Love stories

Sea at Smygehamn, Skåne

[Image source: https://www.reseguiden.se/bilder/sverige/skane/smyge/smygehamn/kallt-hav-198947 .]

Poetry in Swedish, for the would-be translator, divides into two starkly different challenges. 

There's the unrhymed free verse, which preponderates nowadays and is highly translatable, at least reasonably so. Translating it is fun, you can dwell on details, on nuances. You can be hopeful that the resulting poem will be OK. This is the poetry in Swedish that most international readers will instantly think of: most of Edith Södergran and Gunnar Ekelöf, Pär Lagerkvist, Tomas Tranströmer, Göran Sonnevi and virtually all contemporary poets. 

But the bulk of poetry in Swedish, up to the 1960s, was metrical and rhymed. Rhymes may be masculine or feminine; the latter come easily, because of Swedish verb-forms and the suffixed definite article, and they are often an obligatory feature of the stanza form. Getting this poetry into anything like modern English is next to impossible, whether you strive to retain all its formal features or not. Translating it isn't fun, just hard slog. Nuances go out of the window. The most you can hope is that it won't be completely unreadable. 

It means that a poet like Karin Boye (1900-1941) is mainly known abroad for her unrhymed poems, whereas in Sweden her best-known poems are often rhymed. And Hjalmar Gullberg (1898-1961), nearly all of whose poetry is rhymed, was one of Sweden's most-read poets but is basically not known to the English-speaking world at all. 

Translating Swedish rhymed poetry into English used to be a bit more feasible. In the early years of the twentieth century, translators like Charles Wharton Stork and C.D. Locock, adepts in the English/US tradition of rhymed verse and its accumulated battery of handy conventions, made heroic efforts to bring us something of Runeberg and Fröding and Levertin and Karlfeldt. Even so, the results were often clunky. 

But who has those skills today? And even if we had them, what good would it do? It would be totally misleading to make Hjalmar Gullberg or Karin Boye sound like late Victorians.

I don't have any answer to this, except that perhaps it must always be the case that a literature reserves some of its treasures for speakers of its own language. 

But here, anyway, is an attempt to transmit some kind of shadowy sense of one of Hjalmar Gullberg's most famous poems, "Love Story" ("Kärleksroman"), published in the 1933 collection Love in the Twentieth Century (Kärlek i tjugonde seklet). The Swedish text is in tight four-line stanzas rhyming abab, except for section XII where the stanzas rhyme aabb. 

LOVE STORY

I

The blonde Venus shot out of the sea foam

and swam a race with me to the shore.

There was room for two on the rock outcrop.

We made for it. I pulled you up by the hand.

On stone, not like the princess and the pea, 

you lay and baked your brown limbs.

And you were twenty-one and strong and slim

And I want to trumpet that to the whole world. 

II

From science, and not from love poems, 

we get the answers that truly address the topic.

The youth with inhibitions, soul in conflict,

is cured once he sees a woman naked.

Exulting he sank into her arms, the ascetic

whose former worldview had all been Christ-coloured.

A shipwrecked man, I came out of the infinite,

rescued, upon the earth where I was born.

III

Romeo, Juliet, Isolde, Tristan,

were more in our grandparents' style. 

We've put that romantic stuff on the blacklist.

Get some air and light into the musty bedroom!

We know love in the month of August

can bear fruit in May in a clinic.

A new generation has replaced yearning

and prudishness with the matter-of-fact erotic.

IV

Get married! One isn't so stupid. 

We mean to hold onto our freedom.

You stay with your man. I have my room.

Our only law is birth-control.

We don't bow the knee for any priest.

We make no promise of fidelity.

Thus runs the vow at our wedding feast:

I love you, as long as I fancy it.

V

One is modern, one is unprejudiced.

I am evidently one of the polygamous.

A woman entices. Who can let that be?

You bit your lip and didn't make a fuss.

Wein, Weib, Gesang! One dances and gets drunk.

The brief adventure is all set up.

You grieved a long time over my escapade.

Then you went off and did the same. 

VI

Sleeping Venus, discovered in the image

of those paintings from the Renaissance,

with hand on naked sex, without a glance ...

What are you dreaming? What do your eyelashes hide?

Sleeping Venus, born for me from the sea-foam,

here's your body when I need your body.

But the glance and the dream go beyond my room ...

Though I fling myself on your limbs. 

VII

The third angel blew a trumpet blast.

A star fell from the Milky Way's glitter,

where the nebulae are shaken like featherdown.

And the star's name was Wormwood, which is bitter.

And the man went with the woman he loved

in their daily thirst to life's deep well.

And the star fell into the well's depths and it gave

a bitter flavour to the sexual.

