same time.” It was not my foster father, it was my uncle. My biological father, who is still alive, would be very hurt. (My parents were divorced when I was 3 but my father has followed my development from a distance and I am going to send him the book when it appears.) About the Japanese armor. I don’t know if there is a model of the Japanese himself beside the armor in the museum. I think I imagined him standing there. So far the corrections.

Nothing written about my poems has made me so glad as your railway station metaphor—it is so beautiful in itself, a poem, and I can only hope that it is true too. I have always loved your characterizations of this type in the Crunk pieces.

The problem is that the railway station is empty for the present, the trains are delayed and the station master attacked by angry passengers. So I hurry to give my

APPROVAL

of the old Balakirev-poem. A few details. “and the plough was a bird just leaving the ground” is much better than the original text, where it stands “en fågel some störtat” (a crashed bird). So use your version. “The crew came up from below” is more doubtful because it is written “ice-locked, lights out, people on deck” in the previous stanza. “Besättningen kom fram” means they were coming towards him. As a whole it sounds good in the English version—yes I have read all the lines, if you have dropped a few it could not have been important ones.

I have been very busy the last weeks, doing testings and interviews with cerebral palsy children in an institution up in the woods. It is the most interesting part of my present job, it has a little of pioneer scientific work in it and the contact with the patients there is rewarding too. We write long reports about every individual case, trying to make a map of his, her, particular brain. It is a good institution, friendly, even tolerating sexual relationships between the handicapped. They are often glad to be brought there—some have been more or less hidden by their parents and isolated in many ways. Modern urbanized civilization is less tolerant than the old village society.

Spiro Agnew troubles me.

Your effete station master

Tomas

Västerås 19 April 70.

Dear Robert,

many thanks for wonderful sendings of books, magazines, ghost-portraits of famous Americans etc. A special thanks for the poem “walking in spring ditches”—this type of poem (almost impossible to translate) is for me, together with the big, passionate Teeth-mother-poetry, your unique contribution...to...MANKIND. The old boards, old ditches, old cows, old shoes eating the grass, whales, gods! (My English is not good enough.)

I have just arrived from [the Soviet Union]. The Swedish Institute again paid the trip: Stockholm-Leningrad-Riga-Tallinn-Leningrad-Stockholm and the idea was that I should establish contacts on different levels (primarily personal) with people in the former Baltic countries and try to start some cultural exchange. We are nowadays almost completely isolated from these countries that are so geographically and historically close to us. After all Estonia and a big part of Latvia once belonged to Sweden and the people there have a favorable memory of us because we abolished feudalism there in the 17th century—feudalism was reintroduced after the Russian occupation in 1710. (These facts are of course suppressed in the offical Soviet history-writing.) The countries were independent from 1918 to 1940 when they were given to the Soviets after the Hitler-Stalin pact. After a period of deportation came the Germans, a new ruthless occupation followed and after the war the Russians were back and they are now Soviet Republics. Yes, you know all this of course. But you can imagine how strange it is to BE THERE, to see the “old town” of Riga that—from some distance—looks exactly like the “old town” in Stockholm and to realize that in the 1930s regular boat-trips went from Stockholm to Tallinn 3 times a week, and now it takes 15 to 20 days for a letter to arrive. (The censors are many.) To get to Riga I had to take a flight to Leningrad, stay there overnight and the next day take Aeroflot to Riga together with enormously mesomorphic Russian military men and to be housed in a hotel famous for its hidden microphones.