Today's Swedish vocabulary. Small pine trees, monsters.

I've reached that stage in learning Swedish when I'm apt to produce lists like this, at first in a not wholly vain attempt to absorb unmemorable vocab, but soon slipping  into a fantasy of encompassing the essense of a language in a single page. These are words or phrases that I've had some reason to tussle with in the past few days; things I've read, mainly. 

ordförråd -- vocabulary. (förråd -- store, stock)

oavsett  -- regardless

beträffar -- concerns

Varför då? -- Why?

Varför då då? -- Why, then?

I själva verket -- As a matter of fact

Sanningen att säga,.. -- To tell the truth, ...

nuläget -- the current situation

dagsläget -- the current situation

överklagades -- was appealed against (klaga -- complain)

ta emot -- receive

emotse, motse -- await   

förutsättning -- prerequisite   (förut -- before)

tillit -- trust (cf lita på) 

egentlig -- real, true  (also riktig, verklig, faktisk)

verksamhet -- activity, work

unna -- to not begrudge someone something

återhämtning -- recovery

oemotståndlig -- irresistible

myndigheterna -- the authorities (myndig -- commanding, authoritative)

minska  -- tr. reduce, itr. decrease, lessen, decline. Related to minst -- smallest, least

utsatt -- exposed, vulnerable. Used to describe utsatta områden (the vulnerable areas), as designated by police in 2015. These are areas with high poverty and crime, often said to be linked to radicalization and a sense of separation from the rest of Swedish society. 

tillfallet -- the case

tillåtelse -- permission

tillstånd -- a permit. It also means a state, e.g. undantagstillstånd -- state of emergency.

förfrågan -- inquiry

återge -- reproduce (e.g. text)

ange -- state, mention, note

upphovsrätt -- copyright (noun). The adjective is upphovsrättslig. Upphov -- origin, source. Upphovsman -- originator, author, instrigator. 

begränsning -- limitation, restriction

enkom -- solely, purposely, especially, expressly 

martall, margran, marbjörk: small twisted or damaged trees, e.g. dwarf pine. According to SAOB the first element is related to "mara", the witchlike being who causes nightmares (mardrömmar). 

knyta -- to tie, untie (knyta till, knyta upp). Also used to describe the formation in plants of a head or heart or tuber or fruit. "Kålen knyter i goda år fasta hufvuden." "Bönderna började äta äpplen och päron, så snart de knutit sig."

kuva -- subdue (feelings), repress, curb. 

*

The last part was to do with trying to translate a knotty poem by Karin Boye. 

Martall

Här i evig blåst

pinar sig martall upp ur stenen,

kröker sig trött,

knyter sig trotsig,

kryper kuvad.

Svarta mot kvällens stormhimmel

tecknar sig vridna spökkonturer.

Vidunder grips av leda

för vidunder.

Går ett stönande genom de rivna kronorna:

O att se en enda gång

rak emot ljuset

stiga en kungaek,

en gossebjörk,

en gyllene jungfrulönn.

Göm dina drömmar, krympling.

Här är de yttersta skären. Så långt ögat når:

martall. 

Here's the best I can do so far. 

stunted pine

here in endless wind

the stunted pine struggles out of the stone

cowering wearily

knitting itself obstinately

and creeping curbed

black against the evening's stormy sky

outlines of twisted ghost contours

deformity is gripped by revulsion

at deformity

a groaning passes through the riven crowns

oh just once to see

straight up into the light

a kingly oak ascend

a boy-birch

a golden girl-maple

hide your dreams cripple

these are the outermost skerries 

as far as the eye can see

stunted pine.

(Karin Boye, from For the tree's sake (1935))

The main translator problem concerns the word vidunder, which means "monster" or "monsters". The difficulty is to do with cultural change as much as language. 

We're no longer comfortable with the kind of thinking that expresses a pejorative view of people or animals or even trees on the basis of form or appearance. Neither "monster" (conveying visceral horror), nor "cripple", are part of a progressive person's vocabulary.  

That in itself doesn't matter. This is a poem from another era and I don't want to disguise it. 

