Sweet and solved by no-one
is the cuckoo riddle:
how from such a little horn of feathers
can those wide-stretched notes roll forth?
Just now I heard his ringing,
in the newly-washed birch grove,
but his call is most beautiful when it comes
from the Vale of Eternity,
from the grown-together trees'
one crown.
The woodcutter's ascension
Laid on the block:
"Kinsfolk I have none,
but for this curly-birch stump."
The lopped head, rolling away:
"New-split alder wood is red too."
On the passage, to the ferryman:
"You need to rub the boat with tar,
not with red lead and oil-paint."
To the angels: "With respect,
you look like wood pigeons."
Icarus and Buddy Greystone
After reading 73 (excellent) poems about Icarus,
I wish to put in a word for his country cousin,
Buddy Greystone, left behind in the meadow.
I speak also on behalf of a grass tussock,
which enjoys some shade and shelter from the wind.
After reading 73 poems about flight and wings,
I wish to offer my tribute to the footsole,
the downward-aspiring spirit, the art of staying
and of owning one's weight -- like Buddy Greystone
or his sister, the home daughter Miss Sprucebush,
who is dully but forever green.
[Quick translations of more poems by Werner Aspenström from his 1956 collection Poems under the trees (Dikter under träden).]
Curly birch: also known as Masur Birch, Betula pendula var. carelica. The wood, with squiggly rings due to a genetic defect, is valued for decorative wood carving. It's very dense and hard, so I suppose it would also make a fine headsman's block!
Nettle-leaved Bellflower (Campanula trachelium) in deep woodland in West Swindon.
My sister Miranda and her family are at Idrefjäll in Dalarna, making me feel very envious. We should have been walking near Kebne about now. Anyway, here's one of their pics:
From Nipfjället
When I get up each morning at 06:25, I flip on the radio and it's playing the final piece of music from the six-hour "Through the Night" programme. That way I'm fully awake for Radio 3 Breakfast at 06:30. I wander about opening the blinds and greedily relishing the early light.
Through the Night often has more unfamiliar music than the peak-time shows so these first minutes can contain a discovery, and so it was today: Ludvig Norman, one of the many Swedish composers of whom I knew nothing, a contemporary of Frans Berwald. (He also tutored Elfrida Andrée.) The music that took my fancy turned out to be his String Sextet, Op. 18.
At this point I'd normally embed a YouTube performance, but due to the move I'm now back to posting on my phone and I don't seem to have the embedding option. I'm still sleeping in Swindon, but now sharing the flat with little more than a vacuum cleaner, empty boxes and a kettle.
When I've moved I'll be in a house with wifi again. I anticipate a 2 hour riot of listening to Ludvig Norman, perhaps even a download of Through the Night. Then I'll remember that there isn't actually any more time in the day to accommodate all these riches, and I'll revert to digital abstinence.
Some time around 1950, Eva (later, my mum) got onto the bus outside her house in Fridhemsgatan to travel the short distance into central Sundsvall. On the bus, to her astonishment, was a black man, the first she had ever seen. He was tall and well-dressed. He was a musician, he was carrying a trumpet in its case.
They were heading for the same place, of course; Wivex, the dance hall (danspalats) in Sundsvall town centre. Eva was starstruck. Later, while he was playing, she stood right next to the stage. I would have married him instantly, she reminisced last week. No doubt there were plenty of other Sundsvall girls who were thinking the same.
(A little later, my mum became a big fan of Sammy Davis, Jr.)
Danspalatset Wivex opened in 1941 and ran until 1979. The illuminated sign at 16 Torggatan still lives on. (It's currently a hair salon, Salong Wivex.)
The dance hall was a place for singles to meet. Eva once spotted the husband of a distant relative among the Wivex crowd. That was not OK. She considered him a shady customer after that.
I cherish the belief, though I can never prove it, that the musician Eva saw that evening was Jonny Campbell. In which case the instrument was a saxophone, not a trumpet -- and she saw a true legend.
Jonny and his brother Jimmy were the multi-talented sons of Afro-American tap-dancer William Campbell and his Danish wife Oda. During the Nazi occupation of Denmark the brothers were in the Harlem Kiddies, one of Copenhagen's most popular dance groups (it had three black musicians and a Jewish singer!). Later, for instance as the Jonny Campbell Sextet, they toured Scandinavia extensively. Jonny played the saxophone and clarinet, Jimmy the guitar. You can hear them both in action here:
*
Springtime for two fingers
Amazing number of violins
that lay hidden under the snow!
Now the black cases are open.
The lemon butterfly fine-tunes
its wings. The swallow
up-dives from the lake.
The long silver strings
stretched between the mountain and the valley
start to vibrate.
Everything imitates everything.
The eaves of the roof imitate
the tree sparrow's chip chip.
What does Plato say about the frog?
That she imitates the purling stream!
I enrol in the school of nature.
Turn my score to face its master:
the origin of all music.
My translation of Våretyd för två fingrar by Werner Aspenström, from his 1956 collection Dikter under träden (Poems under the trees). Werner Aspenström (1918 - 1997) was born in Norrbärke in Dalarna.
