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Review by Johannes Grannson
8 Takes Toward a Review of Tomas Tranströmer
1.
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems makes available to American readers Robin Fulton’s translations of all of Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry collections as well as some unpublished poems and a selection from his 1993 memoir Memories Look at Me. The collection takes us from his first collection, 17 Poems, through The Great Enigma from 2004.
Tranströmer, one of the most distinctive European modernists of the 20th century, writes with one foot in the high Surrealism of Paul Eluard and René Char, and the other foot in the Swedish Romantic nature mysticism of Vilhelm Ekelund. In difference to Surrealism’s violent struggle for the total liberation of the mind, Tranströmer conceives of his poetry as contemplation. For Tranströmer there is no need for struggle because dream and reality are not separate; they come together in a mystical vision of nature.
2.
Tranströmer came of age as a poet in the 1950s, publishing his first book, 17 Dikter, in 1954, at the age of 23. In the 1950s, Swedish poetry was still largely under the sway of a kind of high Romantic Surrealism, metaphysically radical and imagistically explosive. Perhaps the most prominent poet of this mode was Erik Lindegren, whose important collection The Man Without a Way provides a good example:
to shoot an enemy and roll a cigarette
to flame up and be extinguished like a pyre in a storm
to sit like a fly in the partners’ web
to think one is born with bad luck when one is just born
Tranströmer was part of a generation that moved away from this Eliot- and Breton-influenced poetry. We can see both the influence of Lindegren’s metaphysical verse and a move toward something mundane and laconic already in a poem Tranströmer published as a high school student in the literary journal Medan Lagrarna Gro (not included in Fulton’s collection):
a fog trembles with its fingers over
the churchyard
the carriage wheels stop in front of a
overgrown grave
the man crouches down and listens: he has
a sailor’s face
and the flowers that are laid on the ground are
as withered*
By the time Tranströmer’s first book was published five years later, Lindegren’s influence is even slighter. There is still a hint of it, but the poetry has become much less dramatic, much more relaxed and mystical. While Lindegren had something of an Icarus-obsession, repeatedly using the Greek myth as a metaphor for poetic creation, Tranströmer’s first book begins with the now classic inversion of that image:
Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams.
Free of the suffocating turbulence the traveler
sinks toward the green zone of morning.
(from “Prelude”)
While Lindegren held a Shelley-like concept of the poet as someone who earns truth by breaking through the barriers of normal human existence, Tranströmer sees poetry as a letting go.
3.
A brief inventory of setting and subject matters will give the uninitiated reader a good idea of Tranströmer’s poems.
His favorite settings include: trains, train stations, cars, motels, the side of roads, the site of urban sprawl, Egypt, the Congo, the US, museums and other forms of exhibition spaces. In other words: places in flux and transition, the settings of unexpected meetings and dislocations.
These spaces are generally peopled by tourists, travelers, dreamers, sleepwalkers and children. The speaker and his character seem to constantly experience the world anew, as if they had no memory. For this reason, his poetry could be seen as an extremely accomplished versions of Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostranie (defamiliarization) – he perpetually makes the reader experience the world as a stranger might:
The office windows are open. You can still hear
how the horse is tramping inside.
The old horse with the rubber-stamp hooves.
It is difficult to write about Tranströmer without falling back on such now cliché ideas as defamiliarization or mysticism.
4.
Many translators have tried their hand at Tranströmer. In difference to a poet like Paul Celan, whose deformative language play and radical use of neologism forces translators to commit overt acts of violence on the English language, Tranströmer challenges American translators with an unpoetic slackness of language. His lines are often so casual that translators feel the need to inject poetic flourishes. I think particularly of Robert Bly’s translation of “Allegro.”
In Swedish:
Jag spelar Haydn efter en svart dag
och känner en enkel värme i händerna.
Tangenterna vill. Milda hammare slår.
Klangen är grön, livlig och stilla.
Here’s Bly:
After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
I get the impression with a lot of Bly’s translation that he wants the poems to be more poetic, more forceful than they are in the original. You can sense this urge from the very first line – Bly rearranges the two clauses so as to create a build-up that is not there in the original.