The English word "monster" still thrives, of course, but in contexts that are distinctly out of key with Boye's poem.

For instance, it's often used as a colourful way of saying "very big" or "very overwhelming": a monster truck, or monster bassline. But a connotation of large size doesn't sit very well in a poem about small, dwarf or stunted pines. 

And when "monster" does refer to a monster, it tends to be in contexts appealing to children. For instance Monster Munch (corn snacks shaped like monsters); or Super Monsters, the Netflix animation for young children ("material unlikely to cause offence") in which charming big-eyed kids flip into charming big-eyed monsters and have the gentlest of adventures. Like modern halloween, the programme appeals to children's love of dressing up and role playing. It also carries a social message: that differentness is to be enjoyed and celebrated, that it's OK to look different. It seeks to defuse the atavistic idea of a "monster" and to make it fun, to purge it of monstrosity. And thus for the best of reasons it seeks to rid society of the sensation of monstrosity that Karin Boye's poem is all about. 

So I felt that "monster" was now a word with exactly the wrong kind of associations. Instead I've used the word "deformity", but I'm not particularly happy with the result. 

*

While thinking about this issue with vidunder, I noticed the word again while leafing through Vredgade vittnen (Angry Witnesses, 1966), an anthology of post-civil-war Spanish poetry translated into Swedish by Francisco J. Uriz and Artur Lundkvist. 

The poem was by Dámaso Alonso (1898 - 1990) and I think it's an interesting pairing. It's from his 1944 collection Hijos de la ira (Children of Wrath). 

Alonso's Spanish text "Monstruos" is here. However,  my text re-translates the Swedish ("Vidunder"). 

Monsters

Each day when I get up 

I make this prayer:

O God, 

don't torment me any more.

Tell me what they mean,

these horrors that encircle me.

I'm hemmed round by monsters

who mutely ask me 

just what I'm asking you.

Who maybe ask you too,

and like me vainly disturb

the silence in your unchanging night

with my heart-wrenching question.

In the stars' half-dusk,

in the sunlight's terrible darkness

hostile eyes spy on me,

grotesque forms keep watch on me,

wounding colours lay traps for me:

it's the monsters, 

I'm hemmed round by monsters!

They don't devour me,

they devour my longed-for rest,

they force me to be an anguish that engenders itself,

they make me into a man,

a monster among monsters. 

No, nothing is as terrifying

as this frantic Dámaso, 

as this yellow centipede when he with all his tentacles

            invokes you madly,

as this indwelling beast

when it melts into a flux of anguish.

No, nothing so monstrous

as this vermin that howls unto you,

as this heart-wrenching question

that now affronts you with vociferous groans,

that now says to you:

-- O God,

don't torment me any more,

tell me what they mean,

these monsters that encircle me

and their inner terror that moans to you in the night.

Alonso's poem is a discovery: It is I who am the monster. 

Likewise, though more implicitly, Boye's poem is self-directed: the horror of deformity is her own agonizing consciousness of failing to measure up to an ideal form.

*

Tomas Tranströmer was less spooked than Karin Boye when he wrote about this bog pine: 

Den låga tallen på myren håller upp sin krona: en mörk trasa.

Men det man ser är ingenting

mot rötterna, det utspärrade, dolt krypande, odödliga eller halvdödliga

rotsystemet.

The squat pine in the swamp holds up its crown: a dark rag.

But what you see is nothing

compared to the roots, the widespread, secretly creeping, immortal or half-mortal 

root system.

(from "Några minuter" ("A few minutes") in the collection Mörkerseende (1970), translation by Robin Fulton)

And Evert Taube's martall is positively celebratory:

Men hej, alla vänner som gästa min ö!

Jag är både nykter och klok!

När morgonen gryr skall jag vålma mitt hö

och vittja tvåhundrade krok.

Fördöme dig, skymning, och drag nu din kos!

Det brinner i martallens topp!

Här dansar Calle Schewen med Roslagens ros,

Han dansar när solen går opp!

But hey, all you good friends who visit my isle,

I ’m not quite so mad as I look!

