Airmail (24 page)

I yesterday answered positively a Miss Dzintra Bungs (wonderful name) in N.Y. She invited me to read for the Baltic students in New York, when I arrive. I could not get a fixed fee, but I was promised the net profit of the program. She had read me in Latvian.

A book is planned with translations from some younger American poets, not yet translated into Swedish. I was asked to contribute and I have the idea to translate W. S. Merwin—the poems I have seen seem quite possible to do in Swedish. But I don’t know. How is the man? I want you to open the door of your wonderful treasury of gossip. Some characteristic anecdotes etc. about W. S. please.

Love to Carol and the small ones.

Tomas

10 April ’71

Dear Tomas,

As you see your book is printed now! It is just being bound now, and the dust jacket being printed. You’ll probably get a few paper copies in the mail, with the first try at the dust jacket on them—but I don’t like the jacket, and intend to change it.

But it does exist!

The May Swenson translation is
not good.
(Except for the last 2 lines, which are fine, even excellent.) The first six lines all have archaic sentence order—you sound a bit like an 1824 English romantic

“Nightlong the murmur deep in summer’s gorge.”

“Summer’s gorge” is literary and “poetic,” and the sentence order is simply miles from spoken English. “The spruce tree
at point
” means nothing. The only thing a reader can see is the spruce tree stretched out like an English hunting dog, about to flush a partridge.

The ant
aglow
—“aglow” is not 19th century but 17th century. You’ll have to make it clear to her that you write in 20th century Swedish, and ask her to work on them, making the English more contemporary and spoken.

I think Merwin would be fairly easy to translate, but I’m not sure you’d
receive
anything from his poetry. He radiates psychic cold, like an extremely literate lieutenant. I’d try Gary Snyder (poems from
Riprap
) or William Stafford. I think they’re both in
Naked Poetry.
Must go! Do write!

Love, Robert

Västerås 18 april 71

Dear Robert,

Thank you for the book! I always liked the typed letters of the previous 60s books and I am happy that I got the same. Even the abdominable pig-head looked sweet. But no man is perfect and the printer was probably drunk when he typed “Out in the Open” (or perhaps he is a hawk and did not like My Message) so he transformed a building into a wood-stack. When the last copies have been torn from the hands of the booksellers in Omaha and Tulsa by voracious readers and you have to print a new edition you might correct the lines in this poem a little...Such accidents also happened to Shakespeare, so I don’t want to be finicky. The translations in general make me happy. I did not see before that the translations of my “Solitude” and “Slow Music” were so wonderful. I have one reservation: the end of “Out in the Open”—you put “Force” instead of “Violence.” For me “Force” is not negative, it is a neutral, even positive word. Or what are the associations in the U.S.? Have you been debating about “Violence” so much that the word has been worn out?

Can you ask the editors of the
Seneca Review
and
Doones
to send me the issues where I am published? I’d love to see those small magazines—I have never heard about them before.

Your action on the exclusive rights battle was effective. You must have frightened them! I sent Hertzel a long, extremely pedagogic letter about the question before I knew of your telephone speech to Hazo. “There are 2 sound ways of looking at a verse translation. You may regard the translation as a proposal, one of many equivalent aspects of the original text. Another way of looking at a translated poem is to see it as a poem in its own right, in this case a poem in English (this is especially valid if you have an excellent poet-translator like May Swenson). But none of these 2 approaches is compatible with the idea of exclusive rights to translate a certain poem...” etc. I also tried to convince him that as many (good) translations as possible would stimulate the selling of the Pittsburgh book. Forgive me for putting in the line about May as excellent. It is bad that her translations have this 19th century touch. My earlier poems often are old-fashioned in respect to meter but the language is simple 20th century language always. Now May is very un-academic about meter—if she felt the need to follow the original meter I could understand that the language could be forced into some awkward archaisms. But as it is now...well, I can’t see these archaisms myself, I don’t know enough English. Perhaps you are too harsh. I will give you another example of her translation.

Anyhow I have accepted her and I am not going to have Eric included in the Pitt book even if he has been mistreated. But at the reading in Pittsburgh I will read some of his translations and give him credit.

[------]

Would you cast a glance at another May Swenson poem of mine:

“Drinkenly” is not in my dictionary. Is it a 16th century word for intoxicated olympic gods or something?

---

Monica is studying. She has been a nurse-pupil since January and is at school (hospital) all day and doing lessons at home all night. The other day she made her first post-mortem dissection. No one fainted. The girls are tough nowadays. In Sweden nurses are more thoroughly educated than in most countries—they often have to do a doctor’s job in the country—we are short of doctors. When she is examined (2 years from now) we hope that she can have a job as a school nurse, half-time. Paula broke her arm on Easter Eve, when trying to fly a kite, I have just recovered from a suppuration in the upper jaw. The economy is bordering on bankruptcy. The weather is bad. We send our most hearty greetings.

