Natten river smattrande sin mantel längs pampas. Mörkrets oväder blir en dagstorm in mot Anderna. Solen stiger ur jorden,
ser ned på en flyende boskapshjord som
rusar in i horisonterna mot Tucumana. Gräsmarkerna åska under den uppskrämda hjorden,
flykten dånar som en stad:
en virvlande stad som jagats åt norr
av Eldslandets vindar.
Argentine plains
Night scrapes its cloak rattling across the pampas. The tumult of darkness becomes a day storm over by the Andes.
The sun rises from the earth,
looks down upon a fleeing herd of cattle that
rush into the horizons Tucumán way. The grasslands thunder beneath the frightened herd,
their flight roars like a city,
a flailing city harried northwards
by the winds of Tierra del Fuego.
*
Harry Martinson visited Argentina and other S. American countries during his time as a sailor (1920 - 1927).
The pampas is known for intense thunderstorms and severe hail.
Tucumán province, in NW Argentina.
*
La Pampa
Bakom Don Morjas estancia
började boskapshjorden med några smärre vikar,
sträckte sig sedan åt nordväst
med ett hav av oxar
och en havsbukt av kalvar.
Oceanen av muande nöt gick ända till Corrientes.
Don Morjas blåste i fagott
på sin marmorveranda,
såg på sitt behornade hav med mätta och trötta ögon:
"Undras om inte nordöstra viken
räknat från brokiga kalven här framme
snart kunde drivas mot Pasamadas' fjärran på bete?
Västra grenen till slakt."
La Pampa
Behind Don Morias' estancia
the herd of cattle began with a few minor inlets,
then stretched northwest
with a sea of oxen
and a sea-bay of calves.
The ocean of bellowing cattle went all the way to Corrientes.
Don Morias blew his bassoon
on his marble veranda,
looked at his horned sea with replete and weary eyes:
"I wonder if the northeastern arm
counting from the piebald calf here
can soon be driven towards the distant Pasamadas to pasture?
The western branch to slaughter."
*
La Pampa: province in central Argentina.
Morjas: i.e. Morias in Spanish, but it is not a common surname. (An occasional variant of Moraes or Morais, common Portuguese surnames.)
Corrientes: province in the north of Argentina (not near La Pampa).
Pasamadas: name unknown.
*
Fattig trakt
På sommaren stodo Vendes fältkanoner
och hostade i gräset --
manöveråskorna rullade mot hembyn
och pigorna sjöngo.
Det var som om molnen rämnat
och nakna adonisynglingar regnat ned.
Nymodigheten uppslök en fattig trakt.
Barn plockade gula soldatknappar: maskros på åkern,
och togo hem --
dörrarna smällde igen för dem: -- Asch, sånt gulstrunt!
åt helsike ungar!
Pigor svängde dukar på kullarna:
Hallå, hallåååå! artillerigossar!
Poor district
In the summer, Vendes' field guns stood
and coughed in the grass --
the thunder of manoeuvres rolled towards their home village
and the maids sang.
It was as if the clouds had split
and naked Adonis children had rained down.
The novelty engulfed a poor district.
Children picked yellow soldier-buttons: dandelions in the field,
and took them home --
the doors slammed shut on them: -- Ugh, such yellow trash!
Go to hell, children!
Maids waved tablecloths on the hills:
Hello, hellooooo! artillery boys!
*
Vendes' field guns : referring to the Wendes Artillery Regiment (Wendes artilleriregemente), a longstanding regiment in the Swedish army (disbanded in 2000). They were garrisoned in Kristianstad (Skåne), about 40km from Jämshög (Blekinge) where Harry Martinson was born and where as a parish orphan he was placed in various farmsteads
*
Pigor
Minnes barndomens pigor;
tilldels själar
med ödsliga, sensuella ögon;
tilldels höga brösts och mäktiga länders varma
arvsmonument från forna vadmalsland.
Slagfärdiga munnars rop i slåttern;
samsångens pigpsalm i ladugård;
drömmar på knä ibland rovor;
surmjölk i stenkrus på renen.
Det buttra mumlet om Olga
faren i väg till Idaho.
Många tomma pigor sutto
med hängande själar;
men många sutto där stolta: undersamt barnkära
kvinnor
med buttert melodiska röster
mumlande liksom ur myter.
Där fanns pigor med jungfrudunkel,
med legenden i schalen
och digra frågor i hindklara ögon.
Maria gick
med vit andedräkt
över världens höstkalla scen.
Där fanns gitarrens klagande himlapiga.
Den slarviga dansbanelängterskan fanns
och den obstinata flottistpigan
-- fetischdyrkare inför matrosuniformer.