VIII

It was like being struck by lightning when I found

you meant everything to me in the world.

Too late! I knew that a strange man

was stroking your lovely hair on the pillow.

Oh you the only one, you who young and blonde

stepped out of the sea, as if you were born of foam, not earth!

We split after five years of misunderstandings.

I stood on the quay. And you stepped on board. 

IX

How can two souls abandon each other?

I wrote a telegram: "Forgive me, come!"

And had this answer: "There's nothing to blame.

But that which was can never be made again."

I dreamed of a kind of correction course

for all that had gone awry and stood in need,

until someone sent me a foreign paper,

containing the announcement you were dead. 

X

Your foot was a bird in my hands.

Yes, my hands know you by heart.

What they narrate are your body's legends.

Every fingertip is a reliable witness.

If blinded by your splendour I had to shut my eyes

I found on the sheet or the pillow

an ear's labyrinth, a breast's rotunda,

like a goal for my hands' pilgrimage. 

XI

My body, my whole being is a fire

that nothing slackens, nothing weakens.

Have I broken with love, been judged and condemned?

Those who break the laws of love shall be burned.

Out of the past I fetch your image.

Oh redeem me, you who alone have the power!

Transform this fire that rages so wildly,

so I can serve you, as an altar flame.

XII

Out of memory's purgatory you stepped clean.

I meant this song as an epitaph for you.

Human progress craves sacrifice. We were selected. 

The car of the future drives over the smashed fragments.

I sing our comradeship's litany.

May higher powers condemn, or free!

My youth is dead and its books burnt.

"To another study my mind wills to turn."

XIII

Yet the swell sings on the azure coast,

sea meets shore, two separate elements.

Homesickness overcomes travel-lust;

but late, late shall the heart forget.

Eternal source, from whose deep flood

the goddess is lifted up on a mollusc's shell,

you sung for me of love unto death!

And still it roars in my soul, your blue chorale. 

Swedish text of "Kärleksroman":

https://schoutbynacht.com/2013/05/25/karleksroman-hjalmar-gullberg-1933/

Another Swedish text, somewhat longer. The final section is completely different, and earlier in the poem there are two extra sections. I'm guessing this is an early superseded version, because Gullberg's collected Poems (Dikter, ed. Anders Palm, 1985) contains the other one. 

https://jaglekermedord.blogspot.com/2016/07/karleksroman-hjalmar-gullberg-1898-1961.html

The Birth of Venus (La nascita di Venere), c. 1480 painting by Sandro Botticelli

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

*

Reading this Hjalmar Gullberg poem, I kept thinking of a poem written some sixty-five years later, Craig Raine's A la recherche du temps perdu (1999). 

There are big differences of course. Gullberg flies through such a wide range of tones, is interested in big ideas, is (in a broad sense) a religious poet; Raine's interested in memory, history, the grain of real things. Gullberg's poem was well-received; Raine's wasn't. 

Nevertheless the resemblances are striking. Not just the content but the method, the pain and flippancy and bathos. The male gaze. Yes, the rhyming, too. 

And something else. Both poems lay themselves open in a confessional way. The interesting thing that's being opened up isn't so much the poet's actions (say,  Gullberg's inconstancy, or Raine's refusal to be literary executor) as the fact of the poet's guilt. Which invites being criticized for egotism and self-pity: Grow up! This isn't your tragedy . . .

But it feels important and honest to acknowledge it: the dreadful sense that a successful person feels, that their success is in some way predicated on others' sorrow. The poem presents the lovers as sacrificial victims, "smashed fragments". But these lines surely invite the reflection that Gullberg himself might more properly be located in the "car of the future" that drives over them. Three years after Love in the Twentieth Century he was heading Swedish Radio's drama department (1936-1950). Four years after that, he was in the Swedish Academy (1940). 

*

In this context I suppose it might be worth pasting what I wrote about Craig Raine's poem back in 2002, though I wish I could disclaim the cattiness and reductiveness. 

Craig Raine: A la recherche du temps perdu (1999)

The woman who Raine intends to memorialise is unnamed, like Shakespeare’s young man, though the name is not secret even to an outer public since she is stated to be the Penguin translator of Flaubert’s Tentation. 

In the end her personality remains about as shadowy as the young man in the Sonnets. The flyleaf of the book (which might well be considered part of the poem, since I guess Raine wrote it) talks about restoring her “formidable complexity” (along with other things) but I don’t think this is achieved and don’t really see how it could be without supplying a lot more of her own words than we actually get. 

Raine uses about 800 lines of loose couplets, and I suppose one question that arises is whether his memoir would have more effectively achieved its aim (“To make you here”) in plain prose. Or again, he might have presented his material linearly, instead of cutting back and forth.  

