Airmail (30 page)

Note. So much of women, what does it mean. So much of femininity? Or so many women? Or? Does “sleek cows” mean that the cows are shining? (real welfare state cows?) Does uneven grass mean that some leaves are tall and some are short or does it mean that the grass is rough? Do the cows fly, like aeroplanes or birds, or are they simply running in the sky direction? You see how complicated your poems are, you need a real professor Richards to give lectures about you for months.

Love and peace

    Tomas

Västerås 29 3 [1973]

Dear Robert,

I don’t know why the title of the Martinson poem is “Namnlöst.” Maybe he could not give a name to the poem so he simply called it “Without Name.” “Sung” is Chinese, not Swedish. It means “Sung.” “Modern Lyrik” means “Modern Poetry.” The title of my lightswitch poem is still “Further in”—“Längre in”—I hope to find a better name before the book is published.

The translations of Ingegerd Friberg are not bad. Her fault is that she is too close to the English text—she does not dare to let go—naturally, she is humble. As a good woman she does not know that the name for “firebombs” in Swedish is “brandbomber,” not “eldbomber.” “Nedhangande grenar gin platsen låg”—is bad word-by-word translation—Gustafsson is better here. “Eremilën” and “Att se in i ett amibile” are good translations. The poem about walking in the woods and the November birch is not bad in Swedish but I think I can do it still better. May I? You will see it in my next letter.

I was hypnotized yesterday. I am not a “deep trancer”—sorry to say—but I can become one probably. The state of mind was fine anyhow and I felt happy afterwards.

I got the Hawaiian magazine. Fine! This young Minnesota poet is good—Louis Jenkins—one of your best pupils. Did I meet him?

It is evening. I am rather satisfied and extremely stupid. Have you ever gotten such a stupid letter from me? My IQ is 78. Good night.

Monica is doing something in the kitchen. The dog is growing and growing. Be careful! Hope to see you soon. Your old 1-2-6 (ectomorph)

friend     Tomas T.    

29 March, ’73

Dear Tomas,

O wonderful! A chance to talk about my own poem...it has five layers, three of which you should avoid, they have caused temporary or permanent insanity in all the readers who have ventured into them, their shoes are later found in ditches many miles from their homes, in the hospital, their noses retain scratch marks for many weeks...

“Sleek cows”...like cows in Denmark, they are fat, and terribly self-satisfied...their skin may shine a little from sheer good health but they are not spiritual beings at all...just well-fed and well-cared-for cows...I don’t know why they’re in the poem. Maybe Samson has just thrown them! I doubt that, he was crazy about jawbones of asses, that was his thing...In any case, they fly across the huge midwestern sky like enormous passenger airplanes, crossing in front of you from east to west.

“So much of women”...I wrote this poem as it was, on a walk in the ditch just west of our house one spring...so you have to imagine the long natural grasses that grow in the ditches around there. Eventually some fool farmer comes and cuts them, but this was early enough in the summer or spring so that no one had cut the grass yet, and it was wonderfully thick, around my ankles. So I wanted to end with the mood of that grass, which was so un-super-ego, so un-welfare-state, so un-Nixon. At first the line was “so much richness / in this long ditch grass.” No doubt “so much darkness / in the long uncut grass” came in then “so much of the future / in this long ditch grass”...but none of them were right. Then I decided that by “the future” what I meant or hoped for was that I would come closer to my own feminine soul...and that closely cut lawns must be like crew-cuts on men, and uncut grass is like the long hair of women...so it finally settled down, after about a year, to “So much of women

in this uneven grass.”

You can still use “long ditch grass,” or “uncut grass,” or “grass never cut”...whatever will make the image clear.

In the original the “dissatisfactions,” which are also dissatisfactions the poet has with his own (overly masculine) psyche, or with his present life, are in the plural. The architects are insane, from too much planning no doubt, and are trying to build their buildings from the top floor down, the tails (on invisible animals) are approximately three kilometers long...it’s just important to have many confident syllables there:

mad architects, two-mile-long tails...almost every one of the syllables in that line receives emphasis and a long-seeming vowel...