Men underligast höstskymningarnas
trollska längterska,
separatorns vemodiga, tunga prästinna
som bugade och drog, bugade och drog
den mjölkrytande Alfa-lavalen,
med spiselden speglad
i undrande ögon.
Då sjöng det urtrollska bondska i sinnet
som en tung malm.
Buttra talade rösterna.
Barnet låg undrande i vaggan,
jakthunden såg upp från sin korg.
Var det inte som sången om eviga bönder_
Som malmen av givande jord?
Maids
Remembering the maids of childhood;
some of them souls
with desolate, sensual eyes;
some of them high breasts and powerful loins
warm historic monuments from the ancient land of vadmal.
The cries of ready-made mouths in the haystack;
the singing of the young man's hymn in the barn;
dreams on his knees among turnips;
sour milk in stone jugs on the grass perimeter.
The sullen murmur of Olga
the father on his way to Idaho.
Many empty maids sat
with drooping souls;
but many sat there proud: strangely childlike
women
with sullenly melodic voices
mumbling as if from myths.
There were maids with virgin darkness,
with the legend in their shawls
and huge questions in their clear eyes.
Maria walked
with white breath
over the world's autumn-cold stage.
There was the plaintive heavenly maiden of the guitar.
There was the careless dance-floor-longing girl
and the obstinate navy maid
-- fetish worshipper of sailor uniforms.
But strangest of all was the
magical longing girl of the autumn twilights,
the melancholy, heavy priestess of the separator
who bowed and pulled, bowed and pulled
the milk-roaring Alfa Laval,
with the stove-fire reflected
in her wondering eyes.
Then sang the primordial peasantry in the mind
like a heavy ore.
The voices spoke sullenly.
The child lay wondering in the cradle,
the hunting dog looked up from its basket.
Wasn't it like the song of eternal farmers?
Like the ore of yielding earth?
*
Vadmal: a traditional woollen fabric used for outerwear; durable and waterproof like tweed, but felted so the weave pattern is obscured. E.g. Norna in Sir Walter Scott's The Pirate, Ch 5: "Her upper garment, which dropped with water, was of a coarse darkcoloured stuff, called wadmaal, then much used in the Zetland [Shetland] Islands, as also in Iceland and Norway."
Alfa Laval: the company started in 1883, originally making dairy centrifuges to separate cream from milk (as in this poem), and subsequently diversifying to other specialized plant in heavy industry.
*
Some poems by Harry Martinson from the "Grassland" section of his 1934 collection Natur.
What English-speakers call "Nature" normally takes the definite article in Swedish, i.e. naturen, which literally means "the Nature". So "Natur", the title of Martinson's collection, poses a question: as if it's pointedly saying "A Nature", or wondering what is the nature of Nature anyway?
According to Martinson's Swedish Wikipedia entry this "expressionist-tinged collection" met with a cool reception (compared with the success of its 1931 predecessor Nomad) and this led him to concentrate on prose for the next eleven years, e.g. Nässlorna blomma (The nettles flower, 1935), about his broken childhood.
"June night never comes," wrote Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson, in his youth a sailor. Poetry floods over me this light, balmy, early summer evening, on a boat leaving Gottskär in northern Halland province.
The heavens have landed in the sea. Or else the Kattegat between Sweden and Denmark has become a galactic lagoon, a tranquil gleam, shimmering pink, along the Milky Way. We're on our way to Sweden's very first lighthouse site, ceded by the Danes in the Treaty of Brömsebro in 1645. Its setting is perhaps more remarkable and beautiful than others and it is also by far the most dangerous -- the terror of skippers in days gone by. A spoiler with treacherous reefs, shallows and sharp rocks that once caused at least two shipwrecks a year, sometimes even in calm weather. Thus also a place where bale fires were lit, logs burning in the dark to warn seafarers.
Geologically, the island is an end moraine, given a designer touch on the seabed by the most recent glacier when it receded more than ten thousand years ago, leaving debris shaved from the rock: blocks, boulders, gravel, sand. With land elevation, the tip of the ridge finally became visible perhaps around the time of the birth of Christ. It is still just a thin strip, like a mirage in the trembling heat of summer, a raft adrift towards the horizon.
You can tie up here only if the wind is slack. If there's a westerly blow, those ashore on Nidingen risk a stay of several days. ...
*
So my mind is back in Sweden again, thanks to these two books (above and below). Copies of West Coast: Sweden's Ocean Front, previously used to fill bookshelves in the showroom, were being given away by IKEA in Bristol. I found the volume of Strindberg's history plays in the bookshop beside the cafe at Bodiam Castle. Net outlay £1, unless you also take into account the lost income while I'm filling my mind with books instead of working.
