Airmail (11 page)

My best to Monica,

Yours,  

Robert    

Västerås 3-4-67

Dear Roberto,

thanks for two missives: your letter with poems, animals, friendly words and now today some pages from the
Nation.
But first, loud trumpet blasts from us to herald the birth of your son Noah, friend of the animals! However did you keep from telling us he was on the way? Our best wishes to him—if those are even needed for a baby that weighs so much...

It was fine to read about your tours with the burned Vietnamese children—one seizes upon every reminder that the U.S.A. has a conscience with the most urgent gratitude. All the same, it feels good that you are back in Minnesota just now, safe from furious Cubans and the bad air in New York.

The present degradation of the official U.S.A. torments me as if I were an American myself. Why? What kind of poor, suffering, tortuous thread is it that runs between me and the wrinkled devil’s masks in the Pentagon? Johnson has now lost everything but his face, it stands by itself in the desert wastes, completely hollow. One who is frightened to death of losing face will eventually lose everything except his face.

Your poems were truly a great and life-giving injection from straight across The Great Water. It was impossible not to translate the turtle poem, it happened seemingly all by itself. The first section is problematic, though, I’ll have to think further about it. MAD is difficult to translate. It also sounds strange in Swedish that WE wake up like a sea urchin. Does PASS mean a mountain pass or a ford (are we wading in blood?) But the rest of the poem lifts and carries so delightfully well, it’s both Dante and Walt Disney. Here in short is a first draft:

I would also like to translate the ultimate and last draft of “The Peace March” whenever it comes. I want your translation of “African Diary” for the magazine
Transition
(since “Hötorg art” has been corrected). I saw Mr. Rajat Neogy from Kampala when he was here—he is the editor of that Ugandan magazine—and he wanted it because “you really got something of Africa in it.” There was a convention of African writers in Stockholm recently. I was there for one day, mostly in order to see Rajat, who is an old pal of mine. Unfortunately I was forced to hear Swedish writers stand up and sing their tired old refrain—macabre. They confessed their sins (for belonging to the colonial race, for being Swedes, etc.) in an aggressive manner that astonished the Africans and made natural contact between them difficult. Lundkvist painted Sweden very black, and also informed them that a large percentage of the Swedish people were “supporting the American war in Viet-Nam.” According to the latest Gallup poll, precisely 8% of them do. I should have gotten up and said so, but was too cowardly of course.

When I read the words of encouragement in your letter I have the embarrassing sense that I’ve complained in some letter about having gotten bad reviews. No, it was only from a few directions that I was accused of having represented a “used-up literature” etc. and it feels quite good to be able to sail against the wind for a while. I’m not surfing on the waves of success this time, but still, poets may swim against the current if they can. I’m getting shouts of encouragement from many directions. Yours are worth the most, however.

Best wishes from us

Tomas T.

P.S.

The
Nation
was very interesting. What you say about “the iciness of desensitization” was entirely true and essential. Likewise I dream about that grasshopper’s leap.

But the poets had better shave off their beards before they visit the Bronx! They ought to come disguised as Bronx housewives. An esteemed, well turned out senator, or Dr. Spock or some baseball hero with a Colgate smile is worth several hundred beatniks in that context. It’s such an important matter.

In a few hours I will go to bed in a sleeping car and wake up in Malmö in the morning. I’ll mail this letter in Copenhagen and continue on myself to Fredericia on Jylland, where I’ll read my own work and talk with students at a folk high school [folkhögskola]. At the end of March I’m going to England for the first time in my life. Shall I convey greetings to anybody there? It will be a short visit—I’m going with a good friend who’ll be selling computers! Write soon.

Best wishes to the 5 in Odin House! TT

Västerås again, 5-4-67

Dear Robert,

I’ve been back in Sweden for 10 days and am already longing to be abroad again. I liked London, it’s an amazingly pleasant city for being so big. Most of the Englishmen were chubby little rascals (without much humor), the food was good, the sun shone. I also visited Göran Printz-Påhlson in Cambridge, where he sat sighing over the strict class system in the old English universities. It’s pure apartheid—he’s not even allowed to walk on the lawns because he isn’t a Fellow. I drank beer with some of his students—one of them by the way had translated me in
Adam.
They were exotic figures, which one might expect since they were studying Scandinavian languages. One of them spoke excellent Swedish. Pronounced the words not with an English but a Portuguese accent. Another had a Beatles haircut and used to take part in the Hötorget (sic!) mods riots in Stockholm in the summers. It would almost have been nice if they had had a little plastic and marshmallow in them.

In London I called Carroll up. “Oh Hello Mr Transtromrrrr, how nice of you to ring, we must get together, I should publish your poems in my press,” he began without preamble. I was completely unprepared for this and purely reflexively (reacting out of my Swedish psyche) I started to say that that was surely impossible, oh no, etc.—I all but said I was a totally worthless writer. Against the next occasion I’ll practice the correct response in such a circumstance, such as THIS IS A DAMNED GOOD IDEA or something of the sort. Unfortunately we never did meet, we weren’t free at the same times—it’s too bad, for he seems like a nice person to have a pint with. However, I met Michael Hamburger and he was exactly as good as you had described him. He was the only Englishman I came in actual contact with.

In Stockholm we’re having THE TRIBUNAL—I suppose you’ve heard about that. It’s one of those typical things that make you feel like you’ve got a big crack straight through from your scalp to your crotch. What’s tragic about it is that it could be a good thing—if it weren’t dominated by people who have hated America for many years and who can’t inspire confidence in those it really concerns, above all in the U.S.A. Then there’s all the courtroom terminology...As things stand now, facts that have been thoroughly and patiently gathered together aren’t going to have any effect when they’re presented, because it will be all too easy to dismiss them as “propaganda.” Then there’s the fact that the Tribunal has led to such atrocities as Tage Erlander (a person who happens to be our Prime Minister) almost apologizing on American TV for the Tribunal’s being allowed to come to Sweden. However, Sartre gave a good speech on Opening Day, and maybe some of the information can get through, even if presented by one-eyed fellows.