Tomorrow I’ll have my hay hung up to dry

and sift through my two hundred hooks.

It's time for you, night-time, to give up the ghost,

It burns in the stunted pine's top!

Calle Schewen is dancing with Roslagen’s rose,

he’s dancing as sunrise comes up!

(from his song "Calle Schewen's Waltz" (1936))

Here's Axel Borg, also on the skerries, in August Strindberg's novel I havsbandet (By the Open Sea, 1890):

Nu hörde han måsarna skrika och förstod därav att hon summit ut. Han klädde sig därför hastigt, och sedan han samlat sina saker, plockade han fram ur båtgarneringen till en liten frukost, vilken han dukade på mossan under en halvstammig pinjeliknande tall.

Now he heard the gulls screaming and realised that she must have swum out. He therefore dressed himself hurriedly and after collecting his belongings he took out of the boat's hold a little picnic and laid it out on the moss under a pine with a short trunk which looked like a stone-pine. 

(from Chapter 6, translation by Mary Sandbach). 

In the following chapter, Axel actually cuts down a group of these native pines, and carves and wires the only remaining one into the umbrella shape of a stone pine: it's all part of his bizarre plan to fake the mirage of an Italian landscape, up here in the Baltic. 

Get ready for some linguistic tangles.  

The Swedish word tall is the general-purpose word for the native pine Pinus sylvestris, the same species that is called Scots Pine in the UK. In Norwegian the equivalent term is furu and in Danish fyrretræ. 

[Obviously these latter words are related to the word "fir", a word that is used in conflicting ways by English speakers. By some it's used to mean conifers in general, by others to mean conifers with needles (e.g. not cypresses), by others to mean pine trees specifically (Lambert's treatise calls our tree the Scotch Fir), and by still others to mean all needle trees except pines. Among modern botanists, on the other hand, it means the genus Abies (aka the Silver Firs -- this is the meaning you'll see if you look up Fir on Wikipedia -- a large genus but with no species native to the UK or Scandinavia); also sometimes the New World genus Pseudotsuga (the Douglas Firs).]

Anyway, back to Scandinavia. Swedish also has "fir" words, but they aren't used for the species in general. Fura means a tall long-boled pine, and furu means pine timber, the material you make furniture out of. Meanwhile the Norwegian word tall or toll means a young pine tree. 

SAOB speculates that tall is related to a dialect word tull, which means a young sapling (pine or spruce), especially with reference to the use of the tender shoots (this year's growth) as food for animals, and sometimes people (e.g. to flavour beer or brännvin). So, as often with vernacular tree names, the word origin may go back to some cultural use of the tree. (Like those tree names that originally referred to the tree's fruits: oak, apple, cherry, etc.)

In the Strindberg quotation above, you can see that Swedish also has a "pine" word, pinje, but it means specifically the Stone Pine (Pinus pinea), which might be one of the main Mediterranean species that the Latin word pinus originally designated. 

*

Tall (Scots Pine). Illustration from C.A.M. Lindman's Nordens flora (1901-1905).

It's always worth consulting C.A.M. Lindman's Nordens flora (1901-1905, here in a text revised by Magnus Fries) -- Here's the entry for TALL.  Hopefully I give the general sense but I've unpacked  his long paragraphs and tried to disentangle most of the incapsulation* common in Swedish technical writing. 

The tall or fura (pine, i.e. Scots Pine, Pinus sylvestris) is an impressive conifer. It has a trunk that in favourable conditions for growth is as slender and straight and twig-free as a mast, ascending right up to the crown, which is borne on a few large boughs. It attains a height of 25 - 30 meters, sometimes even 35 meters.

In its upper part it has yellow-red bark, which together with the white trunks of the birches gives to the Nordic woodlands a rare beauty of colour. The pine foliage appears grey-green or blue-green when compared with the spruce's.  [i.e. Norway Spruce, the other large conifer of the Nordic woods.]