This poem was made into a song by the Gävle composer Bo Linde (1933 - 1970), appropriately with a two-finger piano accompaniment. (Fjorton sånger om våren, för sopran och piano, op. 40.)
Poetry is the shred of fabric that's left over when the equation of life has been solved in the economy pages and when the Riksdag has had its say.
(Werner Aspenström, 1918 - 1997)
Längre har jag inte hunnit
Nu ser jag honom åter,
gränslinjens fågel,
i ljuset dels,
i skuggan dels,
hör det dubbla ropet
från en tudelad fågel:
en svart vinge
och en vit vinge
flygande tillfälligt
bredvid varann.
Den som söker en mening
finner två meningar.
Längre har jag inte hunnit
fast våren gått,
och sommaren förrunnit.
Further I haven't gotten
Now I see him again,
the bird of the boundary,
partly in the light,
partly in the shade,
hear the divided cry
from a bird divided in two,
one black wing,
one white wing,
flying by accident
beside each other.
He who seeks a meaning
finds two.
Further I haven't gotten,
though spring has passed
and summer flown away.
(Werner Aspenström, translated by W.H. Auden and Leif Sjöberg)
The last word of the poem is often given as "förunnit"... I'm not sure if that's a recognized alternative spelling or just a typographic error.
A couple of quick translations (by me) of poems from Werner Aspenström's collection Dikter under träden / Poems under the trees (1956)
Sommaren i Sverige
Havet och skogen och lövsångaren
som skvätter från gren till gren
-- som en utanläxa! Sömngångaraktigt,
med vintersömnen ännu i ögonen
träder jag in i den gröna kyrkan.
Någon spelar på en tvåstämmig orgel.
Det finns fruktbarhetsgudar?
Det finns dryader och källnymfer?
Jag överlämnar mig åt den gröna färgen.
Jag fyller mig med grönt som en bladlus.
Jag idisslar, säkert har jag klöver.
Låt molnen lustvandra över bergen, tänker jag,
och löjorna häpet dansa på vatten,
tids nog skall flyktigheten gripas:
i morgon!
Då landar på min hand
den förgänglighetens tanke
som vi kallar trollslända.
Ett gult löv lösgör sig
och faller klingande mot marken.
Sommaren måste hastigt bärgas, hösten
närmar sig med toppeld i asparna,
kråkorna driver som tung rök
över de vattensjuka fälten.
Regnet droppar från gren till gren,
snöflingan dalar från vinter till vinter
-- som en utanläxa!
Allting upprepas i mitt hjärta.
Jag väntar ingenting och väntar
dryadernas slutliga återkomst.
Kymmendö, 1954
The summer in Sweden
The sea and the wood and the willow warbler
that squirts from branch to branch
-- like a lesson learnt by heart! Sleepwalker-like,
with the winter sleep still in my eyes
I step into the green church.
Someone is playing on a two-reeded organ.
Are there fertility gods?
Are there dryads and nymphs in the springs?
I surrender myself to the green colour.
I fill up with green like an aphid.
I chew the cud, surely I have hooves.
Let the clouds saunter over the mountains, I think to myself,
let the astonished shoals of bleak dance in the water,
soon enough such fleetingness is arrested:
tomorrow!
And now there lands on my hand
the transience-thought
that we call a dragonfly.
A yellow leaf releases itself
and falls with a clang to the ground.
The summer must be quickly gathered in, the autumn
draws near with beacon-fire in the aspens,
the crows drift like heavy smoke
over the waterlogged field.
The rain drips from branch to branch,
the snowflake descends from winter to winter
-- like a lesson learnt by heart!
Everything is repeated in my heart.
I expect nothing and I expect
the dryads' ultimate return.
Kymmendö, 1954
(Kymmendö is an island in the southern part of the Stockholm archipelago.)
Åldrar
På frågan om sin ålder svarade trollet:
"Tre ekeskogar såg jag växa upp,
tre ekeskogar åter ruttna ned."
Medellivslängden his hundar är tolv år.
Tjugoåriga hästar leder man till slaktaren.
Jag antecknar min trettiosjunde födelsedag.
Sent, men ej för sent att vaska guldsand
i solrännan. Allt kött är inte hö.
-- Men gladast fotens lek i forna gräset.
Ages
On the question of his age the troll replied:
"Three oakwoods I have seen grow up,
three oakwoods once more rot down."
The average life expectancy of dogs is twelve years.
A twenty-year-old horse goes to the knacker's.
I see it's my thirty-seventh birthday.
Late, but not too late to pan the gold sands
in the sun's runnel. All flesh is not hay.
-- Yet gladdest the feet playing in the long-ago grass.
(Translation by me)
Postcard: watercolour by Carl E Johansson
Ortalaby (aka Ortala) is in Roslagen, the archipelagic coast of the historic county of Uppland, just to the north of Stockholm.
"Ortalaby" is also the name of one of Melker Stendahl's ten summer-pictures for piano:
