Airmail (34 page)

The ribbons are long, I think, perhaps long ribbons girls wear on bonnets, or ticker-tape ribbons, so there are roads crossing roads, as in a frosty window—

Thank you for the new copy of the Street poem! I’ve already done a new draft.

I’m enclosing a foolish little poem. I’m distracted—I have to leave tomorrow for a poetry festival in San Francisco (Östen Sjöstrand is going to read a couple of poems) and then to AN ANDROGENY CONFERENCE in the Holiday Inn in Evanston, Illinois...I’m going—though they don’t know it—to represent the unregenerate, unrepentant male.

I’m writing much, and am all excited over some new poems, and sounds!! There are so many pearls in the ocean, and weeds and “octopuses with unknown Dostoevskyan hands.”

Love to your family and you!

Robert

15 Dec, ’76

Dear Tomas,

I’m sending you a new draft of the Street Crossing poem, and a first draft of your lovely island poem! It carries several queries with it.

Meanwhile I’ve read “Schubertiana”! It is a marvelous poem!!! Terr-rrrr-ific, as the American students would say. Solid and
full of space.

I’ve just come back from my December-week-showing-off (the fattest wren ever seen to warble “both high and low”) and I found a couple of more places who want you to read this spring—Charleston, South Carolina, and the Transcendental Meditation University at Fairfield, Iowa. There the students know “Allegro” by heart, and it has led to a Haydn revival, I expect. They’re having a Festival in early May, around the 9th–12th.

So far there are five:

I’ve told them all $300 plus expenses (which includes airfare inside U.S.). So if you did 10, you’d go home with $3000 this year.

I’m sending along two books for your friend Michael Krüger.

We saw a Barbara Walters interview last night with Carter and his wife, in which she compared him to Rhett Butler in
Gone With the Wind
! There’s no end of wonders. He seems to be a nice man, but more like General Grant than Clark Gable.

I’m home for a whole month. I’ll translate all the rest of the poems you’ve sent me! No, Carter is really a kind of sweet civil servant, as in a Yugoslavian movie...there is
no fire coming from his mouth
...he is a mammal salamander...

Your friend, General Lee

Novel or Romance?

Is the one inside the wall a being, a creature, or a heart?

Is it beating
on
the wall, or is its heart beating?

Tomas: Please check especially five details:

Västerås 18-1-77

Dear Master,

a wonderful snow is covering Sweden and a blue snow of prose poems leaves is covering my desk. Thanks, thanks. I have 3 days now free and I will really do something with the Bly project. The foreword is perfect. (He was a good translator, a marvellous poet and an unsurpassed writer of forewords.)

I have not been writing letters for a long time. Since early December I have been absorbed in a strange duty: writing an essay about early Swedish literature. The Writers’ Publishing house has got into financial difficulties but now everything will be all right (they, we, think) when our real best-seller is completed, called
Författarnas Litteraturhistoria
—Swedish literature from the runestones to Ekelöf, entirely described by us. So Gyllensten has written a chapter about Linné, Lars Gustafsson about Stagnelius, 2 people have written about Strindberg, Lundkvist about Heidenstam etc. etc. But I chose to write about a certain YEAR, and I took the year 1719, which was the year when it finally became clear that Sweden was no superpower anymore. We shrank from the glorious position at the beginning of the reign of Charles XII, to the humble size of 1719, (a half year since) Charles had been shot and we were at the very bottom of everything. I buried myself in history and had a lot of fun. This period is one of the black holes of Swedish literature, no real research has penetrated it since the 1870s and I could walk on lovely overgrown paths right into virginal archives. Oh the welcoming, smiling atmosphere, the fresh air of dusty libraries, the pure athletic joy when you come across a really mildewy print no one has bothered to look at before!

Warmest

    Tomas

[Editor’s note: Internal evidence indicates that the following is a continuation of TT’s letter of 18 January. RB responds on 24 January.]

Comments about “Senhöstnattens roman.” I think your translation is very good, especially considering that you misunderstood 50%. The title means “Start of the late autumn
novel.
” I don’t know why I called it that, a person here in Västerås congratulated me and hoped that the rest of the novel would be fine. But I want to give the feeling that this is something that can go on for a long time, the island visitor has read the first page of something big he will never understand.

Senhöst could be the last days of October, but the mood here is more of November. So if you hate the words “late autumn,” use November. It is of course very autobiographical, a trip to Runmarö during a time of the year when the island is almost deserted. The sound at the beginning is less knocking than rattling, almost ringing (it was probably a loose screw nut vibrating). “The sheltering house” should be “the familiar house” (the house I know so well)...that is the meaning of the word “förtrogna.” “Again and again” is right. But there is a misunderstanding of “om natten,” because “om” is here not a preposition (“at night”) but a conjunction (“if the night”). So the meaning is: If (the) night is not only (something more than) absence of light, if the night really
is
something, it must be (is) this sound. “Is silent a day” is wrong. I wrote “ett tag” and that means “for a short while.” So the sound beats, is silent for a moment, comes back. As if it were the heartbeat of a person half-way between life and death, going zig-zag over the Border. “Hann inte dit ner” etc....“Hann” is the imperfect of “hinna” meaning “be in time.” The creature (or spirit) belongs to the other world but visits “our” world at night. But he must be back in time. Now he was too late, he did not manage to get “down there,” not to get “up there” and not to get “on board” in time. He is “akterseglad” (the last line)—så många akterseglade vidunder etc. “Akterseglad” is a sailor’s word for arriving too late for the ship, the ship has left the harbor and the sailor remains, “akterseglad.” I think the English word is “beached.” “Lövruska” is not a twig but a whole branch with leaves on—now most leaves are on the ground but there are exceptional branches. “Rotvälta” is not in my dictionary either. I have to go to the library and look in a bigger one...The word was not in any dictionary, NOT EVEN SWEDISH ONES. Strange, everybody here knows what it means but it is not in a

So “rotvälta” means the up-rooted root system of a fallen tree. The butt-end

“Street crossing” is now so chewed and digested in your wonderful imagination apparatus that I believe it has become a good Bly poem in English. Maybe it has lost some contact with my version. I would prefer “kaleidoscope of tears” to “tearful kaleidoscope”—I am more baroque. “Is aware” is OK if it is not too abstract, the street should not be aware of my existence by thinking or being told about me, but because the street—like some half-blind cave animal—can see luminous things.