In Sweden, but not in Swedish. The coffee-table book (photos by Tore Hagman, text by Stefan Edman) was translated into North American by Kim Loughran (hence "mew gulls", which I had to look up; in the UK they are known as common gulls), and the Strindberg plays are mostly translated by C. D. Locock (one by Joan Bulman) (1931).
I always feel a bit remiss, reading Swedish books in English; I miss learning, for instance, that the Swedish word for lighthouse is "fyrplats". This isn't the way to become competent in Swedish. As it happened my sister Miranda was in that Bodiam cafe, over from Stockholm; and how I admired her growing ease with "fastighetsforeningen" and all the other words you learn from being there. It's been an unprecedented three years since my last visit.
But still, here I am, at any rate virtually, in Nidingen (an island off the coast of Halland), and in Strängnäs (cathedral town on Lake Mälaren (to the west of Stockholm).
*
I suppose coffee-table books are considered a lowly form of literature. Stefan Edman writes as an efficient journalist, seasoning his lyricism with lovely quotations and well-chosen scraps of history and geology. Perhaps he over-writes a little, but that's because this is the first page. I don't quite know what the milky way, that wintry sight, is doing in this evocation of early summer.
But all these judgements are rebutted by a single reflection, "He's doing it, and you're not." Edman's boat is certainly afloat, Nidingen here we come! And after all he has some admirable successes too: from far out to sea, the sudden close-up of "logs burning in the dark"; and the gradation of that sea's work in "blocks, boulders, gravel, sand".
"Seamen's spoiler", "a spoiler with treacherous reefs"... This sense of "spoiler" -- presumably, a hazard close to a sea-lane -- is unknown to the OED, and I can't find any examples on the internet either.
Harry Martinson, "June night never comes". In Swedish, the line is "Juni natt blir aldrig av", from this poem:
Nu går solen knappast ner,
bländar bara av sitt sken.
Skymningsbård blir gryningstimme
varken tidig eller sen.
Now the sun hardly goes down
just dims its light
the end of dusk becomes the grey of dawn
neither early nor late
Insjön håller kvällens ljus
glidande på vattenspegeln
eller vacklande på vågor
som långt innan de ha mörknat
spegla morgonsolens lågor.
The lake holds the evening's light
gliding on the mirror of water
or wavering on the waves
that long before they have darkened
reflect the morning sun's fires
Juni natt blir aldrig av,
liknar mest en daggig dag.
Slöjlikt lyfter sig dess skymning
och bärs bort på ljusa hav.
June night never comes
it's most like a dewy day
veil-like it lifts its twilight
and is borne away on the bright sea
Bale-fire. A large bonfire. In older usage, a funeral pyre (e.g. Beowulf's). Later, often a beacon or signal fire, a usage popularized by Scott in the Lay of the Last Minstrel.
And yet you wish to sow the seeds of civil war. 'Tis a godless act!
Gert. Nay, now that you have the knife in the flesh, cut! Then the body may be saved.
Olof. I shall denounce you as a traitor to your country!
Gert. You should not do that -- you who have this day irretrievably broken with the Church! Besides --
Olof. Speak out, Gert! You look like Satan at this moment!
Gert. You shall share my secret; make what use of it you like! The King goes to Malmö today; two days later Stockholm will be in revolt!
Olof. What do you say?
Gert. Do you know Rink and Knipperdollink?
Olof (horrified). The Anabaptists!
Gert. Yes! Why are you so surprised? They are merely a pair of bourgeois louts. A furrier and a grocer, who deny the use of baptism to a soulless child, and are simple enough to object to deliberate perjury extorted from an irrational creature.
Olof. There is something more, surely?
Gert. What could there be?
Olof. They are possessed!
Gert. Of the Spirit, yes! It is the storm calling through them! Take heed if you come in its path!
Olof. It must be stopped! I shall go to the King!
Gert. Olof! You and I should be friends! Does not your mother live in Stockholm?
Olof. You know she does!
Gert. Do you know that my daughter Kristina is living with your mother?
(from Act I of Master Olof, by August Strindberg, trans C.D Locock, 1931.)
This was Strindberg's first major play, written when he was only 23, in 1872. It wasn't performed until 1881. (In the meantime Strindberg had kept rewriting it and in 1878 recast it in verse. But the earliest version was the one used for the first performance, and generally most admired. That's the one translated here by C.D. Locock in 1931, and previously by Edwin Bjorkman in 1915; Bjorkman's version is available online:
Olof's horror reflects the general view of Anabaptists at the time. The term itself was invented by their enemies: it means "those who baptize again", which of course isn't how the Anabaptists saw it; they regarded infant baptism as invalid.
