A Tip of the Hat to Tomas Tranströmer

Earlier this month British bookmakers offered Tomas Tranströmer, perhaps Sweden’s most noted poet, as a 5/1 favorite to win this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, placing him ahead of three other poets ranked at 8/1 - Adam Zagajewski of Poland, South Korea’s Ko Un and Syria’s Adonis - as well as the Paraguayan playwright Nestor Amarilla. Tranströmer, born in Stockholm in 1931 has, in addition to his career as a noted poet, critic and translator, worked as a psychologist providing vocational guidance to Sweden’s incarcerated juvenile offenders. This year is not the first time that he has been on the bookies’ shortlist for this prestigious honor. I welcomed this news but suspected that Tranströmer would not win since last year’s laureate was a European - the Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist, Herta Müller. One hopes that geopolitics would not influence the judges, but it does. A Hispanic writer had not won since 1998, when José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and playwright who passed away in June, took home the Nobel laurels. But when you think about it, no Swede - no Scandinavian - has won the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1974 when Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson, both members of the Swedish Academy, shared the prize. So I was not surprised when the Academy anointed Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa as this year’s winner. He was not the bookmakers choice - his chances were listed as 45/1 - but there can be little argument that Llosa is deserving of the honor.

I will admit that I was pulling for Tranströmer. I have been reading his poetry since I was first introduced to it in English translation almost 40 years ago. Robert Bly, his longtime friend and translator, writing in the introduction to his 1980 translation of Tranströmer’s Sanningsbarriären [Truth Barriers (1978)], has perhaps captured the essence of Tranströmer’s importance and appeal to readers. His “poems are a luminous example of the ability of poetry that inhabits one culture to travel to another culture and arrive.” I felt an immediate connection to his poems when I first heard him read in the spring of 1974 when I was attending graduate school at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.

I was working on a Master’s degree in German Literature at the time and had been involved with the University’s Ruth Stephan’s Poetry Center since my arrival in Tucson. I was especially drawn to its venerable reading series and the small poetry library located in a house donated by Ms. Stephan (a second donated residence, a small cottage, housed the noted poets visiting the Center). Tranströmer came to Tucson in late February 1974 to give a campus reading. He was also interviewed for the new student literary magazine, Window Rock, which also reprinted a couple of his more recent poems. I was there that evening sitting in the front row. Admittedly, I knew very little about the poet and his work when he took to the stage. He came before us as a relatively new presence and voice. Although he rose to prominence as a promising new voice in his native Sweden in 1954 with the publication of 17 dikter [17 Poems], at the age of 23, it was not until the early 1970s, with the publication of Robert Bly’s translation of 20 Poems (1970), and May Swenson’s translations in Windows and Stones: Selected Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (1972), that English-speaking readers were first introduced to the work of this fine Swedish poet. I read some of these translations prior to that evening, especially after hearing Swenson read in Tucson the previous month when she offered effusive praise for Tranströmer’s poetry. I cannot say that I fully understood them, but I was nevertheless intrigued as I felt he was a new and important poetic voice. There was an inborn authority underlying ever word, every phrase.

Now the evening star burns through cloud.
Trees, fences and houses grow, grow larger
with the dark’s soundless, steepening fall.
And under the star is outlined clear and clearer
the other, secret landscape that lives
the life of contour on night’s X-ray plate.
A shadow draws its sled between the houses,
They wait.
[“Epilogue,” from 17 dikter, translated by May Swenson]

What I recall from the poems read that evening, and what I have taken from all of his poetry I have read since, is Tranströmer’s very strong sense of place, even when it tends toward the surrealistic at times - Sweden, of course (he has continued to reside in Västerås near Stockholm), but more particularly the islands of Södermalm and Runmarö and the east-central coastal archipelago of his ancestors where Tranströmer spent the summers during his youth. The audience was enwrapped from start to finish and I left that evening a convert.