24 Jan, ’77

Dear Tomas,

Thank you for the good pile of joyful slips of the brain! We all enjoyed your letter, and Monica’s remark will make me good-tempered for weeks...I’m glad she likes the Father poem...And thank you for your corrections on the Novel poem—it’s not so easy to translate when you’re blind you know...I did realize it was a “romance” in the French sense, that is a roman, I knew at least it was not a
romance
...I deserve a little credit...

Now to your questions about “Finding the Father.” The word “light” on the forehead carries more connotations of “full of light” than it does of “weightless.” It is essentially what the visitor sees when he lights the lamp—the eyebrows look dark and heavy, the forehead is apparently rather high, and catches the light.

The whole series of poems could be described as “anti–St. Paul” poems. So they offer various praises of the body he was so suspicious of. For one thing, the body carries us around all day, and charges nothing! That is amazing, when you think of it! I thought of those huge logs that are carried by the sea all the way from the Hawaiian islands to the Oregon coast, floating for months, until left on the Oregon beach. Then there comes an image closely related to those in the Maui poem, which you translated so well. Those crabs might be the same small black hermit crabs, who are listening in Aramaic. A large ocean wave comes and smashes against a boulder half in and half out of water. The crabs are not hurt, but simply slide around the sides of the boulder, and roll around in the water behind it. When it is said the body “wails” with its great energy on certain days—no doubt when the Vitamin E level in the body is very high—it is a good wailing, a kind of joyful humming, as from a big dynamo, or a football player about to go out on the field. (You are right, “longs” are supposed to be “logs.”)

The person in the room does not have time to dress properly for the
weather.
He is probably wearing a cotton shirt and pajama bottoms, and not having time to dress, that is put on rain gear with hood, and rain boots, just throws on some old coat and goes out in his tennis shoes.

One of the father’s jobs was as a restaurant cook, after work he was an amateur painter...not painting walls, but canvases, as I guess is clear.

The last line should have a floating, almost trancelike feeling, with some tenderness thrown forward to “you.”

I hope these weighty observations help...You haven’t answered whether or not you’d like to come this spring. I got another offer last week, from the University of New Orleans. They’ll put you up in the French Quarter, in a little guest house, and take you the next day to the area around Lafayette, in the swamps, and take you to a Cajun dance. The Cajuns speak an old form of French, and are the liveliest people left in the south, any thing. They are the direct descendants of the French people deported from Nova Scotia by the English, and described in “Evangeline” by Longfellow...

Love, Robert

26 Jan 77

Dear Tomas,

Here are a few comments on “Hastig promenad.” Maybe I should type them!! I’m not sure of the implications of “Hastig promenad.” The title in English does not mean taking a fast walk, as when one says, I want to take a walk, but I have only five minutes...it means walking at a high speed, as when one is excited and wants to get somewhere to begin writing something down, or to paint...The colon can be left off after “ändä”...the way it reads now in English is simply: “Everything seems calm, and yet somewhere inside I am not calm.”

There may be something wrong with “inhägnaden.” It’s true the sheep are out of their fence, but what I mention here is the
screen
of the screened-in porch that we’ve added to the house. You remember it. The afternoon before, the children, after peeling a whole bunch of apples (to make into apple sauce for winter), threw the pail of apple peelings out the front door. I’m trying to sleep there, where Carol and I sleep in the screen porch; at six in the morning I hear this ungodly crunch, crunch, crunch, and it is the disobedient sheep who have stumbled upon a positive Paris of goodies...that’s how the poem begins. Grouchily, I begin to examine the rising sun ...

“Adelmodet”...I don’t mean nobility of mind so much as the sort of generosity the good nurse at the hospital has, the one who does so many things for the patients, buys them little things on her off hours, does more than is asked of her...it comes not so much from a sense of obligation, as from a human longing to be of use to other humans...

The “vanvettig kärlek” should suggest if possible both the Sufi love of God, which they describe as “crazy” or “mad” compared to Lutheranism, and the love of Tristan and Isolde.

“Waves” is not essential in the last sentence. The main thing is that the sound be triumphant and full of energy. The dragon has a mane like this

and the artist decides to bring more curve into them, a deeper rise and fall, so when he’s through they will look more like:

so the noun could be “curve” or “sea-mountain” or “oceanic surf” or almost “tidal waves”...or those deep swells that run along at mid ocean...

I like the translations, and I’m glad you chose this one! Awful snow here...

Love,

    Robert

Jan 26 - 77

Dear Robert, have a look at this. As you see I tentatively have left out 6 lines in your foreword, namely the part that starts “It’s possible that while a bird...” and ends with “big rivers.” That part was almost impossible to translate. One sentence I don’t understand grammatically (“so there are certain thoughts”). I think the content is more clear without the 6 lines.??? I have changed some smaller details. You say the pale eyeball creatures want to give poetry
back
to the superego. I have left out “back” because that would mean poetry originated from the superego. We don’t believe that, we wild men! The foreword is dynamite, far out!