There is a similar dramatic build-up in the third line. I would translate “Tangenterna vill” simply as “The keys want.” Bly wants a more dramatic “ready.” It’s not enough for Bly that the sound is “stilla” (simply “still”) – he makes them “full of silence,” which sounds like an imitation of a Tranströmer line (for example “Friends! You drank the darkness and became visible” from “Elegy”).
Fulton takes a less embellishing attitude toward the poems:
I play Haydn after a black day
feel a simple warmth in my hands.
The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively, and calm.
Fulton does not give us Bly’s flourish. But I don’t feel that Fulton’s solution is quite satisfactory either. He translates “stilla” as “calm.” Both Bly’s and Fulton’s translations seem to be attempts to deal with a seeming paradox – that a sound can be lively, green and still. That is both dynamic and motionless. I read this stanza as being deeply concerned with timing. The keys want to be played. Then the hammers fall (“milda” – mild – because they are seen in a slow-motion of sorts). Then we hear the “klangen” – “resonance,” but an onomatopoetic word that suggests “clang” – which at first seems green, then, as it fades, lively, and then still. End of stanza.
Both Bly and Fulton translate the first sentence of Tranströmer’s 1958 poem “Spår” (“Tracks”) as “2 am: moonlight.” But the original – “På natten klockan två: månsken.” – is far less dramatic. I translate it as “Two o’clock at night: moonlight.” Again it seems the translators feel the need to make Tranströmer both more Tranströmerian and more poetic.
However, Fulton frequently succeeds by not attempting to make the diction more poetic than it is. Often the result is a kind of clumsiness that may not be in the original – it comes from the clash between the Swedish and English languages and literary traditions. It is to Fulton’s credit that he allows the English to sound slightly awkward. For example, he translates the following lines – intricate but casual in the Swedish —
På väg i det långa mörkret. Envist skimrar
mitt armbandsur med tidens fångna insekt.
as the somewhat complicated, awkward
On the road in the long darkness. My wristwatch
cleams obstinately with time’s imprisoned insect.
Tranströmer’s language may not be as hyper-translatable as it may seem at first. Not only is the language so laconic and a-poetic in English that it becomes hard to leave it as such, the simplicity hides an incredible sense of detail, tuned to the smallest changes in wording. However, we may say that with this deceptive simplicity, Tranströmer has created the need for multiple translations – and in fact few if any 20th-century poets have been translated as frequently as Tranströmer. Every reader feels they have the right version (including this writer). What we should care about is not, perhaps, whether one gets it more right than another, but that Tranströmer’s poetry calls forth a variety of ways of trying to change or deform the English language to make room for his poetry. We’re all sleepwalkers wandering through an amazing mystical hotel.
5.
In the 1960s, as Swedish poetry became immensely politically engaged and the so-called Nyenkelheten (“New Simplicity”) dominated the culture, Tranströmer became an awkward fit. In its distrust of artifice and contemplativeness, these new poets called for poetry of the city, reality, politics and the masses. Tranströmer was criticized for his lack of political engagement, his bourgeois escapism and mysticism. In many ways the “Tranströmer debates” of this era mimics the “Ashbery debates” of the same period in American poetry – both accused of not coming out in stronger terms against US imperialism.
However, one of the most common motifs in Tranströmer’s work starting in the collections from the 1960s is war and political injustice. “About History” contains Tranströmer’s perhaps most overt political statements.
Radical and Reactionary live together as in an unhappy marriage,
molded by each other, dependent on each other.
But we who are their children must break loose
Every problem cries in its own language.
Go like a bloodhound where the truth has trampled.
The poem was published in Bells and Tracks, a collection published in 1966, at a time when Swedish literary journals began to focus increasingly on political tracts and essays, and the poetry was becoming highly political and overtly moralizing. So it is interesting that Tranströmer’s most overt political statement is made in opposition to extreme political rhetoric.
As with the political poetry of the New Simplicity, much of Tranströmer’s poetry focuses on the US and its violent past and present. But in difference to so much else written about Vietnam during this era, Tranströmer lets America speak, in the voice of a young man from Oklahoma:
The boy said:
“I know I have prejudice,
I don’t want to be left with it, sir.