Göteborg sounds horrible. I’ll punish them by sending Mark Strand there to read.

Love, Robert

5 May, ’73

Dear Tomas,

I am in an airplane on the way to Honolulu! I was supposed to meet Voznesensky here tomorrow, but the Russians decided not to let him come, after he wrote several naughty poems you’ve probably heard about...pulling the ears of bureaucrats and talking of his trips to the U.S. I’ve just done a few other readings to clear up debts, including a reading last Tuesday at the Donnell Library, where I found many of your fans...I read them the new “We got ready and showed our home” poem of yours. The audience clapped so long after the first stanza that I almost decided to give up reading poems of yours at all, and clapped after every

[Editor’s note: Some text is missing here.]

a version of the November Birch poem has come, but I don’t have it with me, for some reason. So I’ll just make a few foolish generalizations. The poem was written up in Northern Minnesota, where one feels the land much less
used or conquered
by human beings. The spirit finds that exhilarating. I think I used the word “obedient” to describe the farm land around Madison, which I was about to go back to. The farm land is like a cowed schoolboy, who has had all the rebelliousness crushed out of him, no doubt by administrators and psychological counselors.

I know “sodden body” is difficult, but it’s related to the poem “Suffocation” in
The Light Around the Body,
when the psyche becomes wholly filled with “worldly” detail, the body grows thick and sodden (as in the opening lines of “Hair”). “Sodden” is used to describe a washrag, for example, so soaked with dirty water that if you lifted it, the water would drip out. It is also used, oddly, to describe a man totally drunk in Ireland. It is then a term of contempt. So it suggests weight, grossness (like John Mitchell’s face), an utter absence of the spirit.

A rumor is going around the U.S., started by me, that Harry Martinson is your spiritual father. In fact last week when the
Nation
printed two of my Martinson translations, he was simply identified in the contributors’ notes in one sentence as “Tomas Tranströmer’s spiritual forefather.” That seemed to the
Nation
sufficient justification for his existence, I guess.

Watergate is having powerful impact here, possible only in a nation where the people are becoming rapidly infantilized, and have given over decisions on what is right and wrong to Daddy—how furious they are to have the decisions handed back again!

It means that next time we’ll elect a
mother
—look for a Presidential candidate who is a stomach type—he will win.

Write soon.

The Jeane Dixon of Madison

Minnesota

Robert

Västerås 29-6-73

Dear Robert,

here are 2 pictures of the late Mr Trans...pardon, here are 2 l a t e pictures of Mr Tranströmer, the Swedish Bard.

I want
to have them back
after they have been used by Beacon Press. It was difficult to get them.

You will get 100 dollars from Författarförlaget soon. Don’t complain, it is not my fault that the American economy has been handled so badly that 100 dollars are not worth much today.

From now on my address will be

Gatan, 13038 Runmarö Sweden

The summer started with fantastic sunshine, Sweden was—as the previous year—one of the hottest places in Europe. This week I have been working still in Västerås, with the family safe on the Island. For the first time since the early sixties I have no serious problem to live with and I hope that will be a good position for writing something. What a pity that you can’t live on the Island too, this summer!

Hope to hear from you soon.

Love

        Tomas

P.S. Do you think it is necessary to
write
to Harper’s and Wesleyan? Could you not simply give the permission for publishing? Suppose they say NO. We will publish the poems anyway.

4 July ’73

Dear Monica and Tomas,

I told Carol all the details of my visit with you, and she was properly impressed with all the work we did, and all the goodies we managed to eat up, and the walk into the suburban wildness, where there are always fingers of foreigners poking from the ground, asking for a bed. I had such a good time with you all...thank you for it. Stockholm seemed very prosaic afterward, and James Tate seemed to be suffering stomach pains from having eaten some huge canary—Gunnar Harding is still hungry, but I noticed some feathers around his mouth. I went into the washroom, and carefully brushed mine off...