One of the features that distinguish the genus Pinus is the strong dimorphism (difference of form) between the shoots. The needles are in pairs (up to five in certain other pine species) on very small "short shoots", which also have a number of membranous brown-grey lower leaves. The short shoot is produced by the long shoot, which bears scattered leaves of a wholly different form, reduced to scales.(See Fig. 2). 

The species of Pinus can also be recognized by the cone scales, which are thicker towards their tips and appear abruptly sheared off with a wart in the centre. The pine cone ripens the year after flowering, in contrast to spruce cones which ripen in the same year. 

The pine is monoecious¤ and wind-pollenated like the spruce, but the young female cones, which (like the spruce) have purple-red scales, are no bigger than a pea (see Fig. 3). The male flowers (the small yellow spike-like groups of stamens, Fig. 5) are massed together to form an oval ring of blooms around the shoot. 

The pine has an extraordinary profusion of pollen, which at the time of flowering covers the ground and pools of water with a sulphur-yellow powder. This phenomenon has acquired the popular name "sulphur-rain". In lands where the pine is rarer than in the north this pollen has been seen on pools that are many miles from the nearest pine tree. Investigations of airborne pollen on lightships+ have shown that pine pollen can be transported a great distance out to sea; even on vessels in the middle of the Atlantic small quantities of pollen have been noted, for the most part pine pollen. 

The pine has deep roots, in contrast to the spruce's shallow spread of roots. It thrives in virtually all kinds of ground. But as a tall stemmed timber tree it prefers free-draining and hence dry and meagre situations, for instance on upland moraine soils, boulder ridges and glacial deltas. Typical plants of these tall-growing open pinewoods are lingon bushes (aka cowberry), ling heather and reindeer lichen. In boggy places the pine becomes dwarfed, i.e. the so-called martall, which at fifty years of age is no higher than a man and has a trunk the thickness of an ordinary walking stick. In general the pine attains a greater age than the spruce.# A pine felled in Dalarna in 1913 showed 654 annual rings. 

Within peatland, especially bogs, people have sometimes unearthed a layer of large pine stumps. These are remnants of pinewoods that in the more arid climate of the Bronze Age were able to grow on the dried-out surface of the peatlands. In the warm post-glacial period pines were able to grow a couple of hundred meters higher than today, as pine stumps found on bare mountainsides bear witness. 

Pine and spruce are our most important trees, economically speaking. Pine timber is firmer and tougher than spruce and lasts well because of its high resin content, particularly in underwater and pile construction.**

The pine occurs here in two forms with different distributions: a northern slender-crowned type (ssp. lapponica) and a southern, more broadly-crowned type (ssp. septentrionalis). The tree has a very extensive distribution in Nordic countries. But like the spruce it is absent from Denmark, large parts of Skåne and much of the southern and south-western coastal regions, as well as the south-westernmost and northernmost parts of Norway. Elsewhere the distribution stretches south of the arctic circle through Europe and northern Asia. The pine came to Nordic lands soon after the last ice age (c. 7000 BCE); as a forest-forming tree it was preceded only by the birch. 

* Incapsulation, also common in German. As a sample, here's a literal rendering of the opening, retaining the Swedish word order:

Genom sin stam, som vid gynnsam växt blir mastlikt smärt och rak och kvistfri ända upp till den av ett fåtal stora grenar uppburna kronan, är tallen eller furan ett imponerande barrträd.

Through its trunk, which with favourable growth becomes mastlikely slender and straight and twig-free right up to the of a few large boughs upborne crown, is the pine or fir an impressive conifer. 

¤ i.e. separate male and female flowers but produced on the same individual plant. In contrast with dioecious (male and female flowers on separate plants) and bisexual (the flowers have both male and female sex organs). The Swedish word for monoecious is sambyggare, which means "living together".

[By the way this handy symbol (¤) appears on Swedish keyboards as shift+4. I don't know what its real purpose is.]

+ The age of lightships is now basically gone. They were used in deep water in the days when existing technology didn't allow sinking foundations for a lighthouse to sufficient depth. There are still three unmanned lightships in use off the coast of Germany. 

