scarcely a rise

Jacket of Anna Ståbi's Den viljelösa säden. (the AB symbol is the publisher's logo, Albert Bonniers Förlag)

Anna Ståbi was born in 1963. Her early childhood was in Ljusdal in NW Hälsingland (county in southern Norrland) and she now lives in Hedemora, a small town in SE Dalarna which nevertheless has the distinction of being that county's only medieval city. Her father was a well-known folk musician, but her own path switched from music to poetry, and for some reason I have her first collection on my shelves: Den viljelösa säden, published in 1994 by Bonniers.

Translation difficulties begin with that title, literally The Will-less Seed. In English while we have the expression "having no will of his/her own" we don't really have any equivalent for the fairly common Swedish word viljelös. The nearest ones I can think of are "drifting" and "aimless". 

Anyway here's a fairly hapless attempt at translating the first poem.

About feeding and a skate etc.

On the armchair a massive skate presses

digests its meal, both mussels and jelly-fish

A window day like this,

what does a skate know about the vertical?

You just exist in your own way

and how you obtain your food

can be the most obvious thing

An elk can't lie like a sheet of paper

in the lingon bushes --

you exist where your food exists

whether you wait for it

or reach for it

like the cloven-hoofed animal

and the dream of seed

is the journey's

whole foundation

food from branches

or from bottom sludge

thus we are stretched and thus flat

we can wait alongside

the everyday

the skate's life,

with eyes like two watchful quails

above its oval lid's

sand-coloured frontside

looks and waits

for food

with those electric ripples

like a smile full of secrets

within it

an attack samurai,

infinitely patient

buried

scarcely a rise in the sea-floor,

which is his own pulsating lung

he's a piece of sea-floor skin

like a patch you lay

over stains, or like a cloth

that hides something

and is in no hurry

he throws his coat

over the food

in a cloud of dust

and bubbles

the ferocity of the atttack is damped

like sound underwater, particles,

negligible like the oxygen that constantly

flows away

out of the skate's world

But the elk, crowned

and dignified

a body of contemplation,

chooses constantly

to reach after

its pine-shoots and its leaves

ruminates attentively

and its steps are precise,

a studied dancer

in the wetland's

sweet-sour universe

over which the elk,

an empirical expert

in the choice of food,

is king in muzzle and eye,

the colours and scents

their stately governor

partakes

listens and floats

gracefully over the marsh

with legs

like fantastic stilts

an irreproachable Gandhi

on a pilgrimage

through down-filtered branch light

*

In a 2003 interview, Anna Ståbi said:

My poems come out of devotion and ecstasy, I don't see myself as personally responsible for the content, rather, I flow with it and trust.

(quoted in  https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_St%C3%A5bi .)

Anna Ståbi in 1997

[Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cato_bild.jpg . Photograph by Cato Lein.]

I'm not satisfied that I've understood all this poem correctly. The opening, the unlikely image of a skate in an armchair... it's odd that this domestic setting is never referred to again. I don't know what a window day means. And there's some other lines where I feel I'm missing something, but there you go.

Frozen field near Cley Hill, 10 February 2021.

Thinking about Anna Ståbi and why her Swedish was proving so difficult for me to understand, I set off for another walk around and over Cley Hill (near Warminster, Wiltshire). 

Walks at this time of year usually mean wellington boots. 

time to celebrate our worthlessness

crawl up the endless mud   

(Peter Philpott, from "Mud Cake Month" (=February), in Telling the Beads)

But today the ground was frozen hard and I could fly over the ruts in trainers. (Like a benign version of the grass in The Great Divorce.) Coming down the edge of a field I met a guy coming up on a mountain-bike, also appreciating these conditions. I saw him again later, standing atop the bowl barrow on the summit of Cley Hill. Pretty impressive to see a bike up there. (You can make out the bowl barrow in the photos.)

The biker was the only person I saw, but someone must have been around earlier, because there was a big bonfire smoking on the edge of a field; I stopped to warm my hands. A bird flitted around the cedar cuttings that hadn't yet caught alight. 

Snowdrops and daffodils. Near Cley Hill, 10 February 2021.

