A Tourist in the Underworld: On Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Tranströmer, transl. Patty Crane | The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer | Copper Canyon Press | October 2023 | 536 Pages
I first read Tomas Tranströmer when I was fourteen or fifteen. I had started to write poems influenced by the Swedish postpunk band Imperiet, whose songs led me to one of their big influences, the Beat-and-Dylan-influenced poet Bruno K. Öijer. To keep me out of trouble and to encourage my interest, my mom enrolled me in a summer class in poetry with the Twin Cities poet John Minczeski. Coming out of a Bly-influenced Minnesota poetry scene, Minczeski gave us a lot of work in translation, including three Tranströmer poems: “Allegro,” “Elegy,” and “Tracks.” I have not stopped reading his poems since.
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How can I still remember the exact poems he gave us? Because they made a mark in me. On one level, it was profound because, as an immigrant (my family emigrated when I was thirteen), I was able to read the original poems on the facing pages, and was able to offer some views on Bly’s choices. (For example, noting that he had translated “Kejsaren” as “Cesar” instead of the more conventional “Emperor”). Up until then, I had felt ashamed of being an immigrant, of speaking with an accent, of sitting in the ESL glass cage in the library to be gawked at, but now my knowledge of a second language was something positive, a worthy skill, and the bilingual immigrant a worthy identity, not shameful.
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More importantly, the poetry’s dreamlike, metaphorical atmosphere made the biggest impression. Unlike Öijer’s dramatic Beat poetry, Tranströmer’s was quiet, enigmatic. “Allegro,” from the second collection, The Half-Finished Heaven (1962), is a paradigmatic early Tranströmer poem:
Allegro
I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.
The keys are willing. Gentle hammers strike.
The tone is green, lively and calm.
The tone says that freedom exists
and someone isn’t paying the emperor tax.
I shove my bands down into my haydnpockets
and act like someone who looks calmly at the world.
I hoist the haydnflag – it signifies:
“We won’t give in. But want peace.”
The music is a glass house on a slope
where stones are flying, stones are rolling.
And the stones roll straight through
but every pane remains whole.
This poem—like so many of Tranströmer’s, explicitly or implicitly—is an ekphrastic poem about music (if we can speak of ekphrasis as responding to music and not just visual art). Tranströmer metaphorizes the music: it is “green, lively and calm,” it “says that freedom exists.” As so frequently is the case, the poem ends with the paradox of the “glass house” that remains whole even as stones roll straight through it.
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Or, it is not exactly the music that Tranströmer is metaphorizing. He is more specific than that. In the Swedish original, he uses the word klangen. It is the music’s klang that is “green,” its klang tells him about freedom, its klang is a glass house. “Klang” is a key word for Tranströmer, appearing throughout his work.It’s in the title of the 1966 book Klanger och Spår (which Crane translates as Ringing and Tracks).It is the title of a poem (“Klangen,” also from The Half-Finished Heaven), and included in countless other individual poems as well.
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What does this word mean? There is of course the English word “clang,” which is indeed very close to the Swedish word, but it feels maybe a little louder. In Swedish, the word connotes a specific kind of sonic resonance (from bird song and church bells). It’s an oddly difficult word to translate. In the new collected poems, The Blue House, Patty Crane translates “klangen” in “Allegro” as “tone.” It’s a good translation, but this word misses some of the word’s nuance. To begin with “klang” is inherently onomatopoetic: its sound is as important as semantic meaning. You strike a piano key and it makes a “klang.” On a more semantic level, it has to do with the resonance of words. What “klang” describes is to sound what association is to words (this might be the difference between “clang” and “tracks,” the words being tracks). You get the primary sound and also its “klang,” you get the signification and its associative resonance. So many of Tranströmer’s poems are about listening, or even living, in a kind of sonic aftermath.
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I’m not discussing this word to criticize Crane’s translation, or to nit-pick (which seems to be the primary mode reviewers have to engage with translation, as if finding faults is a way to prove one’s own mastery). I’ve struggled with it myself as a translator, particularly in translating the work of Ann Jäderlund, perhaps the contemporary poet who is closest to Tranströmer in both importance and sensibility. As in Tranströmer’s work, Jäderlund’s poetry is both full of secrets and full of “klang.” One might write a whole essay on how “klang” works in the elliptical nature poetry of Tranströmer and Jäderlund. One might show how this clang is the manifestation of something that cannot be quite named—even in two very precise poets—or the evocative manifestation of a secret. I want to call attention to this because it’s an important word in Tranströmer’s work—and deceptively difficult to translate.
