Airmail (22 page)

Tonight I had another dream, probably influenced by your letter about the Swenson set. I was not reading this time, I was listening to another man reading, it was not poems, some sort of prose, interrupted by passages of sheer onomatopoetic noise, sneezings and so on. I did not see the performer first but suddenly I saw him—it was Melvin Laird!

-------

“Med älven” (I have to talk at some length about this text, like a professor.

The Swedish word “älv” is the provincial word for “river.” Especially it is used when speaking about the northern rivers in Sweden, the northern rivers that often are wild currents, with rapids. “At the riverside” is too calm—the nearest translation should be “with the current.” I think the first lines are too calm in your translation. The Swedish text is packed, the statements are simple but the rhythm is rather violent. Listen:

It is very irregular, it is like Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung rhythm. It starts with alliterations. By chance it could be that in English too: Conversations/contemporaries

A word-by-word translation would be

“Samtida” does not mean “men of my generation”:—it means “contemporaries” (even if in this text I mostly think of my generation, my friends).

I want to have the “saw heard” together without a “no” (I am both seeing and hearing the current).

I liked first “what is for and what is against” because it was a strong formulation, but I am doubtful now. Well, it should be WHO are for and WHO are against, of course. But the polarization is not mature yet. The unwilling are not definitely against, they are reluctant. They are taken by the stream, some with enthusiasm, some reluctantly, but the reluctant ones are not actually fighting against. Is “the willing and the unwilling” impossible in English?

“Varelsen” in the next stanza is singular form, “The Creature.” What sort of creature? Probably I have in mind an allegorical person, the collective mood as a person. It is vague, I admit. I was partly thinking of my old friend X who was so happy at last to have found a reason to let go, to feel hate and 100% enthusiasm in left wing politics (after having spent his years brooding over the construction of Durrell’s Alexandria novels or R. P. Blackmur’s theories of criticism). But “the creature” is probably a thing where you may project many things.

If you are very convinced that the plural form “creatures” is better I accept that.

But the line “Allt stridare vatten drar” is mistranslated. “Stridare” is a form of the
adjective
“strid,” not the substantive. It means
rapid.
The sentence is in translation: “More and more rapid water is pulling.”

“Några få människor borta i byn” should be something like “one or two men drown there in the village” OBS: “by” means “village” in Swedish—it is in Norwegian that it means “city.” There was a village situated near this very bridge, and I could see a few men outside their houses far away. (So we are back—after visiting the General Assembly, Kosygin, etc., we are taken back to the village, and the rapids and the bridge...)

The description of the timber floating is made in 2 stanzas that are terzines à la Dante (with rhymes and everything—you are surprised!). “And huge masses of water plough by under the narrow” is a line of its own, then a gap, then the first terzina:

then the second:         I am iambic too!

of course I don’t dream   

about a translation with rhymes. No reader has yet, by himself, discovered the rhymes here.

“Vänder på tvären” means “turn cross-wise”—they are floating like B. The A timbers are the “torpedoes.”

But these logs are not “safe” as you wrote. They are helplessly sluggishly turning in the stream. A Scotsman, Mr Robin Fulton, has translated this poem and his translation of these lines is:

The folded hands need an explanation.

The logs are piling up. Like that on the banks of the current.

The logs often resemble the fingers of folded hands. So
the pile
is the folded hands. I have the impression that in your translation it is the solitary log that folds its hands.

OK, do you accept all this? I am a little tired of my poem now. For the ideological background you can look into my letters of 1967–68, if you have kept them. The moral weakness of the poem is of course that I am standing at a bridge, looking at it, and not struggling in the waves. But I was standing that very day, in June 1967, in Floda in Dalecarlia, looking at Väster-Dalälven—it is a documentary. But if you change the title from “At the Riverside” to “With the current” you bring me a little more into the water.

Your Old friend, professor

Kenneth Burke

10 Dec, ’70

Dear Tomas,

An annoying thing. You know your book is being handset, so I get no proofs. All is done now but four pages that have the longest poem, “Balakirev’s Dream.” A sudden appeal from the printer, who stopped printing as he noticed one more stanza on the Swedish than in the English. Somehow, I, or a typist, left out this stanza in English:

Neither of us noticed it! You didn’t either! (And your own poem—what a disgrace.) Now my notes are all in Minnesota! So I’ve retranslated the lines so:

Will you let me know by return mail if that is accurate? With all the problems, you’d think we were printing
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
! I’m sorry we’re so slow and hopeless (the printer is worse than I am, honest).

