Airmail (3 page)

After I had completed my preliminary edit, the manuscript of this chronicle of intelligent, generative, energetic, and irreverent friendship loitered for nearly a decade in my file cabinet, no doubt because of its highly uncommercial nature. But winds do change. On October 6, 2011, came the announcement that Tomas Tranströmer had at last won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first time the Swedes had seen fit to so honor one of their own since Harry Martinson’s Nobel in 1974. That long-rumored and supremely deserved Nobel Prize has sparked a welcome renewal of interest in Tranströmer’s work in the United States. Long in coming but worth the wait, the volume you now hold in your hands is a happy result.

—Thomas R. Smith

All of Tomas Tranströmer’s letters after April 18, 1971, were originally written in English. Three earlier letters, on August 8, 1968, June 14, 1969, and November 17, 1969, are Tranströmer’s first English letters to Robert Bly. Tranströmer’s letter of October 1, 1966, is translated by Bly. The rest of Tranströmer’s Swedish letters are translated by Judith Moffett and Lars-Håkan Svensson. They are as follows:

May 27, 1964; September 3, 1964; March 23, 1965; October 30, 1965; December 10, 1965; January 30, 1966; March 1, 1966; April 10, 1966; April 20, 1966; June 4, 1966; July 20, 1966; September (undated), 1966; October 29, 1966; January 7, 1967; January 15, 1967; March 4, 1967; May 4, 1967; July 11, 1967; August 8, 1967; September 30, 1967; October 7, 1967; December 8, 1967; February 19, 1968; April 19, 1968; June 9, 1968; July 12, 1968; September 2, 1968; December 10, 1968; January 8, 1969; January 18, 1969; May 18, 1969; July 30, 1969; January 4, 1970; January 30, 1970 (latter section beginning “And there is a boat” originally in English); October 27, 1970.

All poem translations are by Robert Bly except as noted. Poems in Tranströmer’s letters of April 2, 1971, and April 18, 1971, are translated by May Swenson.

Frequently, in his early letters in Swedish, Tranströmer employed scattered English words and phrases. We were not able to indicate these occurrences of English without disrupting the flow of text, so suffice it to say that, before he began writing to Bly entirely in his friend’s language, he had already made many tentative gestures in that direction. Where either poet has used all caps for emphasis, we have retained that feature in our text.

Where occasional excisions have been made by either Bly or Tranströmer in the interest of privacy, I have indicated discontinuities in the text with brackets enclosing dashes. They are not many, and the vast majority of the letters are included in full.

Finally, I have not reproduced many poems referred to in the text that can be easily found in either
The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer
or in Bly’s own volumes. Several of the poems and translations that have been included are unpublished, unknown, or making their first appearances in this book. I have done my best to match these poems with their original letters. In a very few cases, I have appended poems that merited much discussion in the correspondence. Likewise, I have appended two letters postdating the correspondence that enrich our view of the enduring friendship of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer.

Many individuals have contributed to the making of this book, and some I have thanked elsewhere in these pages. I acknowledge again original editor Torbjörn Schmidt’s groundbreaking labor. I would also like to acknowledge the translators of Tomas Tranströmer’s early letters, Judith Moffett and Lars-Håkan Svensson. Judy and I, in consultation with Lars-Håkan, were a team of literary detectives, exchanging hundreds of e-mails on these translations-in-progress over the years; it’s more than satisfying to see the often puzzled-over, sometimes fretted-over results brought so conclusively to realization. Mary Byers, copy-editor extraordinaire, assisted vastly in enhancing the clarity and continuity of this book. I’m thankful for the intelligent guidance I received from the Graywolf crew, especially associate publisher Katie Dublinski and Jeffrey Shotts, my editor. At times my discoveries along the way (such as the “lost” Tranströmer poem “Conflict” buried in Bly’s files) made me feel like an amateur astronomer who has identified a new comet. Jeff Shotts’s enthusiasm for those discoveries buoyed me every step of the way, and helped make the challenges of
Airmail
more joy to be relished than hurdle to be surmounted. Gratitude to Ruth Bly and Monica Tranströmer for unfailingly good-natured support over the past years. Thanks to my wife, Krista Spieler, for wholeheartedly cheering on a decade-long effort that for months at a time annexed our dining room to my study. Finally I thank Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer a hundred times over for their poems and translations, around which have grown a body of correspondence as readable, engaging, and entertaining as a good biography.