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Although the language in Tranströmer’s poetry is often very simple, the poems are definitely not, to use the common US term, “accessible.” They are, as the title of another poem has it, Secrets On the Way. Secrets in movement. We feel the resonance of the riddle without knowing its answer: we may not know what it is, but we can sense it moving somewhere. More than perhaps any other poet I know (except perhaps, again, Jäderlund), you have to sit with Tranströmer’s poems awhile after reading them. Not to re-read them—as is so often touted as the gold standard of a good poem—or to interpret them, but just to sit in their aftermath, listening.
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Klang: the word is important to Tranströmer because it’s a kind of musical atmosphere, an atmosphere of artistic saturation, echoing, aftermath.
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Although it doesn’t include the exact word “klang,” “Elegy” (another poem Minczeski gave us in class) may give some sense of this atmospheric aftermath and how it operates. This poem is an elegy, but instead of offering the meditations on mortality typically expected of the form, the poem presents us with a fairytale-like situation of three rooms:
I open the first door.
It’s a large sunlit room.
A heavy car passes on the road
and makes the porcelain quiver.
I open door number two.
Friends! You drank the darkness
and became visible.
Door number three. A cramped hotel room.
View of a back alley.
A lamp sparkles on the pavement.
The beautiful slag of experience.
This is not a conventional elegy. Like another classic early Tranströmer poem, “After Someone’s Death,” it mentions nothing about the person who has died, nothing about how they died or why, nothing explicit about the speaker or poet’s relationship to the deceased. What it focuses on is the saturating atmosphere that follows someone’s death. Even the “slag of experience”—the aftermath of life—“sparkles.” This sparkling functions synesthetically for me: I hear in the word a kind of echo of the “quiver” from the first room. The visual feels sonic, the sounds seeable.
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Tranströmer is a fundamentally synesthetic poet. Even more than Keats’, Tranströmer’s poems blend the senses. We understand sound through images, or appearances through sound. In Transtömer, sounds have color (green for example); the sound of a car is “heavy”; and one can drink “darkness.” The result is sensory, immersive. Although the poems are short and simple, they feel sensorily powerful.
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The Blue House is full of elegies. Why are there so many elegies among Tranströmer’s poetry? Grieving seems to be one of Tranströmer’s most evocative states. In these moments he is undone, vulnerable, receptive to impressions. Because he cannot fully make sense of the world in grief, the senses are amplified, pierced. I think of Roberto Calasso’s defintion of “absolute literature”: “Literature at its most piercing, its most intolerant of any social trappings.”
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These most “piercing” moments occur in some of Tranströmer’s most striking metaphors, as when in “The Outpost” he says “I am a turnstile”; or when in “Secrets On the Way” he writes:
It darkened suddenly as if from a rainstorm.
I stood in a room that contained every moment –
a butterfly museum.
For Tranströmer, inspiration seems the result of a kind of vulnerability to the sensory impressions of the world. This room might feel like a butterfly museum but the thousands of butterflies are still alive: their wings shuddering. These impressions are closely tied to figurative language: the speaker becomes like “a turnstile”; the darkness comes suddenly “as if from a rainstorm.” One might say that the sensory impressions transform into—or through—figurative language.
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“It darkened suddenly”: The “dark” is paradigmatic of this state of mind—both in terms of night (one poem is called “Night Duty,” recalling Breton’s Surrealist quip that he works when he dreams) and a more allegorical darkness. In the darkness moments flicker like butterflies. We might think these would be moments of revelation, of light. But in Tranströmer the piercing moments are often moments of darkness. We are not enlightened but overwhelmed, immersed.
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One of Tranströmer’s collections is called Mörkerseende. Crane translates this as “Seeing in the Dark.” A more literal and idiomatic translation would be “Night Vision.” An even more literal translation might call attention to what this compound word actually consists of: darkness and seeing. “Darkness Seeing” or “Dark Vision.” On the whole, Crane tends to smoothen out Tranströmer’s intriguing use of compound words and neologisms. Part of the magic of these words is that they function a little like a montage of two. Is it “seeing in the dark” or “seeing the dark”? Is it being able to see at night or seeing the night? There’s an uncertainty in the Swedish compound, which is frequently made up for with a wonderful tacticity. These words are both secretive and evocative. They vibrate, quiver, butterfly.