This was an opinion that appalled Catholic and Protestant churches alike; both saw their legitimacy (not to mention their economy) as founded on the involuntary membership of the entire local population.
The pellucid Schleitheim Confession is absolute in its declaration of pacifism and civil obedience.Yet some Anabaptist groups were prepared to take part in active, even violent, dissent. This, inevitably, became the fearful image of Anabaptism fostered by their opponents.
According to Bjorkman, Strindberg was misled: the Germans Melchior Rink and Bernhard Knipperdolling never came to Stockholm. I'm not even sure they knew each other; the active life of an Anabaptist, i.e. between baptism and life imprisonment (Rink) or execution (Knipperdolling), tended to be brief.
But the Dutchman Melchior Hoffman did come to Stockholm. Hoffman influenced both streams of Anabaptism. His wilder adherents were involved in the Münster Rebellion (Bernhard Knipperdolling was one of its leaders); these activists were wiped out by a Europe who were completely united in this respect. But Melchior's peaceful disciples seeded movements that somehow survived, in spite of dreadful persecution. For instance Obbe and Dirk Philips; the former ordained Menno Simons in 1537, from whom the Mennonites take their name. Other modern-day groups deriving from Anabaptism include the Amish and the Hutterites.
Bit of a hiatus, but not of deep artistic, or any other, significance. It's been Christmas, and then before that it was moving home, back from the leafy walks of 2.4 West Swindon to the steeps of Frome (or as I prefer to think of it in limestone terms, from the Upper Jurassic to the Carboniferous).
Somewhere in the middle of this, I finished my essay about Harry Martinson and Chickweed Wintergreen and Karin Boye and Swedish popular song, and put it on Intercapillary Space (in a rudimentary form, it has been coming to birth here on this blog since August). I think I've managed to blend enough matters of acute personal interest into this essay to more or less defeat the well-intentioned interest of any other person on the planet.
Another great blog has come to an end, or to put it another way (because I'd like to see this in a celebratory rather than elegiac spirit), has been triumphantly completed. This is Chris Goode's Thomson's Bank of Communicable Desire. Does anyone ever read completed blogs, though? You should read this one. In principle, I am against blogs coming to an end. Death comes soon enough, so why forestall it? That's why I don't like themed blogs. Let your blog be anything, let it change and grow.
I am reading something you might not expect (or might you?): Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, the first of a long sequence of books for children written in the 1930s. Since I'm being opinionated, let me say that it usually makes me sad to see grown-ups reading books for children. The reason I got to this place was that I accidentally discovered that these books had been read not only by my grandmother (who lovingly collected them all), but then by my father and his brother, and then by my sister. As for me, I remember the books very well, as impressive physical objects (they are early, though not first, editions). As a child staying at my grandmother's house, I often used to linger over the maps in the endpapers, and I used to ask Mutti what the stories were about and I enjoyed her telling me and talking about which ones were her favourites. But I'm now certain that I never read them myself; the only page I recognized was the first one. I liked books, I was a bookish child, but it turns out that often I only dreamed over these family treasures. (In the same way I recently discovered that I never had read the whole of Selma Lagerlöf's Wonderful Adventures of Nils.) To read these books now is to be re-admitted to secrets of my own family history. I discover, for example, where my father learnt to fill a kettle from a lake; Ransome is very informative about sailing and camping. And I discover one constituent of the ideal of a family that my father had in his head; he had to find it where he could. I asked him if he and his brother ever got the chance to make use of all this sailing lore. He laughed wryly. Of course there was no possibility of that, there was no money at all. (But at some stage the boys found out that their estranged father, Mutti's ex-husband, had gone and bought himself a boat; it rankled.)
Around Christmas I also finished Villette, one of the few nineteenth-century classic English novels that for some reason I've missed out on up until now (most of the others I read in university days). - Perhaps I should qualify this by saying that I'm referring to the acknowledged list of classic novels as represented by the Penguin English Library, circa 1977. And even so, I can think of quite a few others: Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, anything by Thackeray or Disraeli or Reade, Wives and Daughters, Jude the Obscure... But anyway, Villette's reputation was HUGE, even though a lot of people hadn't actually read it. Anyway I'm fitfully writing about Villette for the Brief Hist. (And, thanks to my other sister, finally listening to Exile On Main Street in the car, another masterpiece that I missed first time around and that I somewhat associate with Villette in terms of reputation, obscurity, sprawl, over-ripeness and a feeling about it that is half awed and half queasy.)