I’ve been studying your fruit-poem, though I disappear into a vast abyss each time I come to Salamo...perhaps it’s the name of one of the new Italian works in Västerås...

Carol has sold her story to
New American Review
—that’s like being invited to visit the Pope—and is likely to be paid $600 for it!!!!!!! The children’s interest in my poetry is fading now—

Love

    Robert

Västerås 18-8-73

Dear Robert,

You will have some more money from this rich country soon, the fee for your poems in Författarförlagets Tranströmer book
Stigar,
but it will be only half of the
Dagens Nyheter
fee—there must be
some
difference between the honorable publishing in a Newspaper and the more humble appearance in a Book (as there is a difference in status between a big guy who writes journalism and a small guy who is a poet)! Your poems in
Stigar
are: Ensamhet om natten i skogarna, Sex vinterdikter i avskildhet, Promenad på dikesrenen, Gräver efter mask, På Mauis klipper. Or shorter:
Six winter poems late at night about digging worms in the spring ditches of Maui
.

I read the whole book for a small audience (mostly middle aged ladies of both sexes) in Leksand, Dalecarlia, in July and after the reading I asked if they wanted to hear some poems once again. Well, what happened was that they asked for your poems “I want to hear this winter poem by this wonderful American...” etc. So I am trained now in reading your poems (without trying to do a choreographic interpretation of the black crab).

Economy is bad and I am looking forward to the money from Beacon Press. What has happened there? Have Martinson and the widow of Ekelöf agreed? Except for the economy everything is fine, Monica and the children are in good spirits, have recovered from the winter hardships. I have written about 75 lines of
Östersjöar
and sketched about 100 (I can see no end of it) and I could have done more if the weather had not been so good—a fantastic summer heat has paralyzed the brain often.

The house of my mother-in-law at Runmarö will be empty 10 days in June next summer and you can all live there free of cost if you like. We would all be happy if you could.

My visit to the U.S.A. next year will start in Tucson at February 25. It will probably end one month later in Canada (London, Ontario—Steven Osterlund’s place). In between—do you think there are some nice audiences in New Mexico or Nevada?

Love to you all. I am eagerly waiting for reports about how you are.

Tomas

18 Sept, ’73

Dear Tomas,

I thought you’d like to see the sort of letters your strange countrymen write to total strangers...I’m sending you a copy of
Some,
a good new magazine...and a little poem of mine enclosed...I’m typing up some new ones...one about a moth is passable...the rest...Don Hall has written an article on
Sleepers
in which he says I’m the most “systematic” poet in the U.S.—Snyder is second—that’s a stomach type...whatever has a skeleton they find to be too masculine, over-reachers—We have a pony here who is a perfect stomach type—his name is terrific for that—PEANUTS—he is only quarrelsome if he hasn’t just eaten—his back is so wide and broad you don’t know where to put the saddle—that’s probably a secret of stomach types—was Don Quixote a pure nervous system type?—his horse too...I’m babysitting Micah, he is the sweetest child I have ever seen, even among my own huge brood! Love to Monica—What a good time I had there at her table.

Love

      Robert

30 Jan, ’74

Dear Tomas, I’ve been doing some work on your tour, and things look well! I’ll write you tomorrow with the new dates. It looks roughly this way—

Week of Feb 24 [
sic
]—Tucson etc.

(through the desert to:)

Week of Feb 3—California!!

Week of Feb 10th—Midwest; Wisconsin\etc.

—at the end of this week to

Week of Feb 17th—MADISON, MINN!

one or two readings around here then east

Feb 25th—Toronto, Ontario.

I’m enclosing several missives, self-explanatory, and a version of the kamikaze poem. Please comment on errors of fact, tone, and taste!

Field
wrote me that you had sent them some bad translations by “your Scottish friend,” so I tried to rescue them from their dilemma (my solution is always the same) by sending them “Sentry Duty,” “Further In,” “Elegy,” and the kamikaze poem.