# But (though I can't remember the exact details) I believe a Norway Spruce was recently proposed as the oldest living thing so far known -- not an individual tree, but a spreading subterranean root network putting up suckers. 

** Another obsolescent technology. Pile bridges were founded on long poles ("piles") driven into the loose ground until in firm contact with solid substrate. 

smärt -- slender, especially when referring to tall trees (more commonly it's a noun, "pain")

späd -- tender, of shoots  (cf spädbarn -- baby)

Tomas Tranströmer: "Six winters"

[Image source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/vallterrier.com/2009/12/30/istapp-of-the-day/amp/ ]





Six winters     (Sex vintrar)




1

In the black hotel a child sleeps.
And outside: the winter night
where the big-eyed dice are rolling.


2

An elite of the dead fixed in stone
in Katarina churchyard
where the wind shakes in its armour from Svalbard.


3

One winter during the war while I lay sick
a giant icicle grew outside the window.
Neighbour and harpoon, memory without explanation.


4

Ice hangs down from the edge of the roof.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract herd, udders of glass.


5

In a siding an empty railway carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journeys in its claws.


6

Tonight snow haze, moonshine. The moonshine jellyfish itself
trembles before us. Our smiles
on the way home.  Enchanted avenue.

The second poem in Tomas Tranströmer's 1989 collection For living and dead (För levande och döda).  Here was the first one.

Katarina Church (Kyrka) in Central Stockholm [Image source: Wikipedia]. Since Tranströmer's poem the church has had to be rebuilt due to fire damage. New to the elite dead is Anna Lindh, the Minister of Foreign Affairs who was assassinated in 2003. Also here is the much-loved troubadour Cornelis Vreeswijk, who died in 1987, and going a little further back, Sten Sture the Elder (died 1503),  regent of Sweden and still a potent name forty years later, as recounted in Strindberg's Gustav Vasa.

[Image source: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/naturfenomen-i-stockholms-skargard-lockar-dykare ]


Large influx of jellyfish in the Stockholm archipelago, October 2019.

swam faster than time

The forgotten captain

We have many shadows. I was on the way home
in the September night when Y
broke out of his grave after forty years
and kept me company.

At first he was quite empty, a mere name,
but his thoughts swam
faster than time
and caught up with us.

I set his eyes to my eyes
and saw the war's ocean.
The last boat he commanded
grew forth under us.

Out and back crept the Atlantic Convoy ships
those that would survive
and those that had the Mark
(invisible to all)

while the sleepless days and nights succeeded
but never him --
the float-vest sat under the oilskin.
He never came home.

It was an intern's weeping that bled him
in a hospital in Cardiff.
He could finally lay himself down
and be transformed into horizon.

Goodbye No. 11 Convoy! Goodbye 1940!
Here ends world history.
The bomber hung overhead.
The heather bloomed.

A photo from the start of the century shows a beach.
There stand six clothed boys.
They have sailing boats in their arms.
What serious expressions!

Boats that became life and death for some of them.
And to write of the dead
is a game too, that grows heavy
with what is to come.

*

The opening poem in Tomas Tranströmer's 1989 collection For Living And Dead (För levande och döda), poorly translated with a bit of help from Google Translate and probably some recollection of Robin Fulton's rendering.

I've left in my mistakes. The intern's weeping is really internal weeping. No. 11 is really 11-knot.

I passed through Västerås in the summer, an unassuming working town. I would have paid it more attention if I'd known that Tranströmer lived here from 1965 onwards.

In fact it's a town with a lot of history.

Back in 1878 it was where that bright boy from Dalarna Erik Axel Karlfeldt attended the school now known as the Rudbeckianska Gymnasiet. (A then-separate part of today's school had been founded, back in the seventeenth century, by Bishop Rudbeck, father of the eccentric scientist Olaf Rudbeck, who keeps finding his way into my posts!

Tranströmer's Thoreau

[This post has now been published on Intercapillary Space and future revisions will take place there:

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/transtromers-thoreau.html

] 

Trattkantareller (Craterellus tubaeformis)

[Image source: https://www.fotoakuten.se/gratisbilder_foto-8315.html]



Five strophes to Thoreau

So another has left the heavy town's
ring of voracious stones. Crystal-clear salt is
the water that comes together round all true
                         escapers' heads.