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Tranströmer’s work does not just engage with death via elegy. At times, the poems suggest that poetry is the art of death, or the art of the dead. Ghosts abound. In the poem Crane translates as “The Work’s Edges,” Tranströmer writes: “Underjorden lyssnar på oss via grässtråna.” Crane translates this as “The underground listens to us through the grass blades.” But I think this doesn’t fully invoke the Hadean clang. I would translate it as “The underworld listens to us through blades of grass.” It’s not just that the living write poetry for the dead, or in the wake of death, but that the dead overhear us as well.
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In the long poem The Baltics, Tranströmer makes contact with a dead grandmother, and bases much of the language on notes left behind by his dead grandfather. In one revealing metapoetic moment, he writes that he is “writing a long letter to the dead.” This could be a description of The Baltics, or it could be a description of Tranströmer’s entire ouevre. The dead enter into the world of the living. He speaks to the dead, the dead speak (and listen) to him. The title of his last collection was For the Living and the Dead, as if the living and the dead were both the subject matter and the audience of his work.
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In “Homages,” Tranströmer offers a related vision of poetry using some of his favorite poets:
Shiki, Björling and Ungaretti
with life’s chalk on death’s blackboard.
The poem that’s utterly possible.
Poetry is “utterly possible” at the intersection of life and death. We use “life’s chalk” but we write on “death’s blackboard.” (Presenting a pantheon of enigmatic heroes.) Perhaps in response to Robert Frost’s famous quip about poetry being what is “lost in translation,” Tranströmer suggests that poetry is the “utterly possible” art of translation between the living and the dead.
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In The Dream and the Underworld, Jungian psychologist James Hillman argues that when we sleep and dream, we travel into the underworld. We are in some sense dead, or inhabiting our dead selves. Contrary to the common practices that have been going on for centuries (per the title of Sigmund Freud’s book, Interpretation of Dreams), Hillman does not believe we should try to “interpret” the language of dreams—the night language, or perhaps in Tranströmer’s terms, the “night vision”—into day language. He does not think we should make sense of dreams because they have their own logic. Instead, we should sit with dreams, stay in them so to speak. Or in Tranströmer’s language, listen to their “klang.”
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In what mode do we best listen to the dead? For Tranströmer, it seems that one figure who is most vulnerable to both art and the sensory impressions of the world is either someone mourning or a tourist in a foreign land—and both of these might be stand-ins for the dreamer, the person travelling in the underworld. In a way, this emphasis on traveling into unknown realms literalizes the famous modernist concept of “defamiliarization”—the idea, put forth by Russian theorist Victor Shklovsky, that the purpose of art is to make the world strange again. Tranströmer’s speakers are literally in foreign places, but his poems are also possibly the best examples of Shklovsky’s idea.
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There are almost no proper nouns in Tranströmer’s poetry, but the ones that he includes are almost always either the names of artists (Gogol, Haydn, Björling, etc.) or the names of foreign places: Lisbon, Benin, Izimir, Syros, the Nile Delta, Africa, Oklahoma, Iceland, Molokai, Shanghai, and more. Foreign destinations seem to have strong ties to artists and art. They belong in the same register inside these poems. Poems are ekphrastic or travelogue and often both.
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In “Night Travel,” Tranströmer catches the atmosphere of the nightly journey:
It’s teeming under us. Trains depart.
Hotel Astoria trembles.
A glass of water by the bedside
shines in the tunnels.
He dreamed he was imprisoned on Svalbard.
The planet rumbled as it turned.
Glittering eyes passed over the ice.
The miracles’ beauty existed.
It’s a travel poem as a dream poem—or the other way around. It’s a poem about travelling but dreaming of being stuck. The key for me is in the verbs: “myllrar” (“Teems”), “darrar”(“shakes”), “lyser” (Crane translates it as “shines” but I picture it more like “glows”), “mullrande” (“rumbled”) and “tindrande.” These are clang-verbs: physical, vibrating, atmospheric.