Robin Fulton’s translation of
Baltics V
is readable, but curiously pale, like someone who has been in a hospital for months with pneumonia or gall bladder trouble—even the hair on the old bull has turned gray—the sea winds move feebly about the cemetery stones, pausing to rest often—

I will close now—a kiss to Monica! A hug for your two sweet girls—

Love

    Robert

Västerås 13-2-74

Dear Robert,

I hope you had my emergency message—sent to Mr Galin in New York. The content was: there is no third week in February. I have to be back around 15–16 of February. I have so far heard nothing from the man in Canada so this part can be neglected. And I am so grateful for California. I will—if I don’t get another message—buy a ticket: Stockholm-New York-Albuquerque-Tucson-Los Angeles-Cleveland-Minneapolis (or Sioux Falls?)-New York-Stockholm. If I buy it in Sweden I get a 25% discount. Los Angeles can probably be changed to San Francisco without much cost in the U.S., if it is that part of California you are preparing for me.

I will call you from New York (probably one hour after you have this letter).

XXX

Here is such a mess. I am impossible. I cannot find your letter with the “Along the Lines” translation! But I remember it well. The good thing with your translations is that I always meet again the original emotion I felt just when the poem started. Other translators give a (pale) reproduction of the finished poem but you bring me back to the original experience. I like it tremendously. What I am against is that you translate the “words of love” with “word” (singular), I insist that it should be plural. Also I am against stanza 2, the 2 last lines of it. If I am turning my shoulders, but still sitting there, I will be more and more like a corkscrew. Why not simply “turning slowly”?—I need your translations of the latest poems very much, I have only first versions of some of them—I think you took them back to polish for Beacon Press. What I need is especially: “Looking through the Ground,” “Sentry Duty,” “Along the Lines,” and the rushingwaterpoem with the car graveyard. (Please type them and send me quickly or I’ll have to read the Fulton versions!!) (“Headlong, headlong waters” etc.) Type them and send them to Lois Shelton in Tucson. In Albuquerque I have the mad idea to read “Baltics” (exoticism), but not in Fulton’s translation but in Sam Charters’s (a pupil of Charles Olson!), which you have not seen, and not (yet) condemned. Sam Charters is a good man and he has smelled some sea winds.

They read “6 winter privacy poems” recently on the Swedish radio as “dagens dikt.” I was paid 117 crowns for the translation. Did you get anything?

XXX

I am sorry you have to type so much. It is awful to type. But what can I do without the texts?

XXX

Solzhenitsyn just landed in Frankfurt.

Goodbye, auf wiedersehen, love

Tomas

12 March, ’74

Dear Tomas,

It was a great joy to see you as always! I did regret that, pressed by circumstances neither of us could control, constant conviviality kept us from the muskrats and what other small fallen creatures this flatland affords. After you left, I laughed and laughed to think of all the Jungian fanaticism you had been subjected to in just two or three days—this fanaticism in changing everyone
is
American, but perhaps when it starts to broaden to Jung, it’s going too far! At least half of what I said was absurd, so please do forgive me, forgive all of us—the Sitting Bulls of psychology.

Biddy made a Raggedy Ann for Paula or Emma, and is mailing that tomorrow. We’re still reading
Miss Jane Pittman,
to open mouths.

Ruth says that she thinks that in your Baltics poem you are moving in the right direction—I guess broadening the view back toward ancestors—and that since the island belongs to the area of the Mother—or of your mother—you have to walk carefully.

Tell me what other adventures you have had!

Love from us

all and a hug—

Robert

New York 15-3 [1974]

Dear Robert,

a few last words before I take off from that other continent. Thank you for your letter! Everything went fine in Ohio—for me, but not for the people around me. Stuart Friebert got the flu and Tom Lux, who replaced him, yes, his
lungs
collapsed so he had to be taken to a hospital. In Ada no one was sick. When arriving in N.Y. I was supposed to meet Jim Wright and Michael Benedikt. Both were ready but—alas—Jim Wright got suddenly “dizzy” and had to go to bed before seeing me. Now we waited for Michael. He was coming on a bus from Connecticut. But I did not see him either. He got sick on the bus and had to go to bed immediately. So I bring plague to everybody. As soon as I am in the neighborhood people turn sick. I hope you and your family are well. I feel like a poltergeist, but very healthy.