Up a slow vortex silence has climbed to here
from the middle of the earth, to put down roots and to grow
and with a leafy crown to shade the man's
                         sun-warmed steps.

*

The foot kicks thoughtlessly at a mushroom. A thundercloud
grows big on the rim. Like copper trumpets
the tree's bent roots sound a note and the leaves
                          scatter frightened.

Autumn's wild flight is one's own light cape,
its flap-flapping, till once more from frost and ashes
comes the flock of calm days to bathe its
                          claws in the spring.

*

Believed by nobody is the one who saw a geyser,
who escaped the stone-lined well like Thoreau and who knows
like him to vanish deep in inner greenery,
                            wily and hopeful.

Runmarö cottages

[Image source: http://riadarabe.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/sweden-revisited.html]



***


This is my quick translation of one of Tomas Tranströmer's early poems (published in 17 Poems  / 17 dikter, 1954). Previously I've always read Tranströmer in Robin Fulton's translations, but now that I'm reading the Swedish I discover that Fulton's translations are often quite free and sometimes not so clear as the original.  Of course my own translations are always the clearest!  Though in this case I will probably confuse readers with the "steps" at the end of the second stanza: I'm thinking of external wooden steps up to the veranda of a summer cottage.

And that's what I think Tranströmer had in mind too. Many of the images here relate to the common Swedish summer departure from the city into nature, and the poet himself is the "another" of the poem's opening line.

*

Interesting discussion of the poem by Henrik Gustafsson and Niklas Schiöler in the Thoreau Society Bulletin, Fall 1998

https://ia601703.us.archive.org/8/items/thoreausociety1998225unse/thoreausociety1998225unse.pdf

They also supply translations of the three additional stanzas in the original 1951 version of the poem (they were positioned as 2, 6 and 7). Tranströmer realized his poem could get along better without them.

I don't really agree with their symbolic interpretation of the thunder and the wild autumn, nor with their over-interpretation of "stenad brunn" in the final stanza as a stagnant well. Google searches confirm that the phrase merely specifies a well lined with stones, but that's how most Swedish wells were made in the past. Sure, the water in a well isn't fast-flowing water, but it oughtn't to be stagnant.

Rödgull trumpetsvamp  (Cantharellus  lutescens) and Trattkantareller (Craterellus tubaeformis)

[Image source: http://runmaro.ifokus.se/discussions/4d7176f8b9cb46222708405f-svampplockning. This image was taken on Runmarö, the island on the Stockholm archipelago where Tranströmer had his summer cottage.]

Tranströmer himself saw geysers in Iceland in 1951. Geysers are very rare phenomena, there are only about 1,000 worldwide. The poem is characterized by an insistent crossover of images that doesn't necessarily follow the prose sense. (For example the ascending vortex and the man's wooden steps in Stanza 2.) In the fifth stanza it's difficult to ignore the connection between the geyser and the stony well of the following line. Momentarily, we see a Thoreau exploding out of the city-well with a geyser's force. But only momentarily. The verb "flytta" in the following line (to move, leave, depart or flit) is far from explosive. Quietness is re-established. Significant actions, we learn, may often be quiet ones. So, of course, may trivial ones.

More distantly, both this geyser and this well make connections with the spring of stanza 4 and the crystal-clear water of stanza 1. The latter, I think, is the icy, only-slightly-saline water of the Stockholm archipelago. And I think the image is of someone swimming, the waters merging round his head rather than over his head.

Runmarö

[Image source: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/maddeaboutthewild/popular-interesting/]

stone sober

Autoroute food: Aire de Terres-les-Graves, near Bordeaux, 30th September 2016

I return with a head full of almonds, some of them sweet, and some of them bitter with the intensity of a suppressed cure for cancer.

I can't spin down to earth yet, and Tomas Tranströmer's poems of dreaming and waking, which I'm re-reading for the umpteenth time, have an air about them, an air like the burly October crowns of the trees as we drive back north,  a new and pressing intensity of interest.