April 6, 1964

Dear Herr Tranströmer,

We are sending you
Vallejo
and
Lion’s Tail & Eyes
under separate cover—and we’ll send
Forty Poems Touching on Recent American History
as published.

No,
The Sixties
magazine is not dead. (It will never die.) #6 is the most recent issue, though. Our printer in Ireland says he will have #7 to our subscribers in about 3 weeks.

Thanks again for all your orders with us.

Yours sincerely,

C. Bly

[on same page]

Dear Mr. Tranströmer,

The air rate was so ungodly high we sent
The Sixties
by boat, as we did these. I have been enjoying your poems. Just before your first note came by accident, I went to the Univ of Minn library to get your
Halvfärdiga himlen.
Jim Wright showed me your letter mentioning that you had translated a couple of his poems. That was very kind, and you chose excellent poems. I do read Swedish, and if you’d like to send a copy of the translations to me—I’d love to see them in the first place, and will check them for any mistakes that have crept in, in the second.

Our address from April 20th to August 20th will be

Robert Bly

Mill End

Thaxted

Essex, England.

I’m going to send you from England a translation of your “Paret,” which I did a few weeks ago.

Best wishes,

  Robert Bly

15 May, ’64

Dear Tomas Tranströmer,

Thank you for your letter, and for the translations! I must say I think the translations are excellent. I have no suggestions whatever. You have two of the best poems of J. Wright’s book in the Eisenhower poem, and the “I dag var jag so lycklig, etc.” Another one I think is awfully good is “The Undermining of the Defense Economy.”

As for my own book, my favorite there is “Snöfall på eftermiddagen”!

I am very surprised at how natural the lines sound in Swedish, at least in your Swedish.

I hope that we can meet sometime this summer, fall, or winter. I will be here (in Europe) for a year all told. Until July or August, in England, then perhaps 3 months in Norway followed by three or four months in France. Surely sometime during the time in Norway I will skip over the border! For your part, if you plan to be in England or elsewhere, you are very welcome at our house (wherever it may happen to be!)

I see lots of people translating and studying Charles Olson now. It’s part of the widespread suicidal impulse visible in all parts of the world at the present. It’s like parsing Latin, also, remarkably good for penance! There isn’t much in the
Allen
anthology except Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov. Those three are genuine. Ginsberg is very intelligent, but considerably less a poet than someone like Snyder. The rest of the people are nightmarish. The Allen anthology, by the way, is the one J. Wright had in mind—he had been asked to review it—in the poem on page 36 of the
Branch,
“Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, etc.”

Here follows a version of your poem “Paret.” You may find all sorts of mistakes here. The phrase “Sedan lyftas” I am most unsure about.

All good wishes—

  Robert Bly

Roxtuna 27-5-64

Dear Robert Bly,

good to hear that you approve my translations! Still better that you are to visit Norway-Sweden fairly soon. Thinking about your visit, I was suddenly filled with enthusiasm. We have a large house by Swedish standards (5 rooms, bungalow) and you are welcome to stay with us. The summer will be difficult—we are expecting a baby in July and have one child already, my wife has been ill and we will have to hire some sort of help during the first months—but by September things ought to be normal again and a guest room should then be available. We are in the country here, though the situation is somewhat special—in point of fact, it’s a prison. I work as a psychologist in a facility for disturbed criminal youth, and the bungalow comes with the position. Don’t be alarmed/ frightened! Visitors generally think it an idyllic setting. It is located right outside Linköping, 22 Swedish miles south of Stockholm, near the main road between Malmö and Stockholm. A convenient place to spend the night when driving from Stockholm to Malmö or vice versa. Or you can take the train and get off at Linköping, and I can pick you up at the station. So you’ll be able to recognize me, I will be wearing a green tail-coat, a false beard, and a straw hat, and reading Nixon’s autobiography. Or perhaps some simpler arrangement could be found.