[This surprisingly fertile gallimaufrey post eventually spawned three separate essays that all subsequently appeared on Intercapillary Space. I've moved two of them (because it's a pain to have to make corrections in two different places), but I'm keeping the first one here as well, because it seemed to be indissolubly part of this blog.]
DOMESTIC BLISS
[The master-copy of this piece has now moved to Intercapillary Space. It probably won't change all that much, and I'm leaving it here too.]
This is a piece that is partly about the Swedish poets Harry Martinson and Karin Boye. It's also partly about Trientalis europaea. I suppose I ought to call it "On Chickweed Wintergreen", but, more pickiness, I don't like titles that begin with "On".
Robin Fulton's new translation of Martinson is called: Chickweed Wintergreen: Selected Poems. (It's a bit unfortunate that though this essay owes so much to Fulton's book I'm not really going to be writing about it or even quoting it, but it's a pretty absorbing book, that is, if you feel interested in Swedish working-class sailor-poets who write about nature and space travel. Let's hope that, with Tranströmer being awarded the Nobel Prize, Fulton is posting some healthy figures elsewhere.)
Chickweed Wintergreen is one of those translation-titles, like Scott Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past, that proclaims a certain robust independence from its source-text. Yes, there is a poem in the book that is titled "Chickweed Wintergreen", and yes, this is a translation of a poem by Martinson that is titled "Duvkullorna", which is one of the Swedish names for the species of plant (Trientalis europaea) that in English is named "Chickweed Wintergreen". But flower-names, espcially within poetry, are about a lot more than denoting a species. Rarely are they merely a word, such as "tulip". The metaphors within them, usually, are far from buried. Most names are, or seem to be, wholly or somewhat descriptive. "Chickweed Wintergreen" being a case in point: great name for a book: zany, fresh and popping with images.
But this is an effect that owes little to Harry Martinson. The title strikes the imaginative reader precisely because, in Britain, the plant is not very well-known. The sad truth is, Trientalis europaea has always been too scarce to make much impression on UK culture. Quite why that is, isn't altogether clear. There seems to be plenty of the kind of thing that it likes (moss, moor, open pinewoods), yet it's always rare in England (the north, E. Suffolk), and only locally common even in Scotland.
Which explains the background to the English name "Chickweed Wintergreen", not exactly an academic name but clearly a plant-hunter's name rather than a traditional folk name (the oldest OED reference is 1760).
Imagine the scene: intrepid botanist wandering through an ancient Scottish pinewood, around midsummer; a place distinguished by members of the wintergreen family (Pyrola, generally rather local in Britain); botanist suddenly notices some leaves that seem a bit similar (i.e. oval-ish) but, behold, there's a flower on top that looks totally unlike Pyrola, but does look a bit like a chickweed (Stellaria). That, or something like it, must be how the name arose. I mean, taking into consideration that not only is the plant unrelated to either chickweeds or wintergreens, but it isn't eaten by chickens and it isn't green in winter!
Well, this is Martinson's little poem, which was published in the collection Passad (Trade Wind) in 1945.
DUVKULLORNA
Skogsstjärnorna frodas aldrig.
De bara reder sig
med karg nätthet i mossan.
De är spensliga,
men veta ingenting om den söta vekhet
du vill tillskylla sommaren.
Det spensligas bestämdhet
är inte mindre än ekens.
THE DOVEFLOWERS
The Woodland Stars never luxuriate.
They just manage
with sparse elegance among the mosses.
They are slight,
but they know nothing about the tender softness
you associate with summer.
The determination of the slight
is not less than the oak's.
I am not one of those who believe that poems don't state things; I think it's more interesting to see poems as principally statements, though sometimes rather complicated ones. Accordingly, I'm going to begin with the plant. In Sweden, it's common everywhere except in the far south, though (as Martinson points out) not luxuriant. It's a matter of a single plant here and there, growing among other species on the forest floor. Here it is:
Photo copyright Kristian Svensson, but I don't know how to contact him for permission!
It's one of those plants that doesn't exactly shout to us (small white flowers usually don't), but once it's noticed it's quietly striking. Along with Twinflower (Linnaea borealis), it was a favourite of Linnaeus. In Flora Lapponica (1737) he wrote: "I don't know any other flower whose grace so fascinates the eye; the spectator becomes almost bewitched! Maybe this is due to symmetry, the mother of all beauty."