Tranströmer’s long poem Östersjöar was published in the autumn of 1974, and Samuel Charters acclaimed English translation Baltics was brought out by the Berkeley publisher Oyez in 1975. I read it as soon as I could lay my hands on a copy (which, I recall, was not very easy). It provided entree into an entirely new understanding of Tranströmer’s poetics and use of metaphor, and I agree with the poet Bill Coyle who later wrote that this collection “ is in some ways the best place for a new reader of Tranströmer to start; it develops more slowly than his shorter pieces, and his metaphors, though as striking here as elsewhere, reveal themselves more gradually.” Again, the strong sense of place - the Stockholm archipelago, and the Baltic Sea.

In the middle of the forest the Baltic also sighs, deep in the
forest you’re out on the open sea.
[Baltics, II]

“The Baltic is Tranströmer’s archetypal environment,” Coyle writes, “with its mixture of sea and islands, of sweet and salt water and, at least during the Cold War, of democracies and dictatorships.” The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had been under Soviet domination since the end of World War II, and this long poem reflects the geopolitical realities of the Baltic region and their impact on the poet and his work.

Now, a hundred years later. The waves come in from no man’s
water
and break against the stone.
[Baltics, III]

Transtömer returned to Tucson in November 1975 for a reading at which he presented Baltics in its entirety. I had an opportunity to speak with the poet at some length afterwards and he graciously inscribed my copy of the Charters translation of Baltics as well as my copy (one of 600) of the inaugural 1974 number of Window Rock with it’s interview of the poet and the reprints of two of his poems. I went home that evening with a deeper admiration for the poet and his work, but also a better understanding of the plight of these small nations so close to the poet’s native Baltic archipelago yet suffering under the oppressive Soviet thumb.

And now: the stretch of open water, without doors, the open
boundaries
that grow broader and broader
the farther you stretch out.
[. . . ]
But it’s a long way to Liepaja.
[Baltics, IV]

Baltics came up a few years later, in the autumn of 1979, when I had an opportunity to discuss Tranströmer’s poetry and the plight of the Baltic states with the noted Estonian poet Ivar Ivask (1927-1992) and the Lithuanian historian Vitas S. Vardys (1924-1993) . We shared dinner at the faculty club at the University of Oklahoma, in Norman, Oklahoma, and my long conversation with Ivask, who was then the editor-in-chief of World Literature Today and the founder of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature which Tranströmer would win in 1990, opened my eyes to other approaches to the poem, including those by Baltic writers in exile.

Tranströmer’s English speaking audience has continued to grow as has his influence on other poets. His work in translation appeared in Robert Bly’s Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets: - Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelöf, Tomas Tranströmer (1975). Bly’s translation of Sanningsbarriären [Truth Barriers, 1978] appeared in 1980, and an entire issue of Michael Cuddihy’s fine journal, Ironwood 13, was devoted to Tranströmer in 1979 (published in Tucson, by the way). Tranströmer’s Selected Poems, containing the work of several of his noted translators and edited by Robert Haas, was published in 1987, and New Collected Poems, translated by Robert Fulton, appeared in 1997. This volume was greatly expanded in 2006 under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems which represents the first time all of Tranströmer’s poems to date have been available in one volume in English.

I have been lucky to hear Tranströmer read two other times. First, at an evening reading in Stockholm, in the spring of 1985. I had a free evening in the city and it was a treat to hear selections of Östersjöar and other poems read in the original Swedish. Tranströmer was treated like a rock star yet he remained the same humble man I first encountered a decade earlier in Tucson. The last time was here in Washington, DC, when Tranströmer read at the Folger Library, in April 1986. The poet and his poetry had reached a new and recognizable maturity, yet his inner voice, and the voice by which he shared his poems in Stockholm and Washington, were still recognizable from that first time I heard him read in Tucson in 1974. Both, etched by new experiences, remained, spare, clear, and quiet - the benchmarks of his poetry through the years.

Thankfully, Tranströmer at age 79 remains a major poetic voice in the world. Sadly, however, his own voice has been largely silenced by a stroke he suffered in 1990, an event foretold years earlier toward the end of Baltics.