[Editor’s note: The rest of this letter is missing.]

25 Aug, 64

Dear Tomas Tranströmer,

I would like some advice from you. I have been thinking of doing a little book for the Sixties Press called “Twenty Swedish Poems.” This is roughly my plan so far:

Pär Lagerkvist—“In i mitt hjärtas blodiga hamn”

Karin Boye—Stenarna (Gud hade givit oss tunga själar av sten)

Harry Martinson:—Havsvinden

   Cotton

   perhaps one more

Gunnar Ekelöf—Tionfo della Morte (Tre riddare stego ut)

   Monolog med dess hustru

   (Tag två extra gamla, etc.)

   Etudes (I) (Natt och stiltje)

   Etudes (III) (En varld ar varje manniska)

   Svanen (I) (Jag hörde vildgässs over sujkhuset)

   perhaps also an early one such as “blommorna sover”

Artur Lundkvist—from Freud

Eric Lindegren—Mannen Uten Vag #XXIX (I have doubts on this:

      I dislike Lindegren)

Karl Vennberg—We have all done our best

Werner Aspenström—På kyrkogården

   one more

Tomas Tranströmer—Paret

   one more

Now I would like to have you just comment on this list. Where are the holes? Have I left out anyone extremely important or good? Do you think Lindegren should be included at all? Do you have any suggestions for the third Martinson poem I might include, or the second Aspenstrom? How about the younger ones? Is Eddegren good? I have never read a poem of his, but I hear him mentioned often. I’m most interested to see what you’ll say about this plan!

Thank you very much for your last good letter, and forgive my long delay in answering it! Somehow I thought I had already answered it, and was astonished to see it still about. I’m bad on answering anyway. I finally wrote a little poem on it.

[------]

Has your new daughter come yet?!! Or son! We have two small daughters, one Mary, about 2½ (there is a poem about her in Jim Wright’s book) and a new one, Bridget, about 1¼. Do tell me how it all turned out! I will definitely come to see you some time this year. We’ll be here another month, and then we go either to Paris for three months, or Oslo for three months (we’ll go both places, but the order isn’t decided yet). So I do want to know when you will be
leaving
for the United States. How long will you be in that strange Goldwater-ridden nation? Is your family going along?

There is not much to say about James Wright. As he said on the dust jacket of his
Saint Judas,
he has led a “bookish, uneventful” life. Of course that’s a lie, but anyway. He was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, a steel-plant area, not far from where W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Patchen, and Jonathan Winters (our best comic for thirty years) was born. He makes his living as an English teacher (particularly of Dickens) in the colleges and universities, and absolutely refuses to teach any “creative writing” or poetry writing courses. He has refused several offers of “poet in residence” positions, when it involved such teaching; always to the astonishment of the department heads. He is married, and now divorced, with two sons. He has a wild streak in him that makes him a very ambiguous, even frightening, figure in the eyes of the academics. The reason for that uneasiness in their eyes is this: he went to Kenyon College (where John Crowe Ransom was) on a scholarship, and thereby escaped from the steelmill town. Later he took a Ph.D. at the University of Washington where Theodore Roethke was. He began writing poems in the accepted, iambic, traditional manner, which was everywhere in the 1950’s, and by many such people was considered the very best in the country in this traditional sort of poetry. Suddenly he renounced the whole thing, and began to write an utterly different sort of poetry, made of mingled streams of savagery and tranquillity. This upset the academic poets considerably, and they still haven’t recovered.

[------]

I hope all is well with you! I have written to Bonniers for your books (the one I was reading belonged to the Univ. of Minn library, and I don’t have it here in Europe with me), and so I hope to send you a new translation of one of your poems soon.

with very best wishes,

 Robert

3-9-64

Dear Robert Bly,

Thanks for your very welcome letter, and for the poems! I’d better reply right away before three months have suddenly gone by. Naturally I too have begun to write a poem about unanswered letters (with the title “Not to Worry, I’ll Write Soon”)—it’s the insidious old telepathy at work again. But the poem never did come out anywhere; the lines I want to keep were about something completely different, namely the snails that sail forth so majestically in the August night.

