Airmail (29 page)

May all good fairies, trolls and brownies support the Bly farm and its people!

Your friend

John Updi...

     pardon

Tomas

8 Oct., ’72

Dear Tomas,

This is just a note to assure you that the Sam Hazo problem is OK. I offered to change the Ann Arbor reading to sometime the week before, and Hazo said no, it was perfect as it was. If you arrived by noon on the 25th, it would be plenty of time. He sounded rushed—maybe he has a couple of Swedish poets in the house already? He knows too that you go to Virginia the next week.

On your following long weekend, you could fool around the Great Smokies and Virginia; or take a train to Alabama or Mississippi, and rent a car there; or fly to Chicago or Mpls and take the wonderful western train to Fort Collins. If you arrive at Fort Collins by the night of the 31st, you’ll be in time.

I carefully set aside these free days which are known as Introvert Days, and are to be spent in solitary anxious, obstinate, confused ectomorph brooding.

Love from us all,

Robert

[20-11-72]

(Is this the same in Swedish as in English? In English it implies someone dead, also an old classical verse habit, and finally a certain amount of praise for the dead one.)

Dear Wolfgang...please check this for “liberties,” that is rape committed by the feeble mind.

The last line is a puzzle—it’s not entirely natural in English to have a plural “experiences.” Normally it would go “the beautiful slag of experience.”...meaning that out of the number of experiences, lasting over years (and
experience,
as opposed to staying in your room and listening to television), out of all that experience, a slag remains...so we have to talk about plural or singular there I guess. What do you say, Wolfgang?

Västerås 21-11-72

Dear Badger,

I am calling you from the deep abyss of my gratitude. It is a feeling of gratitude without guilt feelings, though I was a happy sponge in your house. Sorry to cause harm to your car—how are the brakes now? Better? As soon as I step into your car something happens...This was the main reason for not riding one of your beautiful horses, I was afraid to make it lame or something. Good that I did not burn down the chicken house.

It was fine in Minnesota. The homecoming was fine too. Everybody seemed happy to see me again. The whole family was healthy and flourishing. Monica has advanced from the emergency department to the intense care. Now she is an operation nurse (it is difficult to hear what the doctors say behind their mouth veils...“twhehh bggg sczzrrrs ssstr...” etc. and that makes life a little more nervous).

An Australian (Keith Harrison) is the next visitor here—did you give him my address? He did not know about your translations.

How is Franklin? I will write to him, but I would like to know first how his conditions are.

Love and Best

to you all

from Us All

Tomas

26 Nov, ’72

Dear Tomas,

Franklin Brainard has heard nothing conclusive so far, and he may be all right. He’d enjoy a letter from you very much. The tests do not indicate that he has gone into the acute stage.

We just finished a two-day “poetry festival” at the annual conference—in Mpls this time—of the National Council of Teachers of English—mainly high school teachers. All the poets acted “like nuts,” and had a marvellous time. Keith Gunderson announced that he paid me $17.50 a reading for not mentioning the Mother, and $21.00 if I didn’t mention the Reptile Brain. Now, he said, a new figure has appeared, the SHADOW SELF, and he’s applying for a grant from the Ford Foundation to pay me and so protect the public from this new danger....

Don Hall has hair to his shoulders, bags under his eyes, and looks exactly like the old photographs of Tennyson...It is snowing today on the chickenhouse...

Your friend,

Robert

29-11-72

Yes Master,

you are probably right about the plural of experience. In Swedish we often use the word “experience” [erfarenhet] in plural...I will now tell you a little about my experiences in the U.S. Okay, first I caught a cold, and then I met Professor Ussachevsky and then I went to Stony Brook and then I watched TV and then there was a snowstorm and then I was in the chicken coop and then we tried to smuggle some bottles of wine into a restaurant in Minneapolis but, surprise, that didn’t work out...right, those were some of my experiencs in the U.S....But if you ask the question “What was your experience of the U.S. like?” then I have to answer in a more academic way like Hm...My experience of the U.S. is that it is a country in constant change, a dynamic environment at once attractive and repellant...in short...hm...a country that makes a visitor feel both large and small...hm in any case it’s impossible according to my experience to elucidate in so few lines my experience of that remarkable country.