Carl Gustav Jung sends his best and reminds you that because intuition is my strongest side I should write poetry with my fact-grasping part, e.g. collecting more dull facts for Baltics and trying to make the poem still more
flat.
I will try to do that in Part VI.

Love to you all and grateful hugs from

Tomas

15 March, ’74

Dear Tomas,

That’s strange—Jung had the same effect upon people. Freud fainted once when he was with Jung...it sounds as if in this over suggestible country they start fainting as soon as you enter the
city.
First Jim Wright falls over, dreaming you are his father, then Michael Benedikt collapses in the aisle of a bus, convinced he is irretrievably an orphan.

I’m enclosing a brochure, showing where—according to Daniela herself—(an old girlfriend of John Logan’s and Bill Knott’s)—the Great Mother essay in
Sleepers
is now leading innocent and suggestible feminists. This ought to cheer Lars Forssell up.

Do write.

    Love,

        Robert

30 March, ’74

Dear Tomas,

I hope you are well there! Spring still hasn’t come here—and it looks exactly the same as when you were here! I am still working on the same poem, too, so nothing has changed!

A new APR has come out, with a continuation of my Jung brainwashing (archetype-implanting, we call it) and I’ve torn out a copy to enclose. The rest of the issue, which includes a letter from Louis Simpson claiming he is not a thinking type at all, but, I gather, some sort of universal man, like Goethe, I’ve sent on by ship mail. I’m going out tomorrow on a 10 day trip, including Kenyon, where the undergraduates talk of the Great Mother a lot, and yet when you listen to them, she seems indistinguishable from the reason! Of course, I must go and straighten them out—with my beak and a cawkle.

I enclose the gruesome news from the telephone company—but this is all of it. Next time I’ll do it by letter!!

Love,

Robert

Västerås 30th of April -74

Dear Robert,

I should not write to you now because my thinking function is very weak here, the day after the leaves really came out. It is good, ecstatic spring weather. Monica is preparing a gigantic party—the first for many years. The good mood from the U.S.A. trip is still left. That usually happens: the first 2 weeks after returning I float like a balloon, and then the balloon loses air and eventually I drop, slowly, into the mess of everyday duties, the Swedish cultural politics etc. But this time was different. We went to Madeira, for the first time since 1959 we were together alone in a new place for a whole week. Monica had had a tough time during February–March and she recovered completely on this fantastic island, I started to write and read books. We were completely irresponsible.

Many many thanks for the book of seal poems, it comes in the right moment when I am hungry for good
prose.
I also had the 2 Danish pamphlets. The translations look reasonable.

A rumor says that Lars-Olof Franzén from
Dagens Nyheter
wants to visit you. If he arrives, don’t forget to sing the hymns before meals! Give him the full Jungian/Lutheran treatment!

Your community/network discussions in APR are very interesting and with a better thinking function (which will appear in a few days) I will say something about it. I have recommended the book to my colleagues here in the office—I think the ideas are relevant for Sweden too, and not especially for writers and artists but for vast areas of our society. It is a great thing that you have this column in APR. As soon as you happen to read a book that really makes an impression on you, you start to feed the audience with the stuff, like feeding a baby with a spoon.

Love to everybody in the Bly farm.

Tomas

16 July, ’74

Dear Tomas,

I’m so glad to hear from you! I was afraid that as soon as you got back to Sweden, you had called in friends, poets and reporters and said, “I now have definite proof that Robert Bly is a Jungian!” (Gasps of horror.) (I have heard that Jung is hated in Europe by amazingly large masses of people.) And you would follow that with a declaration: “I am never going to write to Robert Bly again!” (Loud cheers from assembled Swedes.) “Every time he mentioned with favor a horned animal, such as a moose, he was really talking of Jung.” (Cheers “Good job of detective work. Those fellas are subtle, etc.”)