For the moment I find myself in a lovely and unaccustomed position. I started my vacation yesterday. I’ve dreamed about that vacation so much that I’d begun to believe it would never come. I’m the only one of the so-called higher officials who hasn’t been away from the INSTITUTION this summer, I’ve had to sit here “for the sake of continuity.” And this institution has resembled Cyprus. Accordingly I haven’t had the time or strength to write anything. And just when it looked as if I could, the editor of a collection of Auden’s poetry called and barked like a watchdog because I haven’t delivered any of the translations of Auden I promised. At night the baby cries. Yes! THE BABY CRIES. It went well, happily. Paula was born in the hospital at Linköping at the beginning of July and was entirely as she should be, despite all the damned uterine complications. It turned out to be a lightning-fast birth that had already started in the car. Twenty minutes after we got to the hospital the baby was born. So it was a happy summer in spite of everything.

I’ve taken my Saab out of the stable and driven to Kolmården to be alone for a couple of days and have time to catch up with myself. (Kolmården is a woodsy tract between Ostergötland and Södermanland.) I’m sitting in an inn, writing this.

You put some questions in your letter. I think you should let go of the ambition to do some sort of complete Swedish anthology. If you call a book “20 SWEDISH POEMS” you’ve only promised to display exactly 20 SWEDISH POEMS: twenty Swedish poems which I, Robert Bly, have found and which I think are so good that I want to translate them. How one can translate a poem one dislikes I don’t know. Let it be
your
anthology. It’s not possible anyway to give a representative picture of twentieth-century Swedish poetry in twenty poems. Gullberg should be included for example: he rhymes and seems almost impossible to translate. Eddegren isn’t a big name here, but if you think he’s good then translate him. Martinson should suit you and there’s an endless number of poems to choose among. Come over soon and we’ll go through several kilos of poems. I probably like Martinson best of all the Swedish poets now living. It’s hard to say how much of his greatness lies in linguistic nuances that can’t be translated. But a poet from Minnesota ought to have a decent chance.

Some of your comments about my translation of “Snowfall” etc. arise from a groundless apprehension. PÅ SJON means “at sea” or “on the sea” [“på havet”] in everyday Swedish. That last phrase sounds “literary” and not entirely natural. It’s like this: SJO sometimes means lake, sometimes sea. If you say “en sjö” it always refers to a lake. If you say “sjön” it can also mean the ocean, particularly in such expressions as “på sjön” or “till sjöss” (cf. Eng. sea). Ordinary people, pilots and fishermen for example, don’t use the word “sea” [“hav”] at all. You should bear this in mind when you read Swedish texts.

STRÅNA is an awkward, powerful word, entirely in the same class as CORNSTALKS. No, I don’t want to use “majsstänglarna” [corn + stalks] by reason of the fact that it brings an element of exoticism into (the Swedish) poem. Majs [corn] is something the Swedish reader has seen Disney’s cartoon characters gnawing on or possibly gnawed on themselves from tin cans. What makes translating SNOWFALL so worthwhile is that the poem will strike Swedes as completely natural—a good reader knows right away that this isn’t an interesting exotic product by some American but I have experienced this mystery for myself.

BLEKNAR BORT means, exactly, FADE AWAY. If you like we can write TONAR BORT but that sounds a little bit “literary.” But I think it’s unnecessary. One must have a certain faith in the public’s gifts of comprehension.

FARTYG [ship] should perhaps be changed. Not to “stomme” [framework], which God forbid, but to SKROV [hull], maybe FARTYGSSKROV [ship + hull].

I’ll translate some more of your poems, at least 4–5. Preferably more. I hope in fact that Bonniers (our great, omnipotent publisher) will bring out an American anthology sooner or later—it’s time to be able to read Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Bly, Wright, Wilbur, Levertov and probably some others in a plump selection. Simpson disappointed me a little with his latest book, despite several good pieces. “Redwoods,” which would be right up my alley, won’t work because of the tree itself, which is wholly exotic (cf. my argument above).