Airmail Read online

  AIRMAIL

  * * *

  By Robert Bly

  Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962)

  Hunger by Knut Hamsun (translation, 1967)

  The Light Around the Body (1967)

  Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (translation, 1971)

  Sleepers Joining Hands (1973)

  Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets—Martinson, Ekelöf, and Tranströmer (translation, 1975)

  Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (anthology, 1975)

  News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness (anthology, 1980)

  The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981)

  Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (translation, 1981)

  The Eight Stages of Translation (1983)

  Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (translation, 1983)

  Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985)

  Iron John: A Book About Men (1990)

  The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures (anthology, 1995)

  The Sibling Society (1996)

  Morning Poems (1997)

  Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems (1999)

  The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (translation, 2001)

  The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001)

  The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations (translation, 2004)

  My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005)

  Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011)

  By Tomas Tranströmer

  17 Poems (1954)

  Secrets on the Road (1958)

  The Half-Finished Heaven (1962)

  Resonance and Footprints (1966)

  Night Vision (1970)

  Pathways (1973)

  Baltics (1974)

  Truth Barriers (1978)

  The Wild Market Square (1983)

  For the Living and the Dead (1989)

  Memories Look at Me (a prose memoir, 1993)

  Grief Gondola (1996)

  The Great Enigma (2004)

  AIRMAIL

  * * *

  The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer

  Edited by

  Thomas R. Smith

  Original Swedish publication edited by

  Torbjörn Schmidt

  Graywolf Press

  Robert Bly letters copyright © 2013 by Robert Bly

  Tomas Tranströmer letters copyright © 2013 by Tomas Tranströmer

  Introduction, notes, and expanded compilation copyright © 2013 by Thomas R. Smith

  The original Swedish publication of Airmail: Brev 1964–1990 was compiled and edited by Torbjörn Schmidt and published in 2001 by Albert Bonniers Förlag. Original notes and original compilation © 2001 by Torbjörn Schmidt.

  Some of the letters, as noted, originally appeared in Ironwood and Poetry East.

  Letters originally written by Tomas Tranströmer in Swedish (May 27, 1964–January 30, 1970, and brief excerpts of other letters) were translated into English by Judith Moffett and Lars-Håkan Svensson, copyright © 2013 by Judith Moffett and Lars-Håkan Svensson. The letter dated October 1, 1966, was translated into English by Robert Bly, copyright © 2013 by Robert Bly.

  All poems by Tomas Tranströmer have been translated into English by Robert Bly, except where noted, and in most cases appear in The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, selected and translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly, and published in 2001 by Graywolf Press. The poems “Conflict,” “Walking Running Crawling,” “Sketch in October,” “C Major,” “To Friends Behind a Border,” and “The Wind Shakes Caterpillars” by Tomas Tranströmer in English translation © 2013 by Robert Bly. “Twenty-Four Hours” from Windows and Stones: Selected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by May Swenson with Leif Sjöberg, © 1972; all rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15620; used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

  Excerpts from this book appeared in the Kenyon Review, the New York Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Rowboat, and Tin House.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-639-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-069-7

  First Graywolf Printing, 2013

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012953983

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover drawing of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer by Monica Tranströmer

  Contents

  * * *

  Introduction.

  Crossways: Pages from a Literary Friendship

  A Note on the Translations and Their Presentation

  The Letters

  Appendix 1. Letters

  Appendix 2. Poems

  Notes

  Introduction

  * * *

  Crossways:

  Pages from a Literary Friendship

  The Friends

  In late March 1964, a few days before his thirty-third birthday, Tomas Tranströmer, already critically recognized in Sweden for his first three books, wrote to the Sixties Press in Madison, Minnesota. Tranströmer had caught wind of Robert Bly’s press in a British magazine and wanted to see for himself the American literary maverick’s poetry journal The Sixties. Tranströmer was interested in Bly’s journal not only as a reader but also as a writer and translator. In fact, he had already translated poems into Swedish by Bly’s close friend and colleague James Wright.

  On April 6, Carol Bly typed an initial reply, to which her husband added a note of his own, revealing an amazing and auspicious coincidence:

  Just before your first note came by accident, I went to the Univ of Minn library to get your Halvfärdiga himlen.

  That day Bly had driven all the way across the state to obtain Tranströmer’s recent volume—known in English as The Half-Finished Heaven—and discovered upon his return a note from its author.

  If initially Tranströmer’s interest lay more with Wright’s poems, it soon shifted to Bly’s. A single letter to Tranströmer, dated July 6, 1964, is included in Wright’s selected correspondence, A Wild Perfection. If there are others, they remain unpublished; clearly Tranströmer’s relationship with Wright, if cordial, stopped short of the intimacy of his friendship with Bly.

  By May 1964, Tranströmer had translated a few of Bly’s poems, to which the latter responded with obvious enthusiasm. Such was the two poets’ curiosity about each other that they soon both actively discussed the possibility of meeting in person. In August Bly announced his intention to include two of his English translations of Tranströmer’s poems in a Sixties Press volume, Twenty Swedish Poets. That project never came to fruition, though Bly eventually included Tranströmer’s “Out in the Open” in the one and only issue of The Seventies in 1972.

  In the surviving correspondence, Tranströmer’s letter of September 3, 1964, marked a new stage in what was quickly becoming a working
friendship, the first of many long, fascinating letters detailing the intricacies of the translation process from both sides. In less than five months’ time, the friendship between Tranströmer and Bly had developed into something resembling its mature form. Their correspondence would continue for the next twenty-five years at varying degrees of intensity and frequency, until a stroke in 1990 limited Tranströmer’s ability to write and speak.

  Many English-speaking readers of this book know Robert Bly’s labors as poet, editor, translator, social critic, and spiritual father of the men’s movement. Bly grew up on a Norwegian American family farm in western Minnesota, earned a degree from Harvard, and eschewed membership in the academic establishment of his day to stake out a contrarian position as a literary outrider and independent scholar. Establishing his base of operations near the old farmstead in Madison, he introduced a generation of American readers to poets from beyond the borders of the United States, including, to mention only the Scandinavians, Swedes such as Tranströmer and Harry Martinson and Norwegians like Rolf Jacobsen and Olav H. Hauge. Bly’s vehicle for promoting these and other poets was his now-legendary magazine, in its consecutive incarnations The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies, and, in one encore appearance, The Thousands.

  Tomas Tranströmer, five years younger than Bly, was born and grew up in Stockholm. His maternal grandfather was a ship pilot, and his mother, a schoolteacher, separated early from his father. Tranströmer has written insightfully of his boyhood years in a prose memoir, Memories Look at Me. Eventually he became a psychologist and, at the time he first made contact with Bly, was installed with his young family on the grounds of a prison for boys at Roxtuna. Worried that Bly might be put off visiting, Tranströmer assured him on May 27, 1964, “Don’t be alarmed/frightened! Visitors generally think it an idyllic setting.”

  A remarkable quality of the two poets’ friendship is the swiftness of its evolution from casual beginnings to full-blown engagement. Some of this development, unfortunately, occurs in gaps in what we have of the correspondence. Letters from March to October of 1965 in particular are notably missing. It’s evident from Bly’s letter of July 8 that they have met. From a letter of July 8 to James Wright we overhear Bly’s first impression of Tranströmer while traveling in Sweden:

  ...he was very nice—what he looked like was a combination of Kierkegaard and Orrin Bly! He had Kierkegaard’s long nose and inquisitive profile, and from the back looked exactly like Orrin...He was very touching—he knew entire poems of yours and mine by heart, and dozens & dozens of lines, which he would come up with in conversation about a tree or something. He said that Lion’s Tail & Eyes, even the subtitle Poems About Laziness and Silence, had taught him something incredibly rare—something about how to live. He’d bend his head and say this in a dogged way, so I can imagine the pressures in Sweden against laziness and against silence.

  It was the first of many visits in each poet’s respective country.

  One catches the full flavor of this exuberant, youthful stage of the relationship in Bly’s letter of November 20, 1966. Bly is responding to Tranströmer’s newly published Klanger och spår (Resonance and Footprints):

  ...the book is very good, and I’m enjoying it tremendously. As I read in it I say, “Well, look at all the things I haven’t done yet!” So it reminds me of poems I might write sometime in the future, so it’s a future book, the kind I like best. You do some very strange things in this book. I translated for Carolyn [Bly] your poem about walking in the woods, and evil shaking his head across a desk, and the modern building with so much glass, and finally the airport scene. She was startled and moved...The trains that meet in the (station of this) poem come from such long distances, each of them! That is what is good! One train still has snow on it, another one has a palm leaf caught in the undercarriage—

  Readers may recognize in the above the seed of an image for Tranströmer’s work that Bly has frequently employed, here in his introduction to The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer:

  [Tranströmer’s] poems are a sort of railway station where trains that have come enormous distances stand briefly in the same building. One train has some Russian snow on the under-carriage, and another may have Mediterranean flowers fresh in the compartments, and Ruhr soot on the roofs. (ix)

  While accurately describing Tranströmer’s poems, this metaphor also goes a long way toward defining the affinity between Bly and Tranströmer. Chief among their similarities, both poets are intuitives whose natural speech is the image. This bond was especially important at a time when political and academic rhetoric dominated the establishment poetry of each poet’s home country. Tranströmer could be speaking for both men when he wrote in his poem “Standing Up”: “no big arm movements, please, all rhetoric has to be left behind.”

  Another point of similarity is the two poets’ grounding in the natural world, Bly in the fields and lakes of western Minnesota and Tranströmer in the forests and islands of central Sweden. Both are keepers of an older way of being on the earth in a time of runaway technological change. As such, they are not anti-technology so much as rightly wary of change that wrenches human beings out of their ancient rootedness in the physical. Each poet may be said to stand both in the human world and in an interior realm where, as Jung said, the individual life partakes of the totality of existence, in all its mystery and grandeur. To put it another way, Bly and Tranströmer both, as the critic Charles Molesworth has remarked of Bly, write “religious meditations for a public that is no longer ostensibly religious.” Interestingly, the political arena is where both poets find themselves on a collision course with the orthodoxies of their respective literary establishments, more ironic perhaps because of their essential political like-mindedness.

  In his letter of October 8, 1966, for example, Bly complains that no American editor has shown the courage to publish his ferocious Vietnam War poem “Counting the Small-Boned Bodies”: “The little poem is getting to be well-known, though no one will print it. The last to refuse it was the Book Section of the Herald Tribune and Washington Post this week, who had asked me for poems.” For his part, Tranströmer must navigate a narrowly Marxist literary milieu in Sweden. He remarks of one disapproving review:

  The whole thing culminated in an accusation that I was legitimizing the idea that “the world might be contemplated as a poem.”...Generally speaking the young Marxists in Sweden have little tolerance for poetry. One should show decency and stop writing.

  (October 29, 1966, trans. JM and L-HS)

  In general, the tone taken by these two literary noncomformists strongly suggests what the psychologist Stuart Miller, in his book Men and Friendship, identifies as a peculiarly European component of men’s friendship, the element of “complicity”—that is, a sense of being united in common purpose and sympathy against the oppressive powers of this world, which in Bly’s case manifested as a stifling academic conservatism in the United States and in Tranströmer’s, a puritanical Marxist correctness in Sweden.

  The friendship of Bly and Tranströmer remains strong to this day despite time and the handicapping silence Tranströmer suffered as a result of his stroke. Airmail’s two-and-a-half-decade correspondence tracks the rich multiple threads of that relationship: literary and translation work, personal and family chronicle, political and cultural commentary, all here in abundance and given coherence by a prevailing high-spirited warmth mixed with irreverence in which neither man takes himself so seriously as to be above joking or outright foolery. As the letters unfold, we overhear the two poets inspire and translate each other, arrange reading tours and visits, gossip, and attend the milestones of each other’s lives. Above it all, arching like some uncanny northern night rainbow, is a fidelity to art and a delight in the possibilities of the present moment, no matter how politically dark or unpromising it may appear. As Bly exclaims to Tranströmer on December 1, 1965, “How wonderful to be able t
o live in a time when something fresh can be written! There are endless fields of flowers—many of them are black flowers—on all sides.”

  The Letters

  Viewed as a whole, the correspondence between Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer has its own distinct character and arc. The fast-deepening closeness of its authors is mirrored by the mounting volume of letters, reaching a peak in the first decade of the friendship; roughly two-thirds of the correspondence occurs within the first ten years and the last third spans the fifteen years remaining until Tranströmer’s stroke. The single highest-volume year is 1970, when Bly and Tranströmer are clearly most energized by their reciprocal translation efforts.

  The reader will notice in the letters certain defined stretches of intense concentration on translation work. In this respect, two periods of the correspondence stand out, each centering on major translation projects. The first pairs Tranströmer’s volume of Bly’s poems, Krig och tystnad (War and Silence) in 1969 with Bly’s Seventies Press volume Twenty Poems of Tomas Tranströmer in 1970. The second pairing occurs roughly a decade later with Tranströmer’s selection of Bly’s prose poems Prosadikter (Prose Poems) in 1977 and Bly’s translation of Tranströmer’s Truth Barriers (Sanningsbarriären) in 1980.

  While the first of these two great periods of translation is exploratory, with each poet learning the other’s style, strengths, and weaknesses, in the second period Tranströmer and Bly give much attention to the prose poem medium, with which they are both clearly fascinated. Prose poems such as Bly’s “Walking Swiftly” and “Finding the Father” and Tranströmer’s “Standing Up” and “Start of a Late Autumn Novel” generate lengthy discussion. A bonus is the draft of Bly’s introduction to Prosadikter, which to my knowledge has not been reprinted in English since its initial appearance in the May/June 1977 issue of the American Poetry Review as “What the Prose Poem Carries with It.”