Did you get an idea of the difference between singular and plural or “enfarenhet” in Swedish? So it is OK with singular form in English here when it is OK with plural in Swedish.

About the Martinson foreword...I think instead of “Hegel and Breton” you should have “Spengler and Valéry.” Oswald Spengler was the topical man in Europe in the 1920s.

All the best to you

from your old friend

Tomas

Jan 9 -72 [1973]

Dear Robert,

today I had a letter from Bert Meyers and that is the first letter from the U.S.A. since Dec 18 when the terror bombings started. Before that date I had 4–5 letters per week. Does it mean anything? Are people writing some useful letters to the Congress instead? When you read this the bombings might have started again. I thought I had no illusions about Nixon but I was wrong. He is worse than expected. 4 years...

So the Christmas was spent in a mood of despair, rage and hopelessness.

In the middle of this I was given a prize of 5,000 crowns by the Swedish Radio. The jury consisted of 5 poets: Sonnevi, Espmark (my favorite), Harding, Alf Henrikson (70 years old) and Peter Curman. I was interviewed in the radio by—of all people—Ingrid Arvidsson, who has quit the Washington job and become cultural boss of the Swedish radio. She answered most of her questions herself so I did not have to say much. I met some radio people and proposed a reading for you when you come here in the spring. I think they will be well disposed towards this offer when it is time.

Everywhere here people are signing a protest against the bombings and an appeal to the U.S. government to sign the October agreement. Lists are in post offices, churches and offices. It will probably have more than one million names when finished around February 1. The first names are those of the leaders of the 5 parties. The protest will be sent to Nixon as one more expression of our ungrateful, malevolent lack of understanding for the efforts of a troubled peace president.

It is a long time since I heard anything from you now. I hope everything inside the family is well, as it is here.

Love to all

      Tomas

This is a small despair poem I wrote recently. “Here I come the invisible man...” (The saint is Sanct Sigfrid, a sculpture from the middle ages in the Munktorp Church in Västmanland.)

10 Jan, ’73

Dear Tomas,

It looks as if I
will
be over there this spring! Carol signed me up for a very cheap flight (AAA—American Automobile Assn) that leaves Mpls & goes to London May 24th!!! So I suppose a few days later, either before or after I visit my homeland, its fjords and glaciers, I will be on your hands! It would be a grand time to do the final work on Martinson, as well as touch ups for others in the next Beacon book, coming out in August, who will be:
Martinson, Ekelöf, Tranströmer: Selected Poems,
chosen and edited by General Custer himself. You suggested tickling the udder of the Swedish Institute to see if any gold coins fall out, and that seems wise.

My new book is out, but my own copies haven’t come. I heard this morning that the
Times Book Review
has already done a review, but won’t print it till February, because Harper hasn’t got the books in the bookstores yet. No doubt it’s written by James Dickey or by Charles Tomlinson. Do write.

Your faithful dog

SPOT

12 Jan, ’73

Dear Tomas,

The war news is so depressing that as soon as your letter came, I translated the poem to have something to do. It’s just a first draft...please comment on whatever “liberties” you notice....

It’s more clear every day that China knocked out McGovern deliberately—I think they like Nixon in there, so that Russia will be busy sending war materials to the victims of Nixon’s paranoia. They really don’t care if the war is ever settled, and apparently care no more for the North Vietnamese than we do.

So much for Göran’s hero.