I’ve been reading Jung since an early age, and rehabilitation is difficult now. As Khrushchev said, “Only the grave can cure a hunchback!”

Around here it is hot summer, no islands, no delicious paths through high trees, no swims in the Baltic, no rowboats among the duck utopias. I am learning to play a dulcimer, and Bill Holm comes once in a while with his clavichord in the trunk, and we all have a lovely time then.

Jim Wright committed himself to a hospital for four days, and is determined to end his drinking; John Crowe Ransom died last week, quietly, in his sleep. Ingegerd Friberg (the one who is doing a thesis on my poems in Göteborg), much buoyed up by that
Dagens Nyheter
article by Lundqvist—(I sounded there like a bull elephant, who was a “special friend” of the Mother’s—imagining I am an elephant, of course, I liked it)—she brought me a Lapp drinking cup. Don Hall, the stomach type, is writing poems about going to bed with skeletons and things—I don’t understand that.

That’s all the literary news! At my shack I have your new poem, which I like—do
not
leave out the “crystallizing” line! It is very interesting, and necessary. I think I’ll try to translate the poem—it will probably end up set in Iceland, since my Swedish dictionary is not there!

Love to you all,

Robert

18 Aug, ’74

Dear Tomas,

I’m sending along a letter proving that there was one person at least alive in our audience in St. Cloud this spring! It’s a very gloomy day here—late August, the grass has nearly given up, little rain, the farmers are crabby at supper time, the tractors break down, the farmers’ sons ruin the engines of their $200 cars by racing to the nearby towns, where the girls have their hair in curlers, getting ready to go to the State Fair. Then they get there, and think the boys are vulgar, and rabbits come in and eat all the flowers in the old ladies’ gardens overnight. That is what it is like around here. I’m about to go up on the belfry of my old schoolhouse with a book and stay there—no one can find me there, because this being a Protestant country, no one ever looks up!

We do have gypsies here, real ones, and I was once invited to join a band of them—but I knew I would pick the wrong girl and get knifed—

Do write.

      Love, Robert

Västerås 22-8-74

Dear Robert,

back again in Västerås after a rainy and cold summer—but I enjoyed it, oh I needed it, and we must go back to Runmarö for a couple of days soon. I completed
Östersjöar
(bad for you Jungians!) and the whole pile will be published by Bonniers in October.

Gunnar will publish one of your APR columns in
Lyrikvännen
and that could give Jung a push forward among your fans here in Sweden. I think his underground position so to say is strong—his books are always borrowed in the libraries, but in the Office Intellectual Sweden he is probably not highly valued—the Junta favors a strange combination of Freud and Marx.
¹

So you are tempting me with the South again. I would love to visit the U.S.A. and I can do it in autumn 75, not in the spring. In the spring I have to stay here and work hard at the office to pay my delayed taxes. But let us do a reading in New York or elsewhere under the supervision of Betty Kray. I think Carleton College in Minnesota will have me too—the nice reviewer in
Carleton Miscellany
wrote me and gave a half-invitation. Don’t use the telephone any more, I can write postcards in advance, we have plenty of time.

Another of your fads, the brain-philosophy, had a fantastic confirmation lately—the last months of President Nixon, the reptile brain
fighting long after the battle was lost.
The whole tape story also has something to do with reptile thinking, the need to
roll up,
to protect oneself with winding things. Sam Charters and his wife were visiting us the day he left his President job, 5 pm Swedish time, we were sitting drinking beer outside the shop in Södersunda village, the sun was shining, they looked very pleased, they wanted to see him in jail—I don’t want to, I have no real explanation for that, maybe I suspect putting him in jail would be too easy a way to get rid of the really sad fact: that the fellow was elected by YOU, the People, by a landslide victory. I think everyone who voted for him should go to jail for three minutes (of silence) instead.