Maybe. There are certainly two features that attract attention: one is the curious whorl of differently-sized leaves: a sort of assymetric symmetry, I suppose. The other is the flower itself, partly because there's usually only one flower, and partly because although the number of petals varies the favoured number is seven, which is uncommon to say the least. (The Icelandic name Sjöstjarna and the Dutch name Zevenster both refer to this.)
Martinson doesn't say anything about these features: he relies on the reader to do most of the evoking. All he tells us by way of description is that the plant is "spenslig" (slight, or slender), and this stands in for all the rest. Of course there are a great many plants that could reasonably be called slight, at least in comparison to oak trees, but perhaps there is a particular appropriateness in applying it to this one, where it glances both at the parsimonious production of flowers and at the plant's tendency to appear as isolated individuals rather than profuse stands.
In fact, these plants are not really isolated individuals. They are connected, beneath the woodland surface, by long lateral growths that throw up superterranean extrusions at rather lengthy intervals. That is the main way that Trientalis europaea spreads (or should I specify, the DNA of T. europaea): it puts most of its energy into securing its presence in a good habitat, and not much of its energy into the chancy business of colonizing new sites; few flowers, and even fewer seeds. Hence it never turns up in new woodland, but is a reliable indicator of old woodland. "A good competitor, but a poor colonist," comments the BRC on-line atlas.
Martinson has the reputation of being a poet who grasped science, and I suppose this poem confirms that. When he says:
The determination of the slight / is not less than the oak's
he is not only right about the specific case of Trientalis europaea, though that's still worth emphasizing. Modest and isolated as the plant appears in a European context, it is certainly a successful species, with a circumpolar distribution through the boreal regions of the Old World, and also in Western North America (in the east, it is replaced by the related T. borealis). But the general case applies too. Perhaps he had heard of the Dane Wilhelm Johannsen's genotype-phenotype distinction (1911), which has proved such a fertile ground for later writers. Perhaps his conclusion also amounts to a recognition that determination is the preserve of the genotype, and the success of a genotype has nothing to do with whether its phenotype happens to be an impressively mighty oak or some unattended unicellular organism, a reflection that will be commonplace to readers of e.g. Richard Dawkins.
Nevertheless, the poem does not quite come to rest on this scientific meditation. After all, taken at that level of generality the human connotations of "spenslig" / "slight" lose their validity altogether. But the poem clings on to them: great determination there must be, but the slightness is not dispensed with. It becomes a defining quality of the particular determination with which the poem is concerned: it intends to praise slightness. It's time to think about the context of the poem.
Like many of Martinson's nature poems, it appears at first glance to contain no human context whatever: there are no figures in the landscape, it is alienated from human concerns. And that is intentionally a challenge; an assertion that nature cannot be known if framed or tamed by the quotidian and human. This is a game that Martinson played from the off. Coming to poetry after a youth on the oceans, he repeatedly brought his public up against the realization that he was no stay-at-home, that he had un-domestic experience that his readers didn't share with him: for example in the famous poem that begins "Have you seen a steam collier" (1929) - he means, after a storm at sea - and draws all its energy from the unmistakable implication: No you haven't, but you know that I have. "Home Village" (1931) had framed the "silent lie" of tranquil village life through the eyes of one returning from "the brothel alleys of Barcelona".
Yet a nature poem such as this one does, lightly, intrude an awareness of a domestic context. Though the plant in question is not exactly commonplace, we've seen that a tradition already existed, among reasonably sensitive observers, of appreciating its finer features ("I don't know any other flower whose grace so fascinates the eye..."). Domestic bliss, Swedish style, tends to involve not just the home but its extension into the trees and the borders of that everlasting wood, where one is always roaming about, if only to find a good spot to fling out the washing-up water.
There's a further clue to this context in the two Swedish names for Trientalis europaea that appear in the poem. I've translated them literally; unlike the English name "Chickweed Wintergreen", both were evidently folk-names rooted in long tradition. But the one that Martinson uses in the title (Duvkulla - "Doveflower") was evidently a local name; it is certainly not much used now, and the only Google reference that isn't talking about Martinson's poem comes from a 1923 article in the provincial newspaper Dalpilen. It was the other name (Skogsstjärna - "Woodland Star") that was, then and now, in general use; and doubtless it turns up in the poem's first line in order to ensure that the reader knows exactly what plant Martinson is talking about. The local name in the title amounts to a confession: it is the poet's own name for the plant because it's the name he grew up with, in a countrified provincial locality, long before he set off to sail the world.
The poem then, implies the limited rambles of a child close to home: domestic surroundings. The defiant praise of slightness, in this context, amounts to a sentimental, perhaps desperately sentimental, defence of the limited horizons and quotidian activity of an unassuming home. Martinson had no particular reason to be sentimental about his own childhood; at the same time he was a popular poet, both working with popular sentiment and inevitably yielding to it, at least in respect of its thought-forms.