What do you think of us?”
However, elsewhere he has less sympathy for the Yanks. In “I det fria” (Fulton translates it as “In the Open,” but I think “fria” contains a reference to the US – the land of the free), he receives a letter from the US that infuriates him. He responds with this (rather overt) statement:
Those who run death’s errands don’t avoid the daylight.
They rule from glass stories. They swarm in the sun’s blaze.
They lean across the counter and turn their head.
Over the years, Tranströmer returns to political issues over and over. However, he tends to do so with the same impressionable naivete as he plays Haydn or listens to office workers. He is particularly concerned with censorship and political imprisonment. They seem not only wrong from a moral perspective but also because such regimes stop the flux and flow that is so central to Tranströmer’s vision; they set up “truth barriers” (the name of his 1979 collection) because “truth” for Tranströmer is in transformation, not in stability.
Perhaps my favorite of all of his poems is “To Friends Behind a Frontier” (“Till vänner bakom en gräns.” Here I would say “gräns” is more “border” than “frontier’ because he’s referring to the border of Eastern Europe):
Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years
when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten
and can at last sleep, become trilobites.
(from Paths, 1973)
We don’t need to revisit all of 20th century Marxist criticism, but it may be useful to consider whether this kind of poetry – poetry that turns political injustices into beautiful, contemplative poetry – is at all political. Does it merely aestheticize the injustices? Can poetry be more politically efficacious?
Clearly Tranströmer’s branch of Surrealism has little in common with the insurrectional energies of Breton’s Surrealism. Instead of their urban, anarchic energies, Tranströmer gives us contemplation.
6.
In addition to becoming increasingly concerned with politics over the years, Tranströmer also seems to have become more self-conscious about his writing. In the earlier collections he seems a sleepwalker without memory, effortlessly moving through a dreamy landscape. In his later works he refers to “sleepwalkers” more frequently – suggesting a level of consciousness about his work. The late tour-de-force “The Gallery” (from “The Truth Barrier”) struggles with this consciousness:
An artist said: Before, I was a planet
with its own dense atmosphere
Entering rays were broken into rainbows.
Perpetual raging thunderstorms, within.
Now I’m extinct and dry and open.
I no longer have childlike energy.
I have a hot side and a cold side.
No rainbows.
Instead of the effortless parachute jump of waking up, we get this tortured image of the creative process:
Often I have to stand motionless.
I am the knife thrower’s partner at a circus!
Questions I tossed aside in rage
come whining back
don’t hit me, but nail down my shape
my rough outline
and stay in place when I’ve walked away.
7.
In 1990 Tranströmer suffered through a debilitating stroke. This has not stopped him from continuing to write striking poems that continue with his concerns:
I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.
(from “April and Silence”)
It is interesting the way his biographical illness gives a different view of the sleepwalker-persona. What was once mystical, may now strike us as illness. This sends me back to “Tracks”:
As when someone has fallen into an illness so deep
everything his days were becomes a few flickering points, a swarm,
cold and tiny on the horizon.
Breton developed his ideas about Surrealism to a large extent in response to interacting with shellshocked soldiers during World War I. Tranströmer has spent much of his professional career as a psychologist for juvenile delinquents. In a strange way, perhaps Breton’s rabble-rousing Surrealism and Tranströmer’s mysticism could be seen as two different explorations of mental illness. Many of Tranströmer’s speakers can be imagined as the vision of characters from Oliver Sach’s clinical anecdotes (in fact he mentions aphasia in “Baltics”). While Shklovsky conceived of defamiliarization as a return to childhood, it could also be seen in terms of mental illness.
8.
Fulton has done a remarkable job translating so much of Tranströmer’s oeuvre. By avoiding much of the domesticating embellishments of Bly’s translations, instead largely allowing the English to become awkward in its connection to the Swedish language, he has created a book tense with the interplay between languages and literary traditions.
*My translation. I found the text in Nina Burton’s Den hundrade poeten (Falköping: FIBs lyrikklubbsårsbok, 1988. Page 51)
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