Congratulations on the Swedish Radio prize! If they had any wit, they’d give you a radio, as well as money. What will you do with your 1,000 dollars? Hire a thousand baby sitters, I suppose. I’m glad to hear Ingrid Arvidsson is out of this country at least. By the way, the other day I got a check from Danish Radio for—of all things—$211—which I needed badly—for their reading “The Teeth Mother” twice on Danish Radio. I had no idea they paid so much money. I wish fervently that you and Göran would finish your translation of “The Teeth Mother” and put it on Swedish Radio!

I’m going to take Noah for a walk out in the snow soon—the fields are frozen now, and the snow so hard packed that you can walk over it...

As ever affectionately

Robert

Would you correct it

Västeras Jan 19 [1973]

Thank you for 2 good letters and welcome in May! The only thing that could prevent our meeting now is if I get drafted and deported to the Northern Front again, as in 1971! Around June 1st usually is the best time of the year in Sweden, sunshine, birds, flowers and fresh green. Monica gets her exam as a nurse at June 13 and if (IF) the Viet Nam nightmare is over at that time it will be the best June in many years.

Hope and despair goes up and down from one bulletin to another. It is like being treated by an expert in brainwashing.

It was nice of you to translate my little poem. About the glasses: yes it is glasses, spectacles, not “glass eyes.” This saint—I think it is Saint Sigfrid, in the Munktorp church not far from here, has the look of a person who used to wear glasses but just has lost them: a confused smile is typical for near-sighted people when stripped of their glasses. I don’t think the glasses have been “stolen,” rather just taken away from him. I would prefer “they” to “someone.” “As if they had taken away his glasses” suggests that there is an unfriendly majority of Nixons, Tranströmers, Brezhnevs and other modern, brutal people living in secular Now who have done it. “Allt det andra” is simply “everything else” or “The rest”...it is a little like “the rest is silence” (the ending of
Hamlet,
as you certainly know Professor). “This moment” might be better than “the moment.” I sometimes have the feeling that I have a duty to do for some hidden Consciousness. Why do I have to live through this constant confusion, to see and hear all these things, what does it mean? I sometimes get a little comfort from the feeling that Someone, or rather Something, wants me to do it. “Stay where you are my dear Tomas, don’t run away, you have a function even if you don’t know what it is.” (The same idea is in the middle of the guard duty poem.)

It has been a strange winter because no snow arrived until yesterday. That has not happened for many decades.

Right now an enormous magazine,
Invisible City,
arrived, sent by you. I have never heard from or about the translator, Mr. Kaebitzsch. Probably a
bad
translation. I don’t mind.

I saw yesterday that de Gaulle is Nixon’s hero. A disastrous example of the American admiration of Europe. I want to see Carol’s best story. Good night! Good luck!   Warmly   Tomas

Västerås 28-1-73

Dear Robert,

a Mr Booth from England wrote me and asked for permission to print 2 of your translations, which of course I agreed to—even if I now, after reading
Virginia Quarterly,
know that they are made by a CULTIST in order to prove an irrelevant point. But I don’t blame you Robert. We cannot all be graced with the enormous craftsmanship of a May Swenson.

Is Mr Booth descended from The Salvation Army?

Now an important announcement!

From now on I will authorize only one name for the mushrooms mentioned at the end of the October poem. And that name is

INKY-CAP MUSHROOMS

which is and shall forever be the correct name for a
Coprinus comatus
in English. The name in the dictionary (“horsetail mushrooms”) is simply wrong and the fool who put it into the dictionary has probably passed away, poisoned by a mushroom he mistook for another.

Love and Peace

Tomas

Joan Baez just arrived, warm thanks!