Your friend,

Robert

14 Dec, ’70

Dear Tomas,

Thank you for your very good notes on “Traffic” and “The Bookcase.” You’re right about Mr. Clean. I’ll try “brood” and “sitting on eggs” with a couple of wise women, and see what happens. Isn’t the link with thinking odd in both languages?

I know the power the word “pass” has in Europe. The word “passport” has no power at all in English—I suppose because most Americans travel so seldom over borders. It has the feeling of some honorary document, like a graduation certificate from Sunday School. So if I compared a heavy tome to a passport, they’d just yawn. I will try to get the
identity
(that’s what our raw nerve is) card enlarged somehow to a book, or pamphlet, at least!

I was sure that “rummet” was “space!” The idea of space looking at itself in the dark skin of a river is nice. But “the room” makes a good and scary image—horizontal, rather than vertical, and more to the point, in the poem!

Carol says Louis Simpson will adore this poem, so I must send it to him.

I’ll do my last corrections and then set about getting them in magazines and a pamphlet. The tour will be duck soup. I’ll have acceptances in a couple of weeks.

I got up at 5 this morning to work, and my little shack where I work is too cold this morning (temperature went down to 35 Fahrenheit last night, Polar for California stoves, summery for Minnesota), so I’m writing inside, on the dining room table, the floor covered with cheerful toys, and fragments of cotton batting—(Mary and Biddy spent 2 hours yesterday making a Santa Claus costume, with beard, for Noah, and putting him in it—he looked as if he’d just seen the Pope, and would bless us shortly).

Love, Robert

Västerås 20 dec 70

Dear Roberto,

these lines will reach you after Christmas, so happy (ending of the) Christmas to you and pope Noah and the rest of the good family! I hope to see you in 1971—if, if, the expression “duck soup” means something good. You wrote “your tour will be duck soup” and I have not found an American slang dictionary yet, so I don’t know if the expression means YES or NO.

Best new year greetings to the Printer (the hand-printer, not the foot-printer). He is no stakhanovite, but observant. I think your translation of the missing 2 lines in “Balakirev’s Dream” is excellent. I hurry to make my confirmation.

I told a few friends about the translation and they began to look at me with some suspicion now. Recently a young Norwegian truck driver got headlines—he had inherited 1 million crowns from an unknown relative in the U.S.A. He was interviewed etc. A week later he disappeared—it was found out that the poor man had invented the whole thing.

This translation business is slipping out of my control. What is Leif Sjöberg doing? A student in Göteborg, who has written a small thesis about my poetry for his examen, got a sudden message from Leif Sjöberg (he had never heard about him before)
ordering
him to send
by air mail
his thesis, the reason was that Leif needed some inspiration for a “foreword to the translation.” What translation? I have not yet heard anything from May Swenson. You will hear from me soon, I am afraid.

Love

    Tomas

28 Dec, ’70

Dear Tomas,

I’m on a plane about to land in N.Y., where I’m going to read “Teeth Mother” tomorrow night to a mob of 3000 howling academics—here for a conference of college English teachers—who will no doubt throw their old Miltons at me. The Hilton Hotel (where the conference is) would not give us a room in which to hold this antiwar reading (can you imagine—after all these years), so we are holding it, of all places, in the Ballroom of the Barbizon-Plaza.

I typed up last night all my work for the last three months on my long poem—the Mss amounts to about 40 pages now. I’ll no doubt, for common decency, have to remove some of the worst pages. The writing goes most of the time very easily like duck soup, but we will have to wait and see if it has as much flavor.

The plane is down. The concrete has a cement-headed foreman. I must go and check in.

Love from your old   

mushroom picking friend,

Robert

Västerås 30 dec 70

Dear Robert,

I must have your fatherly advice (big-brotherly advice), and very soon! Yesterday I got a recommended letter from the USA which gave the explanation to Leif Sjöberg’s cryptic small messages about translations. The letter was from a Mr Samuel Hazo, director of “International Poetry Forum, Carnegie Library, 4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, Penn.” I quote the start of it: