PGR’s blog

TOMAS TRANSTROMER TASTES TRIUMPH WITH NOBEL PRIZE

 

The poet Tomas Transtromer has finally tasted triumph by winning the Nobel Prize for literature for 2011. The Swedish Academy praised Mr. Tranströmer, saying that “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” This is absolutely true of his serene poetry.

 

The 80-year-old Transtromer Transtromer is one of the greatest Scandinavian poets and has had a profound influence in the literary world as  Sweden’s most important poet since World War II, an influence that has steadily grown and has now attained a prominence comparable to that of Pablo Neruda’s during his lifetime. But if Neruda is blazing fire, Transtromer is expanding ice. I was lucky to grab his new collected poems,  “The Great Enigma”  early this year and they are  wonderfully translated by Robin Fulton and endorse his brilliant oeuvre.

 

His poetry thoughtfully explores the unconscious and challenges the reader’s conception of the world. He  is also known for his subtle, multi-faceted poetry that typically explores man’s relationship with nature, and reveals mystical insights into the human mind, a result of his training in psychology.

 

Of his spare and incisive work produced over nearly 30 years, Transtromer has confessed, ”My poems are meeting places.” The metaphor is singularly apt for his divided career, his dominant concerns, his wide-ranging subject matter and, not least, for his claim on a growing audience. Transtromer displays enormous economy of words and expressions in his poems that gives his poetry a rare density. Equally notable is his marvellous ability to coin metaphors, not in a mechanical sense, but because they open up a world by itself. His metaphors give new meanings to things, situations, emotions or people.  Just consider the very first poem that appears in the book mentioned above. The title of the poem is “Prelude”. It describes the process of just getting up from bed in the morning as a parachute jump.

 

 “Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams.

Free of the suffocating turbulence the traveler

sinks toward the green zone of morning. “

 (Translated by Robin Fulton)

 

Tomas Tranströmer comes from a long line of ship pilots who worked in and around the Stockholm Archipelago. He was born in Stockholm on April 15, 1931. His father and mother divorced when he was three; he and his mother lived after that in an apartment in the working-class district of Stockholm. He describes that  apartment  and the shifting of a bookcase into his room and filling of books that he had inherited in his poem titled “The Bookcase.”

 

” It was fetched from the dead woman’s apartment. It stood empty for a few days , empty until I filled it with books, all the bound ones. In doing so , I let in the netherworld. Something rose from the underneath, slowly and inexorably like a massive column of mercury. Your head couldn’t turn away.”

  

One of the most beautiful qualities in his poems is the space we feel in them. One reason for that is that the four or five main images that appear in each of his poems come from widely separated sources in the psyche. His poems are a sort of railway station where trains that have come enormous distances stand briefly in the same building. One train may have some Russian snow still lying on the undercarriage, and another may have Mediterranean flowers still fresh in the compartments.  

 

”A man feels the world through his work like a glove,” Mr. Transtromer has written. The child of a broken home, the poet became a psychologist, first doing therapy and rehabilitation for six years at the Roxtuna Prison for Boys. Later he and his family moved to Vasteras where he worked with a state labor organization, counselling juvenile delinquents, treating the physically handicapped, drug addicts and parole offenders. rehabilitation.

 (Translated by Robin Fulton)

 

Tomas Tranströmer’s poems are so luminous that it elevates you into a sombre mood of meditation about life. He has a strange genius for the image—images come up almost effortlessly. These images have a  resonance with the outer and inner depths of nature and shows the psyche of  a poet vulnerable to the shocks of our world. In a poem called ”Night Duty” he conceives himself in the figure of a ballast stone in the deepest hold of a ship. The poem begins as below:

 

”Tonight I am down among the ballast

I am one of those silent weights

that  prevent the ship from overturning!’

Obscure faces in the darkness like ’stones.

They can hiss: “Don’t touch me.” ”

 (Translated by Robin Fulton)

 

His powerful  imageries are often concerned with issues of fragmentation and isolation. Forest is a recurring image in many of his poems.  Being in the forest seems to connote a sort of existential abandonment — perhaps a necessary precondition to authentic discovery or salvation. The poem “The Clearing” begins:

 

“Deep in the forest there’s an unexpected clearing that can be

reached only by someone who has lost his way.

 The clearing is enclosed in a forest that is choking itself. Black

 trunks with the ashy beard stubble of lichen. The trees

 are tangled tightly together and are dead right up to the tops,

 where a few solitary green twigs touch the light. Beneath them:

 shadow brooding on shadow, and the swamp growing.”

(Translated by Robin Fulton)

 

 

The exotic provenance of images in his poems is balanced by the stones, forests, villages and cities of his native Sweden, the chief metaphors of his meditations on existence. One obsessively recurring image complex : the car, the driver, the mass migration of traffic. The motif of driving somewhere, anywhere, becomes an effective symbol for contemporary man, encased in his technology, separated from the earth, prone to sudden accident, moving in the blind flow of traffic like ”a sluggish dragon” over asphalt where ‘’seeds try to grow.” His marvelous poem “Alone” is an example of it. May be his life as a psychologist explains his fascination with things that might have arisen only from dreams, from the archetypal forms that lie deep, deep within us all. Consider the following passage

“It’s spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.”

Swedish poetry tends to be very rational, and therefore open to fads. Tranströmer, simply by publishing his books, led a movement of poetry in the opposite direction, toward a poetry of silence and depths. Read the poem ” April and Silence”  and note the striking third stanza.

 

 
 

April and Silence

 (Translated by Robin Fulton)

 

Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.

The only things that shines
is yellow flower.

I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black box.

The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker’s.

 

 

Tranströmer was able to tackle the ‘big’ subjects without seeming in the least bit pretentious or foolish. I was bit shocked to read his description of how grief displaces our everyday sense of reality in ‘After Someone’s Death’. It  is a poem of three stanzas of four lines each. As in many of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems, this one begins with the appearance of a story, but by the end, the series of disconnected images do not seem to add up to a coherent narrative. It is the speaker’s visual (rather than organic) ordering of things that holds the poem’s various images together. The title suggests the discontinuity between life and death; it is the time after someone’s death that the poem considers.

 

After Someone’s Death  
 

 (Translated by Robin Fulton)

 

Once there was a shock  
that left behind a long pale glimmering comet’s tail.  
It contains us. It blurs TV images.  
It deposits itself as cold drops on the aerials.  
  
You can still shuffle along on skis in the winter sun  
among groves where last year’s leaves still hang.  
They are like pages torn from old telephone directories–  
the names are eaten up by the cold.  
  
It is still beautiful to hear your heart throbbing.  
But often the shadow feels more real than the body.  
The samurai looks insignificant  
beside his armor of black dragon scales.  
 

 

 

Transtromer has traveled extensively, and much of the pleasure of his art is in the wit and accuracy of his imagination as it expands our awareness and renews the familiar. In a smoky hut in Madeira, two fish are frying with ”tiny garlic explosions.” New York City seen at night from a distant prospect is like ”a spiral galaxy seen from the side,” the dozing bodies in its subway cars becoming ”catacombs in motion.” (Ref to the  poem `Schubertina given at the end`). Sometimes these deft formulations go beyond pungent perception to express an aesthetic credo, a moral stance, as in a prose-poem titled ”Upright,” which captures the condition of living ”free but wary” in the memory of a visit to the Sara tribe in Africa. In ”From an African Diary”, he describes climbing on a canoe hallowed from a log:

 

 ”The canoe is incredibly wobbly , even when you sit on your heels. A balancing act. If the heart lies on the left side you must incline your head a little to the right, nothing in the pockets, no large gestures, all rhetoric must be left behind. Just this: rhetoric is impossible here. The canoe glides out over the water.”

 

 

Penetrating insights about the mystery of existence are abundant in his poems and it has  led to Tranströmer being described as a visionary poet, and certainly a sense of the numinous, of moments of spiritual epiphany, embalms his poetry. They are full of   stolen moments when he seems to have caught himself off-guard: “I pause with my hand on the door handle, take the pulse of the house”, or “I stand under the starry sky / and feel the world creep / in and out of my coat / as in an ant-hill”.

 Finally,  I present below one of the great poems of Transtromer. It is titled, ` Schubertiana’`. His brilliant artistry in combining visuals to create a  sense of cosmic wonder, of communion across time and space is magnificent in this poem.

 

Here’s how he describes what happens as he listens to the Schubert String Quintet: ‘I curl up  like an embryo, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future/suddenly feel that the plants have thoughts’. The importance of music, in this view, is not just that it transcends our daily lives, but that it connects different aspects of existence. Moreover music wakens us to ways of being human that elude the grasp of our worse instincts. The great composer Franz Schubert’s String Quintet may indeed be ‘heroic’ but

…those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly

despise themselves for not being murderers,

don’t recognise themselves here,

and the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can

be bought, don’t recognise themselves here.

 

Read the poem in its entirety as below

 

Schubertiana

(Translated by Robin Fulton)

 

 

1

In the evening darkness in a place outside New York, a viewpoint point where

             one single glance will encompass the homes of eight million

             people.
The giant city over there is a long shimmering drift, a spiral galaxy seen

            from the side.
Within the galaxy coffee-cups are pushed across the counter, the shop

           windows beg from passers-by, a flurry of shoes leave no prints.
The climbing fire escapes, the lift doors glide shut, behind  police - 
locked doors  a perpetual seethe of voices.
Slouched bodies doze in subway cars, the hurtling catacombs.
I know too – without statistics – that right now Schubert is being played
in some room over there and that for someone the notes are
more real than anything else.

2

The endless expanses of the human brain are crumpled to the size of a fist.
In April the swallow returns to last year’s nest under the guttering of this

             very barn in this very parish.
She flies from Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two

continents, makes for precisely this vanishing dot in the land-

             mass.
And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary
            chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,
is a stout young gentleman from Vienna known to his friends as `The
Mushroom,” who slept with his glasses on
and stood at his writing desk punctually of a morning.
And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in motion.

3

The string quintet is playing. I walk home through warm forests with the

             ground springy under me,
curl up like an embryo, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future, suddenly

            feel that the plants have thoughts.

4

So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day without
           Sinking through the earth!
Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the village.
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding, trust that

           the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden axe-blow

           from within won’t come.
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the three
           hundred times life-size bee swarm of steel.
But none of that is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else. And they keep us  com-
           pany part of the way .
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers –
          trustingly – follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the
          darkness.

5

We squeeze together at the piano and play with four hands in F minor,
          two coachmen on the same coach, it looks a little ridiculous.
The hands seem to be moving resonant weights to and fro, as if we were

          tampering with the counterweights
in an effort to disturb the great scale arm’s terrible balance: joy and
         suffering weighing exactly the same.
Annie said, `This music is so heroic,’ and she’s right.
But those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly
          despise themselves for not being murderers,
don’t recognize themselves here,
and the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can be

            bought, don’t recognize themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody that remains itself in all its transfor-

             mations, sometimes glittering and pliant, sometimes rugged

             and strong, snail-track and steel wire.
The perpetual humming that follows us — now –
up
the depths.

 By bestowing Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy has finally recognized the world’s most translated poet, a poet who truly grapples with the agony of modern man and daringly defines our inner world.The turbulent silence of Transtromer has triumphed finally.

 

 

Ref: The Great Enigma: new and collected poems translated by Robin  Fulton

 

    The Winged Energy of Delight-poems from Europe, Asia and the   Americas translated by Robert Bly

 

 

 
 

Some poets conquer you at the very first reading itself and you know that they are going to be part of you forever. For me, the great Norwegian poet Olav H Hauge was one of a kind, a rarity in modern literature. I encountered his poetry first in an anthology edited by Robert Bly titled, “The winged Energy of Delight”. Since then I had been waiting to get hold of his poetry collection and I must confess that  my emotions on reading them were ineffable. As Robert Bly says -” Olav Hauge’s flavour is persistent, like the taste of persimmons that we can never forget.” I agree that the tang that even his tiny and taut poems give last for long. 

Norway has produced three great poets in the last century  and they are Rolf Jacobsen, Olav H Hauge and Tarjei Vesaas. Their contributions were significant in bringing Scandinavian poetry to the forefront of modern world literature. I had written a blog earlier on the poetry of Rolf Jacobsen titled Room 301 . This blog is the second in the trilogy series that I have planned. Like Robert Frost, Olav Hauge led a solitary life and wrote poetry in a country side in western part of Norway. He was born in 1908 and lived all his life on what he could produce from three acres of ground. 

 He lived in the old pre-commercial gift-giving society and visitors say the richness in his house lay in the handmade spoons and bowls, the wooden reading chair, and book cases to which best poetry from many continents had found its way. Olav was an avid reader and he modestly confesses in an interview that half his life was spent in the world of literature. Thus, working as a gardener and fruit farmer in Ulvik where he grew up, he lived a grand life in the books that he collected and the poems that he wrote.

 

Olav Haugue’s poems are written in his native western Norwegian dialect, conveying by their very word forms both an earthiness and a down-to-earth acceptance of the cycle of life which Standard English cannot transmit in the same way. Yet the translation by Robert Fulton, with its simple, concrete vocabulary, repetition, and straightforward syntax, is as close one can hope to get to the deceptive simplicity of the original. Let us start with a very well known poem.

Don’t give me the whole truth

Don’t give me the whole truth,
don’t give me the sea for my thirst,
don’t give me the sky when I ask for light,
but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote
as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing
and the wind a grain of salt.

The above poem is simply sublime as it is about sensitivity and delicateness. The beauty of it is that the poet does it marvelously with concrete images. And it has an amusing and appealing quality too. The poet announces right away what he wants:”Don’t come to me with the whole truth”. The poet then asks us to bring only a “hint” when he asks for truth, and as a model for such discretion, mentions that bird carry away only a few drops of water and the wind takes from the ocean only a grain of salt.   This short, straightforward and tough style is remindful Chinese  poetry, of putting as few words to a phenomenon as possible. 

The following is another famous poem in Norway, and in its simplicity it points to something central to each of our particular expressions of existence. A comforting as well as uplifting poem in the sense that each has to tread one’s path in a unique way knowing that even the trail of one’s journey will  be cleaned irrevocably

 

 

Your Way

Translated by Robin Fulton

No-one has marked out the road
you are to take
out in the unknown
out in the blue.

This is your road.
Only you
will take it. And there’s no
turning back.

And you haven’t marked your road
either.
And the wind smoothes out your tracks
on desolate hills.

Olav’s  poetry varies in form, from sonnets to short haiku-like poems, and the quality varies as well, but he has written a great deal of poems of simple beauty and usually with a meditative approach to all things small and universal. He is  also a significant voice in the Norwegian geographical landscape too, as he in many ways expresses its grandeur and simplicity, its wildness and purity, and the human feeling of separateness from each other and from nature, while at the same time he transmits a sense of unity with everything and everyone.

 

December Moon 1969

 Translated by: Robert Bly

It hides its steel
In a silver sheath.
On the edge there is blood

His spare imagery and unpretentious tone ranges from bleak to unabashedly joyous- an intricate interplay between head and heart and hand. Look at this poem in which he lauds the thorns of a rose. I loved this deft poem where the poet finds something truly positive in the apparently negative. 

Briar Rose
 

Translated by : Robert Hedin

The rose has been sung about.
I want to sing of the thorns,
and the root–how it grips
the rock hard, hard
as a thin girl’s hand.

Sorrow and suffering are essential elements in Hauge’s poetry. It is present at all times, weighing down as well as lifting up, hopelessness combined with an anticipated redemption. Negative experiences are greatly represented in Hauge’s poetry, but they are not the final destination for the poetic self. The sorrow is heavy, and sometimes even paralysing, but the author brings a movement to the poems where these depressing emotions appear. For example in the poem titled “Ophelia” , he asks

“Where would we go
If we didn’t have sorrow and death?”

 

Let us consider another striking poem titled “Black Crosses”

 

 

Black Crosses

Translated by Robin Fulton

Black crosses
in white snow
stooped in rain, awry.

Here came the dead
over the thorny moor
with their crosses over their shoulders
and laid them by
and went to rest
under each icy tussock.

The combination of the pure, simple image and the symbolic treatment of the liberation from suffering are almost gothic in its emphasized and clear darkness, where rain, snow and crosses appear together in the above poem.

The dead come walking, they move – come walking with their sorrow, and as such they are used as a personification. Life and death mirror each other. The dead come walking and lay their suffering down, before they go to rest. Hauge animates the inanimate, what is already dead and buried. In this way, even the unmoving sheds a cold light on our lives. Death in this poem is suddenly our own death, as if death is already here. Hauge creates a moving image of how the dead have walked there, perhaps together, like a long file of doomed on their way to the final rest. The poet is absent, like the absence resting over empty space where no one is looking.

Think of Zen poetry of immediate experience, place it in a northern climate and austere living conditions and you have the poems of Olav Hauge. Despite sorrows, many of his poems are radiant with its bright positive outlook to life and future. Consider the following poem.

 

New Tablecloth

 
A newtablecloth,yellow!
And fresh white paper!
Words will have to arrive,
Because the cloth is so fine
and the paper so delicate!
When ice forms on the fjord, we know
Birds do come and land on it
(fjord: a long narrow inlet of the sea between steep cliffs; common in Norway)

His carefree and come-what-may attitude is again beautifully reflected in the poem below.

 
You Are The Wind

Translated by: Robert Bly

I am a boat
without wind.
You were the wind.
Was that the direction I wanted to go?
Who cares about directions
with a wind like that!

For the word to be a vehicle of signification seems to be its most important aspect to Hauge. The following  lines from “Prayer” emphasize it

 “Open my eyes, Oh Lord,
that I better can gaze
upon the wonder, not only
its outer glaze.”

I wish to end my blog with my favourite poem that I think casts a very positive outlook on life and  with the craving for freedom it expresses,  translates well into any human language. I wish someone had painted a picture with these lines embedded in it so that I could hang it up my drawing room. It is made up of a chain of repetition of the subordinate clause ‘that’ as its key structural component and point of departure. It is interesting to note that this acts as a dominant rhythmical unit in this poem that works through continually adding new elements to it.

 

 

 

It’s the Dream

Translated by Robin Fulton

It’s the dream we carry in secret
that something miraculous will happen,
that it must happen –
that time will open
that the heart will open
that doors will open
that the mountains will open
that springs will gush –
that the dream will open,
that one morning we will glide into
some little harbour we didn’t know was there.

At sixty-five, Olav married the Norwegian artist Bodil Cappelen, whom he met at one of his rare poetry readings. He died at 86 in 1994 in the old way; no real evidence of disease was present. He simply did not eat for ten days, and so he died. A horse-drawn wagon carried his body back up the mountain after the service. Everyone noticed a small colt that ran happily alongside its mother and the coffin all the way.

 

 

    

 Ref: The Dream We Carry: Selected and last poems of Olav H. Hauge translated by Robert Bly and  Robert   Hedin

 Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses  by Olav H. Hauge translated by Robin Fulton

 

        

THIRUVATHIRA THOUGHTS

INTRODUCTION

Here is a Thiruvathira dance scene in its pastoral setting from the Malayalam movie ‘Parinayam’

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zGuG-gjeeqk