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Tranströmer loves the verb “flimmrande” (“flickering”). It’s a visual phenomena with a synesthetic, onomatopoetic quality. We both hear and see the flickering. It’s a noisy word–butnot noise at a high volume, it’s a soft noise. It does not give us a clear image, but—as in David Lynch’s moves and TV shows—creates a gateway into an alternative world, an underworld.
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In “Tracks,” another night journey poem (and the third poem Minczeski gave us that summer), Tranströmer describes travelling in a train car at night, seeing the lights of the city “flickering coldly on the horizon.” This flickering sends him into a reverie:
As when a person has gone into a dream so deep
she’ll never remember she was there
when she returns to her room.
Or when someone has gone into an illness so deep
his days all become a few flickering points, a swarm,
cold and slight on the horizon.
The “flickering” observed in an in-between state on a train is akin to being ill (though I cannot help but think the person has gone into the underworld). This in-between state—neither sleeping nor awake, neither alive nor dead—is where his poetry happens.
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There is something vulnerable about the tourist. Unused to his or her surroundings, they become overwhelmed by the senses. These speakers tend to forget themselves, lose themselves. Like the boy in “After a Seizure,” the tourist is absorbed—into art, into a foreign landscape.
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In “Izimir at Three O’Clock,” the speaker sees two beggars on a street in Turkey. Their strange appearance leads to this climactic moment:
Blue slipped past at anchor, shimmering.
Black crept and shrank, staring out from rock.
White blew into a storm in the eye.
This is Crane’s translation—the word she translates as “shimmering” is not surprisingly “flimmrande.” Flickering. Here the synesthetic imagination stirs the senses: the colors themselves become animated, personified “in the eye.” Mörkerseende. Night Vision. Existing outside of the everyday, the tourist opens up to the world.
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Tourists are often criticized for not being knowledgeable enough about the places they visit, for having a shallow relationship to the space and language, but it’s exactly this dislodged—or homeless—quality that appeals to Tranströmer. Traveling is like going into a dream (which is like going into the underworld). For Tranströmer it’s the tourist’s ignorance that allows for the truest experience, unaided by illusory mastery.
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I tend to reject the anti-tourist rhetoric when it appears in discussions about translation or “world literature.” The idealization of mastery is an idealization of removing the foreign through mastery—usually of foreign languages. Critics (and academic conventions) tend to demean translation as a kind of touristic activity. You have to read the poem “in the original” in order to really read the text. This idealization of mastery is not only illusory (you cannot master languages, texts, cultures), but also not the best state for receiving poetry. Tranströmer’s “utterly possible” poetry happens by being open to the foreign—to foreign art, foreign senses. I tend to be very suspicious of writings about foreign poets that overemphasize their “original context.” Such rhetoric tends to overemphasize the nation state (as original context), as if writers only read other writers from their nation; and tend to overstabilize that context (as if that context is homogenous, as if it can be reduced to a paragraphs). Most importantly perhaps, such rhetoric quarantines the text, foregrounds the borders, tells US readers: you cannot really read this.
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However, with a poet as acclaimed at Tranströmer, I have the opposite impulse. I feel the need to assert his various contexts–not just the nation-based Swedish contexts, but the international contexts. In the introduction to The Blue House, Yusef Komunyaka says simply that “Tranströmer is a world poet” as if the phrase absolves the poet of any belonging, any language. There are most certainly ways we can read Tranströmer as a particularly Swedish poet. To begin with, his life and career overlapped and was shaped by a part of modern Swedish society known as “folkhemmet”—“the people’s home”—or the welfare state. Working as a psychologist for prisoners and juvenile delinquents, and as part of public employment services, Tranströmer played an integral role in a society that emphasized rehabilitation and therapy.
Further, Tranströmer’s poetry participates in a long line of nature mysticism in Swedish poetry. And like many young poets who began publishing in the 1950s, Tranströmer was influenced by earlier Swedish modernists, such as Gunnar Ekelöf, Erik Lindegren, Gunar Björling, and Artur Lundkvist, poets who had brought T.S. Eliot and avant-gardism into Swedish poetry. Like many of the poets of the era, Tranströmer’s poetry tends to be less extreme and political than his predecessors. A quick view of a Lundkvist poem may suggest some similarities:
When you without realizing it cross the hidden bridge
the butterflies fly out from the creek’s sludge
and space is suddenly full of enormous, almost invisible flowers of glass,
whose treacherous shimmer evokes the water that runs down
the windows of the butcher shops.