Hatred flourishes. A writer my own age—and previously a very close friend of mine—said recently at a meeting that it would be a great misfortune if Johnson stopped the bombing of North Vietnam, since hatred of the U.S. would then diminish (I didn’t hear this myself, it was reported in the paper). This is the Year of the hawks, on all sides.

I would rather sound a little less gloomy. Eric Sellin wrote in his last letter that it was of course always nice to get a letter from me, but that what I wrote always had the effect of deepening the gloom he felt about the world situation. I’m also sending you a fantastically gloomy poem (though it has a hopeful curl at the end). I have trouble getting going (it’s that CRACK) and have to write some shit out of my system first. I hope that soon, in the spring, in the summer, something will happen: the bung will fall out of the barrel and My Life’s Work will come pouring out, something tremendously long and tremendously concentrated ah...

Send more little magazines and signs of life! The portrait gallery of famous American poets was fantastic. What mature physiognomies! I’d quite like to have a beer with Donald Hall. (I notice that I often return to the subject of beer
²
—one of Sweden’s faults is that we drink too little beer here.) Monica and the little ones say hello.

Your friend,

  Tomas T.

10 June, ’67

Dear Tomas,

Here it is, lovely wet old spring. It has been raining for 10 days, and my Norwegian soul (or my mildew) is just beginning to feel comfortable. I’m home for the summer—no more hopping about! I just jump around inside my head now—leaping from ear to ear, jumping on the sofas inside my brain—springs poking out in all directions, legs fallen off—

I’m glad you met Michael Hamburger. He’s awfully ethereal compared to his extroverted, meaty name. A sweet man.

I just sent back page proofs on my new book—it will be ready in another month or so, and I’ll send you a copy then.

My translation of Hamsun’s
Hunger
is out too, but I won’t send you a copy—it’s better in Norwegian!

The Stockholm trial got almost no publicity here. I have the clear feeling by the way that we are losing—not only politically, but
militarily
—in Vietnam. The Marine commander has been removed. Letters I get from soldiers in Vietnam (who write poetry and send me some at times) are full of disgust and despair—much more so than a year ago.

Thank you for the wall-stumbling-along-in-the-street poem. Very odd. It is frightening when the empty houses gather as an army.

Write soon. Forgive my long gaps—I’ll send some poems next time.

Runmarö 7-11-67 A.D. MCMLXVII

Dear Robert,

as you see, I’ve moved out to our cottage on the island in the archipelago for the next while. We’re on vacation. I forgot my typewriter but have found an old one from the beginning of the century, in one of the houses in the village. The type is hard to read, but has a sentimental value of its own. The keys are trembling with age—an old man’s trembling fingers—he’s a faithful old worn-out worker called CORONA. Me, I feel significantly younger than I did last year at this time, better than for a good long while, actually. Now something will finally get done! I’ll start by finishing a first version of your wonderful president poem. By now Sonnevi has published at least three of your poems in the Swedish press, I only two (it’s 3–2 in Sonnevi’s favor). His latest was “As the Asian War Begins” in our only young writers’ magazine,
Komma.
It’s a good translation. [------] I can also inform you from Sweden that there is another Viet-Nam conference in Stockholm and this time I’ve contributed a little sum of money, which I didn’t do at the [Bertrand] Russell Tribunal. The person who made the biggest impression this time was Dr. Spock. Has there been anything in the U.S. press about this conference? Spock asked the Swedes to come up with something besides demonstrations in the streets to influence opinion (in the U.S.). Maybe we should do something for the tourists? I’ve thought myself that a torrent of sober, well-brought-up letters to the editors of
Time
and
Life
from all over Europe might do some good.

Today the big trees around our house are full of wind. It’s blowing so hard that green caterpillars keep falling into my coffee cup. I love the constant sound of it, the rising and falling—it only goes to show that I’m no real sailor. My grandmother (who was born in 1860) always got melancholy and uneasy when the wind moaned in the trees. She would think of the people in small boats out on the water hereabouts. Grandfather, who was a pilot, took himself to and from the big boats in a little rowboat with a sail. Once, in the 1890s, he was hired to sail a Stockholm gentleman from Runmarö to Stockholm. The passenger turned out to be Strindberg. My grandfather could only say about him afterwards that he was “a nice man.”

Dear Robert, let me hear from you soon! Every time you go poaching with your Swedish net you should think about your Swedish readers and friends and remember that it’s time to send something over. Monica sends her best, as do I, to the whole family.

Tomas

P.S. I’m enclosing a poem,
³
which jumped into me during a car trip in Dalarna, right before Midsummer. Of course, from a
Sixties
point of view it’s a scandal, since it is mostly iambic.—When is
Sixties
coming out, by the way? The greedy public waits impatiently to snatch the new issue out of the bookmonger’s hands!

Krylbo 8-8-67

Dear Robert,

I write in haste to hurry you up—I would like to submit “3 presidents” to a magazine and want to know if you approve of it or if you want anything changed. I’m also sending you some documents from Sweden. Lasse Söderberg’s translations are of a rather good quality, particularly the first poem. In addition I have the pleasure of telling you that Söderberg is more than six feet tall. My own poem is a relapse into the Tranströmeresque “archipelago style” which can’t be condemned too harshly. I’m only sending it as a testimonial to what a beautiful vacation I had, out among the islands.

I’m writing this during a work trip to a BORSTAL in the forest.