It might seem rather against the grain to attempt to disentangle the chronology -- but since that is what Raine is shown doing himself (working out if he could have caught AIDS), and since it is after all possible (a marked difference from Shakespeare’s sequence), let’s accept the covert invitation. For after all, in doing this we are treating the woman as a real person, and thus forwarding the author’s project. 

Childhood, in Tunis (undated). She is 9 years old.

“thirty years ago” (i.e. from now, therefore late ‘60s?) their relationship began, and he read her poems. But the quotation about the “rare, precious hair of the dead” must have been written later, if it was written, as the poem says, when her father died -- because her father was able to refer to Raine as “the gutter-snipe” years after they’d split. 

Before the below, probably -- “At Stoneleigh, Watlington” -- she sublets, and makes Raine give a lodger notice. 

1969 -- She is in Strasbourg for a year, and writes him letters. Raine visits her, at Easter, and they go camping -- their happiest time together. (She is presumably an undergraduate doing her year abroad. Raine, born in 1944 so already in his mid-twenties, was tutoring.)

1970 -- she is living at Crick Road. Presumably soon after, they split -- since the poem says “things were going wrong”. 

Sometime later: she has a lecturing job and gives it up. Tries modelling. Her first adventure with “a total stranger” -- thereafter, many more. 

Also sometime later, she has a black boy-friend (Jamie, the one who gives her AIDS) -- but Raine and she go to bed at least once thereafter (“talking like sister and brother”). 

“1982, 83?” -- she is living at Gillespie Road. The cowboy boots, the nude photograph from her modelling venture. 

1986 “unreadable” novel published. (Three years before the next.) 

1989 (i.e. the year before the next). She already knows she has AIDS. Asks him to be her literary executor -- he refuses. 

“1990”. The last time they met, at Fornello’s, a restaurant. She invites him to Gillespie Road “sometime”, but he obviously doesn’t go.

The experience of working all this out is quite interesting, since it reveals a more vulnerable side to the woman than appears in swift reading through. Her own chaste letters (the “epistolary iceberg”) and her burning out of Raine’s “filth” from his, are now seen to pre-date her later sexual adventurings. The shock inspired by Grünewald’s painting is presented as prophetic of her death. But she retains a reserve to the end (“Details that make you cringe”). 

I meant to complain that, if not quite “unlovable”, she certainly strikes us as unloving. But she does have an affection for the famous dead (Racine, Proust, Caruso...) and for Raine himself, and we know too that she has a certain consideration for her parents’ feelings. She doesn’t love her goldfish. 

Raine’s couplets are easy to read, often humbly bathetic:

We ate a quiche, a quiche Lorraine.
Quiche hadn’t reached England then.

The bubble at the corner of your mouth.
Which seems somehow to mean so much.

Sometimes, there’s an unpleasing university wit, suggesting light verse:

The vulgar fraction and the better half.

or

The way your knees whispered together
like words of a feather -

And then there are the trademark successions of similes:

Tunis. The palm trees’ structure
is file and feather duster. 

The sea is sparkling like sandpaper.
Arabic script, its ripple and flutter

stencilled on whitewash.
The main café: a line of hookahs

like a single letter
practising itself. 

It’s hard to judge a passage like this as a whole (I like the sandpaper, but not the rest so much). The only way seems to be to see this as building up a civilised, inquisitive, accepting tone, a sort of fluid though limited medium in which the woman can be, to the same limited extent, re-membered. What we get is not the woman as a complete person (which would involve her relation to her parents and who knows who else) but the images that live in Raine’s imagination and bear her name. What else could he honestly come up with?

But I don’t like it very much. In some ways I even prefer Dryden’s Eleonora, though the author freely admits “One Disadvantage I have had, which is, never to have known, or seen my Lady”. Dryden passes methodically and blithely through each field of virtue -- Eleonora excels in them all -- and we are not informed of a single gossipy, peculiar little trait or taste. But Dryden, in surveying this model noble wife and mother, achieves more than he knows. Most of what we are we share with our peers. 

Of Raine’s poem I might say, unkindly, that its chief impression is “a glimpse of Oxford life”. But still, that's an honourable achievement, especially as the glimpses are so intimate (Raine’s athlete’s foot is the thing that made me wince most). 

Nevertheless, he doesn’t really stretch his art to meet the challenge that his desire to re-create contains. The poem feels simultaneously complacent and restless, as if he knows he wants to magic something out of the ashes of that cremation, but thinks that if he just gives his memories the good old Raine treatment it could possibly be enough. 

[2002]