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Taking refuge in small things was a sentiment that lay deep in popular culture. I don't want to reduce Martinson's poem to its popular substratum, but at the same time it's important to understand the substratum.
I want to approach it by way of the hugely popular pan-Nordic standard "De nære ting" / "Små nära ting". The composers of the melody, Kurt Foss and Reidar Bøe, recorded the song in 1951, both in Norwegian (June) and Swedish (September).
There were numerous subsequent recordings and, as is the way with standards in Sweden, a host of drinking-song parodies. I'm taking most of my information from Enn Kokk's interesting blog.
The original Norwegian lyrics were composed by Arne Paasche Aasen (1901-1978), a strongly left-wing politician, activist, journalist and poet. As a populist poet his work graded into song lyrics: rousing labour movement songs such as "Vi bygger landet" (based on an earlier Russian anthem), but also sentimental songs like "De nære ting". Norwegian and Swedish are so closely related to each other that translating from one into the other is a doddle, and Ture Nerman's Swedish version is sometimes almost word for word. The main difference is the inclusion of the word "små" (small); the Swedish title means, literally, "small near things", but you can't put that into idiomatic English without becoming wordy: "the little things close by", or something of that sort.
D F#6
Din längtan flyr vilse
G
så vida omkring.
Em
Det är som du glömt
A4 A
alla nära ting.
D F#6
Det är som du aldrig
G B dim (or Gm)
fick lugn en minut
D E7
till någonting annat -
A7 D
du jämt vill ut.
Your yearning heart wanders
so far and so wide -
it seems you've forgotten
the things by your side.
It seems that you never
one moment sit down.
To some destination
you're always bound.
Du tycker din dag är
så fattig och grå.
Vad är det du söker?
Vad väntar du på?
När aldrig du unnar
dig rast eller ro,
kan ingenting växa
och intet gro.
You think that your days are
so empty and grey.
What is it you're seeking?
What do you await?
If you never have
any fun or repose,
then nothing develops,
and nothing grows.
Gå in i din kammare,
liten och trång -
den gömmer vad hjärtat
höll kärast en gång.
På ropet i skogen
får ingen ett svar.
Finn vägen tillbaka
till det du har.
Go into your parlour,
so little and close -
it hides what your heart
used to care about once.
The cry in the forest,
it gets no response.
So find your way homeward
to what is yours.
Den lyckan du söker
bak fjället i brand,
den har kanske alltid
du haft i din hand.
Du skall inte jaga
så rolöst omkring…
D E7
men lära dig älska
Gm A D små nära ting!
The treasure you looked for
in far mountain lands,
perhaps it was always
right here in your hands.
You don't have to struggle
so hungry and high,
just value those little things by your side!
Ture Nerman (1886-1969), like Arne Paasche Aasen, had begun as a communist and was later a social democrat. But the song-lyric is solidly conservative in intention, intrinsically dubious about ambition and idealism. It may not be relevant to point it out, but they were no longer young men.
"Små nära ting" is a classic consolation-lyric, like that other song from 1951 "Cold Cold Heart" (Hank Williams, Tony Bennett), and such countless predecessors as the Irish standard "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen" (in fact composed by an American, Thomas Paine Westendorf, in 1876). "Små nära ting" is less obviously aligned to the heteronormal male subject / female object format than either of those songs; in fact the most-remembered recording is probably Monica Neilsen's, if it isn't Anna-Lena Löfgren's.
Nevertheless, it shares the in-built tensions of the consolation-lyric, e.g. that if the unconsolable could be consoled by whatever the consoler is saying, then s/he probably wouldn't need consoling in the first place. The consolation-lyric is both heroic and doomed: heroic because in performance the song boldly offers itself as the resolving turning-point in its own narrative; doomed because every time the song is re-performed it turns out that the consolation is still needed. The singer continues to brood "why can't I ease your troubled mind and melt your cold cold heart"; the singer reiterates the ever-unfulfilled promise "I'll take you to your home again"; and here, the singer urges, yet again, the sweet simple advice about the little things in life that the poor distracted "wandering wanderer" finds it impossible to be satisfied with. (That Misty in Roots classic is apposite, as is this more recent lament:
You've wandered so far
from the person you are.
Let go, brother, let go.
- which gains an extra frisson from its singer being not the reproving composer but, as we suppose, the very wanderer that Tim Rice-Oxley addresses. Battle is pretty much a big village.)