Tomas

Västerås 21-5-71

Dear Robert,

the day after tomorrow I leave Västerås for Northern Sweden. The military authorities want to refresh my memory about warfare during some weeks. I will send you a message from the bush later—I don’t know if I am supposed to be crawling with camouflage-painted face through barbed wire or if they will let me sit calmly day after day in a forgotten bunker. But if I disappear you have at least the included 2 documents: 1: My statement about the spiritual situation in Sweden (“Den skingrade församlingen”) and 2: the first two parts of my attempt to write The Long Poem, called “Baltics.” The poem will have 4 or 5 parts. It started when I found my grandfather’s almanacs from the 1880s, where he had noted down the ships he was piloting. The 3 ships/captains/draughts etc. quoted are from the almanac. Then I found out that much of my life had some connection with the Baltics so I started to give a jumbly sketch of many things—even my visit to Riga is there, fragmentarily, in part 2.

I don’t know if I am strong enough to stand Carol’s condemnation of the Mormon Lady’s translations, when it comes. There must—for Heaven’s sake—be
something
good in them. May is doing the complete Tranströmer, without hesitation, and from that GESAMMTWERK I am supposed to make a final selection. Leif Sjöberg is impatient because my comments arrive much slower than her translations—“you must be in love with your own poems” he wrote reproachingly. Oh no. I am not in love with them, I just have a gloomy paternal sense of responsibility for them. Beside, the last months have been taxing, with Monica running to her hospital work at 0615 in the morning.

We send our best, summer warm wishes! If you drop me a note to my Västerås address Monica will send it forward to my military address.

Din gamle vän

    Tomas

30 May, ’71

Dear Tomas,

I just found an old letter of yours, which I propose to answer! I hesitated myself between “force” and “violence” in “Out in the Open,” and I’ll think it over again when the time comes to reprint. In that same poem, I cannot find the building that got turned into a woodstack! Give me more on that. Actually I took the only copy of your book I had up to Carol in the hospital yesterday, so she’d have something good to read. She gave birth to a little (of course he was little) baby boy yesterday morning at 6:30! It all went very fast, and two days ahead of time, and she is very happy about the boy! Just before we went to the hospital, when we were still not sure it was time to go, I closed my eyes for a bit, and saw this sign over and over again, in various colors, and I felt it was the sign of the new boy. It looked like this:

It was a pair of wings, spread, with two crescent moons underneath. I don’t know what it means, but I think it’s a magic baby. I’ve always thought so. After all, two mediums in 1968 predicted his birth (or another child at least). We’d like you and Monica to be the new baby’s godparents, by the way! Yes, we do! We would baptize him, if you agree, while you’re here in October, and Monica can be a godparent
in absentia.
Your physical duties would be light, and, spiritually, all you’d have to do is bless him every once in a while. We’d love it if you’d both agree.

He is strong, and kicked a lot in the womb, weighed over eight pounds, and looks very calm indeed. We haven’t decided on a name for him yet, and plan to wait a bit for that.

About May Swenson: Obviously some poems are going to slip into English for her better than others. Sometimes she goes two whole lines without 16th century English coming in. Since she is doing the entire Gesammelte Werke, I think this is a time to depend on your friends a little. Let the whole group come in, get them all gathered together, then in consultation with your American-speaking friends, choose the ones to be finished. Carol and I would be happy to vote in this matter, and maybe Eric or someone would help too. Once that choice is made, then you can also depend on us to make suggestions on which lines need to be modernized a bit. I’d rather let it go, and let her just do the whole thing, and know nothing about it all until it was printed—but I do hate to see your—particularly your—poems mangled.

Perhaps you can sort of gather alternate versions of clogged lines over the summer, and then talk them over with May when you come in the fall, maybe on your way home. We could go over the poems chosen, one by one, while you’re staying with us in Minnesota.

I will write you soon about the tour, since we need to settle dates soon. Would you like to come for 2 weeks or for 3? Would you like it to be in early October or later October? How many readings would you like to give? Suppose you stayed two weeks...Would you think 6 readings would be about right? The truth is you’ve had so many acceptances you can give as many as you want to. At the moment, I’m discouraging Scandinavian departments, and, following your sensible suggestion, encouraging colleges interested in a simple
poetry reading.
I have to go through the papers soon, and settle on an itinerary.

In your letter, you sent along a copy of May’s translation of “Sailor’s Yarn.” I can see two things here she is doing that she hasn’t thought through. In the attempt to gain music, she is working with sound in rather obvious ways. For example, the last line of the first stanza of “Sailor’s Yarn” goes:

as lynx, seek and fall their grip in the shore’s gravel.

That line really doesn’t make any sense in English, and evidently she did it that way in order to get the two “g’s” in “grip” and “gravel,” following what she imagines to be your three planned “F’s.” (Her “k” in “seek” is probably intended to suggest a third “g.”) But I don’t think these consonant repetitions can be constructed as easily as all that in translations. Here she has had to lose the grip on the meaning, and the reader’s assumption then is that the meaning is not important to you either.

Her second mistake I mentioned earlier: the tendency to translate without care for contemporary usage. “In the north flits the real lynx.” She is just translating word for word, but it happens that in English now the verb in such a sentence
never
comes before the noun. No one says: “In Washington run the demonstrators.” You should remind her to adopt English sentence order, forgetting what the sentence order is in Swedish.