[9/2/1973]

Dear Robert,

a bombardment of mail from Madison has disturbed me in the most wonderful way the last days.
Sleeper
is of course the most remarkable of these things. I read the title poem the other night when I was very sleepy and I did not fall asleep. Why is this fellow’s subconscious so engaging? I have had very little time to read this week because of busy life conditions but I carry the impressive red and white tome with me (in the bag with the cucumbers) and next week I hope to disappear into it. (I have been working full-time in my office and poor Monica has NIGHT DUTY—I take her to the hospital at 9 p.m. and pick her up outside at 7 a.m. the next day. So we have a strange life now.) But how good to have a book I really want to roll over in! It was a long time ago...I hope you can feel something of the same about Lars Gustafsson’s latest! (“Guillevic are making them in France”—that is very bad English, isn’t it?) The solution of your Gustafsson problem must be to recommend some other person. Michael Dennis Browne? He seemed to be generous, intelligent, poetic etc. Yes, I looked melancholy when I met Lars because it was in the middle of the Christmas Bombings. I admit. I was melancholy. Good that someone gets “sad to see it.” I am not melancholy now. But too many duties. When you arrive in May/June I will be much more free. I told John Walldén about your visit and wrote a formal request for 1,500 Swedish crowns to be sent to you in Norway as contribution for your travel and living in Sweden. (You will probably get at least 1,000.) You remember “completing the Martinson translations and visiting the Publisher etc.” You will probably meet some more or less gifted people in Stockholm who think that you have the key to the American audience—it has not been mentioned in the newspapers etc. that you have translated me but there are RUMORS ciruclating about it so be prepared. I know that the advisory board for literature of the Swedish Institute wants to have a meeting with you—and you should definitely see them: that is an incredible combination of very different people: One crew-cut conservative, one ecstatic young poet, one politruc, one Newspaper Caesar and so on. More gossip later.

I sent the paper about The Minnesota Writers to our boss of the Writers’ publishing house. How is Franklin? Love to you all. Please forgive this mess. I am hunted by djinns.

Tomas

17 March, ’73

Dear Tomas,

Beacon has sent me a few queries I can’t answer, and I have to pass them on, with apologies, to you.

Don’t forget to send me the title of your poem about looking for light switches in the woods...looking for fuses on the bottom of rivers is a lot of fun, too...

Your friend,

Robert

24 March, ’73

Dear Tomas,

I don’t want to go to Göteborg! I just want to sit in your house and hear the stones roll through the windows, while all the panes remain whole. Yes, truly. The only other thing I long for is for both of us to pay a visit, for a half hour or an hour, to Harry Martinson. As you know by now, the Swedish Institute collapsed in a disgraceful way under your pressure and awarded me 1,500 Swedish crowns...oh joy oh joy! It means I’ll buy a lot of goat cheese in Norway...

Love, Robert

I’ll come May 1st (or the night of the 31st), and will be with you June 1, 2, 3, 4. I have to fly to London and home on the 5th.

March 25 -73

Spring is early this year. It is the first day without overcoats! This evening Emma is singing in the cathedral, in a cantata by our friend Werner Wolf Glaser—she is a member of the choir, not soloist. (The text is—humbly—chosen by Glaser: Rilke, Schiller and Glaser himself! He has published a book of poems at his own expense.) He is a brilliant Jew from Köln, a refugee in Denmark until 1943 when he was
smuggled
to Sweden.

The Göteborg reading was for an audience of writers. And some of their friends. They did not use me well. Instead of talking with me they gave small speeches about “the meaning of poetry” etc. One middle-aged lady—a rather unknown poet—was nice and said that
Krig och tystnad
was one of her favorite books. I think she wants to hear your poems primarily. But some of the other ones probably see a glimpse of hope to be translated by you. Especially one former Englishman, Martin S. Allwood (he was not present when I was there but he sent a mesage that you should come, he was so eager to see you). Allwood has started a sort of translation industry and wants to have you in the business, I think. If he is good or not I don’t know, but I know that he is prolific. Too prolific. The only possible day for a visit by you seems to be May 30. I leave it to you to decide, but if I were in your shoes (like whales eating the grass) I would
hesitate
to accept.

I have always been fond of the mad Walking in ditch grass poem. So here is a first version. With liberties.