It's hard to believe, when some of our woods are so packed with snowdrops, that the species is an introduction; Galanthus nivalis wasn't recorded in the wild until 1778. It doesn't form much seed here but spreads as bulbs. (There are several other naturalized snowdrop species, but this is the most common.)

I thought the daffodils were the wild daffodil Narcissus pseudonarcissus ssp. pseudonarcissus, but when I went back a month later I discovered they were just the normal daffodils you see in parks.  

Snowdrops. Near Cley Hill, 10 February 2021.

A frozen stream. Near Cley Hill, 10 February 2021.

Snow- and ice-crust suspended about a foot above a flowing stream. Near Cley Hill, 10 February 2021.

A bonfire, where I stopped to warm my hands. Near Cley Hill, 10 February 2021.

*

Late the night before, I finished A Man Called Ove (En man som heter Ove, 2012), the international bestseller by Fredrik Backman, who comes from Hälsingborg in the far south of Sweden.

Like so many other readers I laughed and cried. Especially cried, but maybe that's my mood. After the walk I was in tears again, this time to the finale of Brahms' third symphony on the radio. 

There's 28,000 reviews on Amazon. I read a few of them, and all the important things were said. The thing that stayed with me most was this: 

There must be so many people like myself who can personally relate to the storyline but have not got the talent of the author of this book to share our feelings in the written word by creating such a wonderful story.

I don't think there can be much higher praise than that.

Backman is a people's author. It doesn't come as a surprise to read that he's struggled to cope with his fame. The mental landscape of his books must come from within; the grief and fury as much as the comedy.

I think part of what induces the tears is the feeling of fairy tale, the feeling of Can it be? The inner conviction that lonely elderly set-in-their-ways people who put up the kind of wall Ove does aren't often given the chance, or can't take the chance, to start over again, to give and receive love. (The same way that Shakespeare generates the emotional punch of Pericles and The Winter's Tale.) Ove's neighbour Parvaneh is the light of the book, but she trembles on the verge of being too good to be true. And maybe the possibly impossible fantasy isn't only about love but about its obverse, revenge, the justice we'll probably never get. 

The light turns green. Parvaneh brings up the clutch, the Saab splutters and the instrument panel goes black. Stressed, Parvaneh turns the key in the ignition, which only makes it grind in a heart-rending manner. The engine makes a roar, coughs and dies anew. The men with the shaved heads and tattooed throats sound the horn. One of them gestures.

   "Press down the clutch and give it more gas," says Ove.

   "That's what I'm doing!" she answers.

   "That's not what you're doing."

   "Yes I am!"

   "Now you're shouting."

   "I'M NOT BLOODY SHOUTING!" she shouts.

   The city jeep blares its horn. Parvaneh presses down the clutch. The Saab rolls backwards a few centimetres and bumps into the front of the city jeep. The Throat Tattoos are now hanging on the horn as if it's an air raid alarm.

   Parvaneh tugs despairingly at the key, only to be rewarded by yet another stall. Then suddenly she lets go of everything and hides her face in her hands.

   "Good Go . . . are you crying now?" Ove asks in amazement. 

   "I'M NOT BLOODY CRYING!" she howls, her tears spattering over the dashboard.

   Ove leans back and looks down at his knee. Fingers the end of the paper baton.

   "It's just such a strain, this, do you understand?" she sobs and leans her forehead against the wheel as if hoping it might be soft and fluffy. "I'm sort of PREGNANT! I'm just a bit STRESSED, can no one show a bit of understanding for a pregnant bloody woman who's a bit STRESSED!!???"

   Ove twists uncomfortably in the passenger seat. She punches the steering wheel several times, mumbles something about how all she wants is to "drink some bloody lemonade", flops her arms over the top of the steering wheel, buries her face in her sleeves and starts crying again.

   The city jeep behind them signals until it sounds as if the Finland ferry is about to run them down. And then something in Ove snaps. He throws the door open, gets out of the car, walks slowly round the city jeep and rips the driver's door open.

   "Have you never been a learner driver or what?"

   The driver doesn't have time to answer.

   "You stupid little bastard!" Ove roars in the face of the shaven-headed young man with throat tattoos, his spittle cascading over their seats. 

(A Man Called Ove, Chapter 27, translation by Henning Koch)