Airmail (47 page)

The letter is written on some typed information about the Nobel Prize, on which Saul Bellow’s name is crossed out and RB’s written in, with the year 1976 changed to 1996.

what’s-his-name?—Michael Cuddihy.

seals and billfolds—See “The Dead Seal” in
The Morning Glory.

The headache piece—“The House of Headache,” translated by John Matthias and Lars-Håkan Svensson in the
New Yorker,
October 17, 2011.

In the other piece—“Minusgrader,” translated by RB as “Below Freezing.”

Glaser—Werner Wolf Glaser.

Maybe the hockey poem—“The Hockey Poem” in
The Morning Glory
.

my longest prose poem—“Finding an Old Ant Mansion” in
The Man in the Black Coat Turns.

“Lars Gustafsson Collection”—Gustafsson lectured at the University of Texas, Austin in the 1970s and subsequently lived there 1983–2003.

the long poem I include in this letter—“Galleriet,” translated by RB as “The Gallery.”

the beautiful Snail-book—RB’s
This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood
is embellished by pencil drawings of snail shells by Gendron Jensen.

our Bly-volume in Swedish—
Prosadikter,
1977.

a Wright-issue—
Ironwood
10, 1977, featured Carol Bly’s photo of James Wright on the horse David, mentioned in Wright’s poetry.

penates
—In both Spanish and Latin, household gods.

Gov Wallace’s photograph—George Wallace, governor of Alabama and segregationist.

Michael Cuddihy wants to have some letters—Published in special TT issue,
Ironwood
13, 1979.

Ironwood
—The
Ironwood
issue included TT’s letters of: January 30, 1970 (partial, seems to belong to letter of that date translated here by JM and L-HS, though written mostly in English), February 27, 1970, February 8, 1972, January 18, 1977, May 19, 1977, May 11, 1978. The originals of all these letters are missing, so the versions here may incorporate transcription errors.

in the title of your book—In 1980, RB published a full translation of TT’s
Sanningsbarriären
as
Truth Barriers,
Sierra Club.

I am finishing an anthology—
News of the Universe,
1980.

“Havsvinden”—Translated by RB as “The Sea Wind.”

“Fredagsbarnen” (or is it “Mandagsbarnen”?)—“Friday’s Children” or “Monday’s Children”; TT is playing on an old proverb here.

Annie did not say—Ann Charters.

I met a young man at M.I.U.—Joseph Stubblefield.

This letter originally appeared in
Poetry East
4/5, 1981, and was reprinted in
Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly,
edited by Richard Jones and Kate Daniels, Beacon Press. Since the original, written in English, is lost, transcription errors may be built-in, as with the
Ironwood
letters.

the Oberlin milieu—Stuart Friebert and David Young, editors of
Field
at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.

Wharton—Bob Wharton.

The review from
Publishers Weekly,
September 26, 1980, was enclosed with the letter.

the TV program—“Tomas Tranströmer—ett möte sommaren 1980.”

In this letter I send—On a photocopy of the article, TT has written: “Means that you don’t have to worry about the Nobel Prize and I don’t have to worry about membership in the Swedish Academy.”

your Petrarch Prize—German annual literary award.

Enclosed is the April 26, 1981, review of
Truth Barriers
from the
New York Times.
RB has captioned photo of TT: “I once read a Kafka book and have never been the same since.”

a letter of yours from late June—This letter is lost.

Enclosed with the letter is a newspaper clipping about a man who shot his TV thirty-one times.

A Mr Haba—James Haba.

mecenat
—A generous patron, especially of literature and the arts (RT).

The letter included poems titled “Postludium “ and “Svarta vykort,” with TT’s note, “Sapphic!”

the NERUDA WATCHDOG—Artur Lundkvist.

My latest essay—“Form That Is Neither In Nor Out,”
Poetry East
4/5, Spring/ Summer 1981.