Something wants to be said, but the words don’t agree.
Something that can’t be said,
aphasia
there aren’t any words but maybe a style . . .
[. . .]
Then comes the stroke: right side paralysis and aphasia, can only
grasp short phrases, says wrong words
Can, as a result of this, not be touched by advancement or blame.
But the music’s still there, he still composes in his own style,
he becomes a medical sensation for the time he has left to live.
[Baltics, V]

Despite the cruel silence imposed upon him, Tomas Tranströmer continues to practice his craft and sharing it with the world. We are certainly thankful for his insights and his ability to help us recognize and transcend the boundaries that encompass us all.

Highway 61

Bruce Springsteen first heard Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan’s seminal 1965 album, when he was a 16 year old kid growing up in Freehold, New Jersey and playing guitar with his first band, the Castiles. He recently told Ed Norton that this recording awakened something very basic in him. “I had the first indication of what my country felt like. It was exhilarating.” A folkie using little instrumentation in his first five albums, Dylan, who “went electric” in public at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, debuted a Rock and Roll sound on this new album. “Dylan had the courage,” Springsteen says, “to go places others didn’t.” And Springsteen has been doing this his entire career, from the time Mike Appel, his early manager, hyped Bruce as “the new Dylan” in the early 1970s, through his early groundbreaking albums, including his own seminal Darkness on the Edge of Town deeply reminiscent of Dylan, through his acoustic turn with Nebraska and his more recent tribute to Pete Seeger and American folk music. Springsteen has always done his music his way, and his true fans have been more than happy to follow his journey of self-discovery.

Bruce turns 61 today. He has come a long way from that skinny teenage kid playing guitar in a Jersey garage band . . . Heading down his own Highway 61 and looking back to that record that changed it all for him. I am reminded of a line from “No Surrender” - “We learned more from a three minute record, than we ever learned in school.” Perhaps this is true. Happy birthday Boss! “When they built you, brother, they broke the mold.”

A Stroll Down Memory Lane

It appears my hiatus lasted a little longer than expected. But I am back now.
__________

I have returned to the McKeldin Library, my old stomping grounds on the campus of the University of Maryland at College Park. I spent a lot of time there between 1976 and 1984 when I was enrolled as a graduate student and completing my doctorate in Germanic Studies. Since then I have had little opportunity or reason to return to the campus and I had forgotten how many strong and pleasant memories I have of this place where I spent so much time during my graduate studies.

Since my retirement a few months ago, I have renewed my membership in the alumni association which offers me inter alia borrowing privileges at all of the campus libraries (there are eight at last count). I am taking full advantage of this by re-familiarizing myself with the stacks and the layout of this old book barn and using the peace and quiet it affords to work on a number of new projects with all the materials I need close at hand. Most recently I was preparing a paper which I delivered over the summer at the biennial meeting of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, in Concord, Massachusetts. . So it was just me and Mr. Hawthorne in a quiet corner.

The place has changed quite a bit since I last worked there. Gone are the banks of wooden cabinets housing the thousands upon thousands of dog-eared bibliographic data cards needed to locate books and other publications in the stacks. They have been replaced with computers which allow for a different type of fingertip search.

As I searched for the library’s holdings on Hawthorne, I was overcome by curiosity (and not a small measure of hubris) as I typed my own name into the computer catalogue’s search box. And there it was - an entry for my doctoral dissertation completed back in November 1984. A few minutes later I made my way back into the stacks where I located that 344-page monstrosity, now hard bound in two volumes, one of the signed copies I had to submit to the Graduate School faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. I could not help myself. I carried the volumes back to my work table in the reading room and spent the next hour or so perusing the product of long days and nights spent in this library those many, many years ago.

The title is not something that rolls right off the tongue, but typical for a dissertation, I guess - Spatial Behavioral Patterns in Selected Short Prose of the German Democratic Republic [East] and the Federal Republic of Germany [West] as Evidence of Developing Cultural Diversification. Despite its long-winded title, the study itself is a rather straight forward (remarkable for me) examination of fictional literature as a means of tracking and evaluating how Germans in the two postwar German states handled space differently and how these modalities served as benchmarks to measure the development of two distinct German cultures over the course of almost four decades. The conclusions drawn by my study demonstrated (at least my examination committee believed I was successful in my approach) how and why literary historians and critics must look at the sociological and anthropological sub-texts of literary works in order to properly understand their meaning and importance within the cultures that produced them. Pretty heady stuff, to be sure.