As the bites of insects and the brush of a jellyfish begin to quieten on my skin, as the smell of diesel is showered away, I am, or someone is, that traveller with the dispersed ego who appears in Tranströmer's characteristic present tense.


In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world
as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.
The traveller is standing under the tree. After
the crash through death's turbulence, shall
a great light unfold above his head?

(The end of "Prelude", the first poem in Tranströmer's first book, 17 Poems )


Behind waking life there is a deeper and larger community of the sleeping, the dreaming and the dead. In this larger community we can meet each other: opposites purged of our divided cultures, languages and - that current tool of the demagogue - "national identities" (".... divided cultures and people flow together in a work of art..." as Tranströmer described his poetry). He was writing in a more blessed time than today, in some ways. This makes his poems doubly precious because no-one could write them now, but also they are limited simply by not having the problems of 2016. So it must always be.

All of these thoughts run around my reading of the following poem, from The Wild Market Square.



Nineteen Hundred and Eighty

His glance flits in jerks across the newsprint.
Feelings come, so icy they're taken for thoughts.
Only in deep hypnosis could he be his other I,
his hidden sister, the woman who joins the hundreds of thousands
screaming 'Death to the Shah!' - although he is already dead -
a marching black tent, pious and full of hate.
Jihad! Two who shall never meet take the world in hand.




(The Shah, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was deposed in February 1979. He died in exile in Egypt on 27th July, 1980.)

Tranströmer links, but sharply contrasts, his two protagonists: the newspaper-reading male whose emotional life is so  cold that he himself believes it is rational thinking; and the impassioned woman (seen, no doubt, on the TV) who has joined a celebratory mob in Iran, so seemingly emotive and irrational that she yells for a death that she knows has already happened, what's more in a cause directly against the interests of Iranian women, as you might reflect from a westernized perspective. (It was well known, however, that the Shah's human rights record was far from spotless, to say nothing of the royal family's relentless accumulation of personal wealth.)

From our later perspective TT's foray into the Islamic world feels  - a weasel word, this - a touch "simplistic";  he has not witnessed so much debate around the word "jihad" as we have done since; and we can sense that the Islamism glimpsed in his poem is still something comfortably far away and picturesque. The marching black tent is not marching in the direction of the Stockholm archipelago.

But even though I feel these things, they somehow don't harm the poem. In fact you could say that subsequent events have sharpened it.

This depends partly on how we read the final words. Do this ill-assorted pair of people truly mould the world (as, since the poem was written, Islamism may certainly be said to have done), or do they merely take the world in hand in a helpless, clutching kind of way? But the poetry seems to refuse to make this distinction,  just as it refuses to regard dreaming as unimportant compared to waking. This poem still carries the neutral sense of the image I quoted from that early poem: of grasping a warm stone.

In most ways I approve that refusal to make the distinction. But I also think I see why Tranströmer's influence on mainstream poetry is as potent as it is. *

His poems overwhelm us with the simple strength of their acceptance of the imaginative life.  But by proposing the life of nature and dreams and the dead as valuable topics, he also offers, for those who want to find it, a most reassuring apology for educated western lifestyles.


[Translations by Robin Fulton.]

* Wikipedia continues to report that there was a mixed response to his Nobel Prize in 2011, but this is extremely misleading. Of course the newspapers sought out the usual cynical quotes about the committee being Eurocentric in general and Swedocentric in particular. But it was swiftly apparent that these quotes betrayed an embarrassing ignorance of contemporary poetry. Tranströmer may have been Swedish but he was not, as the newspapers too readily assumed, an obscure figure outside Sweden. On the contrary, his poems had been very widely translated and very widely admired: his international reputation was right up there with Ashbery or Walcott. Indeed he exemplified the ideal of being both a local poet and a world poet: something much dreamed of by mainstream poets and readers, but not often so unequivocally achieved..

 Morning tea and shower: Área de servicio La Ribera, near Oropesa, 27th September 2016