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When Martinson built his poem towards that assertion about "the determination of the slight" he was, I believe, recalling another short poem published ten years earlier, by Karin Boye. Recalling it unconsciously, perhaps: he does not use the same words, but the shape of the clinching line surely betrays a kinship.
EN STILLHET VIDGADES
En stillhet vidgades mjuk som soliga vinterskogar.
Hur blev min vilja viss och min väg mig underdånig?
Jag bar i min hand en etsad skål av klingande glas.
Då blev min fot så varsam och kommer inte att snava.
Då blev min hand så aktsam och komma inte att darra.
Då blev jag överflödad och buren av styrkan ur sköra ting.
A STILLNESS SPREAD
A stillness spread, gentle as the sun-filled winter woods.
How was it, my will grew certain and my path obedient to me?
I bore in my hand an etched bowl of ringing glass.
Then it was my steps became cautious and would not stumble.
Then it was my hand became careful and would not shake.
Then I was suffused and borne along by the strength of fragile things.
(From För trädets skull (For the Tree's Sake), 1935)
Elsewhere, Boye had reacted defiantly to the national vein of cosy, domestic quietism. Indeed her famous poem "I Rörelse" ("On the Move") is the classical rejoinder in Swedish:
Den mätta dagen, den är aldrig störst.
Den bästa dagen är en dag av törst.
The day of satisfaction is not best.
The better day, that is a day of thirst.
But (as is always the case) the defiance conceals an awareness of the contrary pull, i.e. towards domestic peace. What takes her by surprise in the poem about the glass bowl is, perhaps, exactly a feeling of momentarily being at peace with her surroundings. And, of course, they are domestic surroundings: passing between a main house and an outhouse, and taking care not to trip on the ubiquitous birch roots.
The observation, a brilliant one I think, is that the fragile object so long as it exists unbroken is indeed a show of strength; it takes all the object's strength not to fall apart. (No-one calls Boye a scientific poet, but she is just as scientific as Martinson, and her poem too deserves to be taken seriously as a statement.)
And this strength is what is communicated to the carrier who doesn't drop the bowl; her own tensed poise, being patently required of her, is accordingly manifested, and it reveals her capability to herself; not only her capability either, but the deep peace of having a nurturing role, and fitting it; the nurturer is dependent on her charge. A deep peace, for as long as it lasts.
Because for both poets these restfully optimistic poems constituted swimming against the tide. There is a cry of desperation in their restfulness. In April 1941 Karin Boye, anguished by personal distress as well as World War II, took a one-way walk into the wintry countryside; she was carrying only a bottle of sleeping-pills. Harry Martinson, product of a broken working-class home, his health ruined at sea in his youth, grew steadily gloomier through the later part of his poetic career. The last straw, perhaps, was winning the Nobel Prize in 1974; or more particularly, the barrage of adverse comment that greeted the announcement. The prize was shared between Martinson and Eyvind Johnson, another Swedish working-class writer; both of them were now members of the Nobel committee itself, so the award was certainly a bit naïve (contrary to what you might expect, the most biting criticisms came from within Sweden itself). In 1978 Martinson attempted to commit ritual suicide by disembowelment (seppuku) with a pair of scissors. He was horribly injured and died a few days later.
These exemplify the blog-as-complete-literary-text, and they are very complicated objects. I've printed them both out, because I can't read properly on the screen, but then which way up do you read them, back-to-front? (It also means I lose all the hyperlinks). Whichever way you tackle it, this is amazing writing.
In reaching bottom rock, where underside astounds, giving away any attempt at tempt. It is here that curios collect, with a stark rarity of reaction. Those moments in miniature that pool and band together for our own story’s sake, can climb out at any time and shake off excess sentiment.
(and, in fall May 2007)
a fine mist… fading at the mouth ahead of a mirror that holds our residue, we lean over, there we witness our multiplicity, lost in the turn of following deep down, down in search of earth to pile around our words and all of a sudden send up the appearance of nowadays
we perceive little else apparently, little else that others between us show signs of, they possibly appear everywhere, but we distrust their might and upset their looking for
and perhaps they don’t exist these stifled elementary images… pointing for so long at the same spot, at times we lose sight of its presence and doubt altogether the world, nothing that we know is untouched by living the unnoticeable
(from "extracts from tomorrow" Intermittent Voices April 2009)
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talking of great blogs, Tom Clark is excelling himself in recent posts, and I just had to link to this:
"Presley indicated that he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit. He said that the Beatles came to this country, made their money, and then returned to England where they promoted an anti-American theme. The President nodded in agreement and expressed some surprise."