Here we have some of the same language, words as in Tranströmer in an equally heavily metaphoric world–butterflies, flowers, bridges–and a poetics based on dream associations (Lundkvist had a Jungian take on Surrealism), but Lundkvist’s imagery is far more combative.
Tranströmer himself often pointed out Ragnar Thoursie as a particularly strong influence. Thoursie did not write a lot of poetry, as he dedicated himself to politics for most of his life, but the poems he did write had a profound influence on Swedish poetry–and beyond (Prime Minister Olof Palme liked to quote him). In Thoursie’s poems, we again see a richly metaphorical language, such as in this section from the poem “Stagnelius”:
…Now I step down into the green kingdoms
where peace reigns; there the bird song awaits
a mere sign from me, there I will care for Anima’s instruments,
lay on my back and finger the water stream’s lyre
with memory’s inexhaustibly knowledgeable underwater forest
Here we see the densely metaphoric journey into a dream-or-death realm that is so important to Tranströmer, but even here, Thoursie’s speaker is so active compared to Tranströmer’s. Tranströmer’s speakers walk, listen, look; they seldom do anything as dramatic as finger the water’s lyre or care for Anima’s instruments.
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I hope this brief foray into mid-century Swedish poetry may create some sense of the literary climate Tranströmer came of age in, but from the beginning he was a very international poet as well. He read the Surrealists (one early poem is an homage to Paul Eluard); early on, he struck up a friendship with Robert Bly, who started translating his poetry in the 1960s; and over the years, Tranströmer himself also translated a number of poets (Janoz Pilinszky, Bill Knott, and others). In the literary climate of the Cold War, Tranströmer traveled widely, giving readings across Europe as well as in the US. One of my favorite Tranströmer poems is “To Friends Behind a Border,” written to friends he made when travelling to the Baltic nations. Chinese poet Bei Dao translated Tranströmer into Chinese and, in exile ended up visiting Tranströmer in his “blue house” (Bei Dao has written a memoir called Blue House, after Tranströmer’s house). The Baltics can be read as a direct response to Eliot’s The Wasteland. To cap off an internationally acclaimed career, Tranströmer received the Neustadt Prize in the US (1990) and the Nobel Prize from the Swedish academy (2009). National contexts can be useful but they are also often reductive. Tranströmer’s poetry of the 1970s and 80s is clearly influenced by US poetry; it becomes a little more conversational and casual.
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I welcome The Blue House—clearly a work of love and dedication, beautifully edited and produced—but I also wonder: Why another Tranströmer translation? This translation is not significantly different from previous translations (especially Robin Fulton’s). Why do we keep translating and publishing (and reviewing!) Tranströmer poems?
To answer the question, it might be worthwhile to ask: why don’t US presses publish new or younger poets in translation? I think there’s a lot of anxiety about such translation projects. Most of all there’s the worry: Are these poets worth translating? Are they major enough? With Tranströmer (or Neruda, Garcia Lorca, etc.), we know that they are “major.” With others, we may worry that they are not worthy of translation, we may even worry that they will bring something truly new into the conversation of contemporary poetry, something that will dislodge the status quo.
But, I would argue, that it’s precisely in this state of doubt—that of Tranströmer’s tourist—that we are most receptive to the power of poetry. In this state, we are encountering things we cannot easily classify, “master,” categorize. This is in part why poets like Tranströmer or Garcia Lorca had such a profound effect when they were first translated: they opened up US readers to writing beyond the enforced and normative canon of the moment (the New Critics and their disciples). And it is precisely when the status quo has been dislodged that we can be truly vulnerable to poetry.
So while I appreciate this beautiful new volume of translations, I hope that Crane will seek out newer Swedish poets to bring into US literature, that Copper Canyon will take risks on newer, less acclaimed poets in translation, and that reviewers—such as this one!—will also seek out and read and respond to such poets, so that we may engage with a broader range of poets, even as tourists—or, in the spirit of Tranströmer’s own work, especially as tourists—lost in a strange world where we are more than anywhere vulnerable to poetry’s dream language.