Enclosed with the letter is a flyer for “A Conference on Form August 7–11, 1982,” and “Love Poem in Twos and Threes,” published in
Loving a Woman in Two Worlds,
Dial Press, 1985.

your mysteriously sad and wonderful poem—“Snowbanks North of the House.”

my Bible job—TT’s versions of the Psalms were published as a part of a new Swedish translation of the Bible in 2000.

I have your new book—
Det vilda torget,
1983.

We could talk about our frog skins!
—RB discusses the Russian fairy tale “The Frog Princess” in “In Search of an American Muse,”
New York Times Book Review,
January 22, 1984.

The shock of Sam’s death—Sam Ray, son of Ruth Bly and David Ray, was killed in an accident in September 1984.

a new translation of
Peer Gynt
—The play was finished and staged at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, in 2008.

Included with the letter were Bill Holm’s poems “Liszt” and “Playing Bach’s
Orgenbüchlein
on the Piano”; also a
Minneapolis Tribune
story with photo of RB in jail for protesting arms manufacturer Honeywell.

the Market Place book—
Det vilda torget.

your latest book—
Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.

the first stanza of “Alkaiskt”—in
För levande och döda.

“Älgen”—“The Moose.”

“Nattgrodor”—“Night Frogs.”

by killing Palme—Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated in Stockholm on February 28, 1986.

“Right here I was nearly killed”—“Ensamhet,” translated by RB as “Solitude.”

Heim—Michael Henry Heim.

your car-wreck poem—“Ensamhet.”

I have all sorts of questions—Robert Hass was then editing his
Selected Poems
of Tranströmer (1987), incorporating a number of RB’s translations. RB includes the revisions occasioned by Hass’s queries in
The Half-Finished Heaven.

Here are the four questions—The four poems are translated by RB as, respectively, “Guard Duty,” “The Scattered Congregation,” “For Mats and Laila,” and “Below Freezing.”

STRYKER LÄNGS VARMA ÖGONBLICK—In “Posteringen,” translated by RB as “Guard Duty.”

eighty-five-syllable poems—RB’s invented form, the
ramage,
several examples of which appear in
Talking into the Ear of a Donkey,
W. W. Norton, 2011.

an essay on the naive male—Part of RB’s work in progress,
Iron John,
Addison-Wesley, 1990.

What fun to have your new book!—
För levande och döda (For the Living and the Dead).

Here is a draft—“Romanesque Arches.”

Neustadt Prize—Annual prize sponsored by the University of Oklahoma, publisher of
World Literature Today,
edited by Ivar Ivask. WLT featured a special section on TT in its Autumn 1990 issue.

Robert Bly
is the author of numerous books of poetry, nonfiction, translation, and cultural criticism, including
The Light Around the Body,
winner of the National Book Award for poetry, and the international best seller
Iron John: A Book about Men.
His many volumes of translation include
The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer.
His most recent book of poems is
Talking into the Ear of a Donkey.
He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Tomas Tranströmer
was born and educated in Stockholm and worked as a psychologist. One of Sweden’s most distinguished poets, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011. He is also the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany’s Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize. He has written twelve books of poems. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Thomas R. Smith
is an internationally published poet, editor, essayist, and teacher. His six books of poems include
Waking Before Dawn
and
The Foot of the Rainbow.
He edited
Walking Swiftly
, a festschrift for Robert Bly’s sixty-fifth birthday, and
Robert Bly in This World
(with James P. Lenfestey), proceedings of a conference at the University of Minnesota in 2009. He lives in western Wisconsin and teaches poetry at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

Torbjörn Schmidt
, born 1955, is Master of Arts at the University of Stockholm and currently preparing a doctoral dissertation on Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry. In 1998 he was appointed editor of the original Swedish edition of
Airmail
(2001), a book that was followed by an enlarged Danish edition in 2007. From 1981 to 1994, Schmidt worked as editor-in-chief of the major Swedish poetry magazine
Lyrikvännen
(“The Poet’s Friend”).