There are two (at least) recurring nightmares that every graduate student experiences - 1) that the only copy of a thesis or dissertation is lost or stolen and one must go back to the beginning and start over; or 2) one’s advisor dies or disappears under mysterious circumstances and one is left alone without any clear guidance as to how to carry on. I was lucky to avoid both of these as well as a third somewhat unique to my circumstances. Almost five years to the day after I successfully defended my dissertation the Berlin Wall, much to almost everyone’s surprise, fell and a year later the two German states reunified. I still shudder to think what would have happened had I been called to defend my conclusions - that the two postwar German states were gradually, but steadily, giving rise to two distinct German cultures - faced with the reality of one of the more momentous and unexpected events of the late 20th Century. I am still confident, as I was then, that my ultimate conclusions are sound, and despite the political and economic reunification of Germany, there are still two distinct “cultures,” in the sociological and anthropological meaning of that word, in evidence in the reunified Federal Republic of Germany. That said, I am glad I was not put to the unnecessary test of my wits and my wherewithal.

So it was a treat, to say the least, to discover these bound volumes of this hard fought study just a short distance from where many of the outlines and early drafts took shape. They awaken many fond, old memories. But past is past, and my visits to McKeldin are now focused on new projects.

I Am On Hiatus Until Mid-March

I have just retired after almost 32 years on the job and, frankly, my attention is focused elsewhere - on wrapping up a few remaining projects, packing up my office (no small task I am discovering much to my dismay), and preparing for the whatever is coming next. To say I am distracted is putting it mildly. I will be back very soon so please stay tuned!

Now There Are Fewer Books . . . .

Back on December 19, in an earlier posting entitled "Books, Books, Books," I referred to Paulo Coehlo’s essay "Dust in the Wind" in which he defends his decision to reduce his personal library to around 400 of his favorite and most useful books, giving the remainder to a public library where they might be enjoyed and used by others. I also shared my own compulsion to possess books which has led to crammed bookcases and shelves along with piles scattered here and there at home and in my office at work. My wife, confronting the latter, was increasingly chagrined - what would I do with all of these books once I decided to retire? Perhaps Coehlo had come up with a feasible solution when that time came.

Today the hens have come home to roost. Just over a week ago I announced my retirement after almost 32 years at the same job ( http://lookingtowardportugal.blogspot.com/2010/01/its-time-to-bone-duck.html). And today my wife and I braved a winter storm and drove into downtown DC to begin packing up my office, including three decades of accumulated books. There were books that had sentimental value, and others I knew I would need at some point in the future. Like Coehlo, I would want to keep these. We crated up almost two dozen boxes which we brought home. Several boxes of books moved from my office to the section’s library where my colleagues will continue to use them. Finally, we packed up more boxes which I loaded into our car and then navigated a snow-packed Pennsylvania Avenue to a small bookstore on Capitol Hill. While the owner unpacked each box for inspection, his wife invited me into an adjoining room where she offered me a piping hot cup of coffee and I told her how I had come to accumulate so many books. They both understood how difficult it was for me to part with them. They were generous and ended up buying about half of what I brought in. The rest I donated to the store for its "books cheap" program to benefit the local neighborhood association . . . the idea being to find them a good home. Sounded good to me; Coehlo would have been proud. I made my way back through the snow to my office with a few bucks in my pocket, enough to buy a nice dinner for us when we finished our packing at the end of the day.

We are home now. The floor to ceiling bookcases in my office are essentially empty now. The boxes of books we brought with us are squeezed into the basement wherever there was space. The office library is a little richer, and a small bookstore up on Capitol Hill has new volumes for perusal. I have fewer books to deal with, but all of the books still exist; they are just in different places than they were when the day began.