TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
“November”

When the hangman’s bored he turns dangerous.
The burning sky rolls up.

Tapping sounds can be heard from cell to cell
and space streams up from the ground-frost.

A few stones shine like full moons.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

"National Insecurity"

The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X

and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles.

As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground

so the demon merges with the opened newspaper.

A helmet worn by no one has taken power.

The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.

Translated by Robin Fulton

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

“The Blue House”

It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush,  from the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.

Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create…draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.

The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

“Two Cities”

Each on its own side of a strait, two cities

one plunged into darkness, under enemy control.

In the other the lamps are burning.

The luminous shore hypnotizes the blacked-out one.

I swim out in a trance

on the glittering dark waters.

A muffled tuba-blast breaks in.

It’s a friend’s voice, take your grave and go.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

"From the Snowmelt of '66"

____________________

Rushing rushing water's rumbling old hypnosis.

The river's flooding the car-graveyard, glittering

behind the masks.

I grab hold of the bridge railing.

The bridge: a large iron bird sailing past death.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

"The Indoors Is Endless"

____________________

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven

hoists his death-mask and sails off.

The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills.

The wild geese are flying northwards.

Here is the north, here is Stockholm

swimming palaces and hovels.

The logs in the royal fireplace

collapse from Attention to At Ease.

Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes,

but the city wells breathe heavily.

Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas

are carried by night over the North Bridge.

The cobblestones make them stagger

mamselles loafers gentlemen.

Implacably still, the sign-board

with the smoking blackamoor.

So many islands, so much rowing

with invisible oars against the current!

The channels open up, April May

and sweet honey dribbling June.

The heat reaches islands far out.

The village doors are open, except one.

The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence.

The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience.

It happened like this, or almost.

It is an obscure family tale

about Erik, done down by a curse

disabled by a bullet through the soul.

He went to town, met an enemy

and sailed home sick and grey.

Keeps to his bed all that summer.

The tools on the wall are in mourning.

He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter

of night moths, his moonlight comrades.

His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain

against the iron-bound tomorrow.

And the God of the depths cries out of the depths

‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’

All the surface action turns inwards.

He’s taken apart, put together.

The wind rises and the wild rose bushes

catch on the fleeing light.

The future opens, he looks into

the self-rotating kaleidoscope

sees indistinct fluttering faces

family faces not yet born.

By mistake his gaze strikes me

as I walk around here in Washington

among grandiose houses where only

every second column bears weight.

White buildings in crematorium style

where the dream of the poor turns to ash.

The gentle downward slope gets steeper

and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.

Translated by Robin Fulton

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

"Streets in Shanghai"

____________________

1

The white butterfly in the park is being read by many.

I love that cabbage-moth as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself!

At dawn the running crowds set our quiet planet in motion.

Then the park fills with people. To each one, eight faces polished like jade, for all

       situations, to avoid making mistakes.

To each one, there's also the invisible face reflecting "something you don't talk about."

Something that appears in tired moments and is as rank as a gulp of viper schnapps                with its long scaly aftertaste.

The carp in the pond move continuously, swimming while they sleep, setting an   example for the faithful: always in motion.          

2

It's midday. Laundry flutters in the gray sea-wind high over the cyclists

who arrive in dense schools. Notice the labyrinths on each side!

I'm surrounded by written characters that I can't interpret, I'm illiterate through and            through.

But I've paid what I owe and have receipts for everything.

I've accumulated so many illegible receipts.

I'm an old tree with withered leaves that hang on and can't fall to the ground.

And a gust from the sea gets all these receipts rustling.

3

 At dawn the trampling hordes set our quiet planet in motion.

We're all aboard the street, and it's as crammed as the deck of  a ferry.

Where are we headed? Are there enough teacups? We should consider ourselves lucky

       to have made it aboard this street!

It's a thousand years before the birth of claustrophobia.

Hovering behind each of us who walks here is a cross that wants to catch up with us,

        pass us, unite with us.

Something that wants to sneak up on us from behind, put its hands over our eyes and

        whisper "Guess who!"

We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don't

        know about.

Translated by Patty Crane

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

“Icelandic Hurricane”

____________________

No earth tremor, but a skyquake. Turner could have painted it, secured by ropes. A single  mitten whirled past right now, several miles from its hand. Facing the storm I am heading for that house on the other side of the field. I flutter in the hurricane. I am being x-rayed, my skeleton hands in its application for discharge. Panic grows while I tack about, I am wrecked, I am wrecked and drown on dry land! How heavy it is, all that I suddenly have to carry, how heavy it is for the butterfly to tow a barge! There at last. A final bout of wrestling with the door. And now inside. Behind the huge window-pane. What a strange and magnificent invention glass is—to be close without being stricken… Outside a horde  of transparent splinters of gigantic shapes rush across the lava plain. But I flutter no more. I sit behind the glass, still, my own portrait.

-

I've read this poem a thousand times. I'm always struck by the line "What a strange and magnificent invention glass is - to be close without being stricken."

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

"National Insecurity"

The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X

and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles.

As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground

so the demon merges with the opened newspaper.

A helmet worn by no one has taken power.

The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.

Translated by Robin Fulton

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

"The Half-Finished Heaven"

____________________

Despondency breaks off its course.

Anguish breaks off its course.

The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,

even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,

our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.

We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door

leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

“The Nightingale in Badelunda”

____________________

In the green midnight at the nightingale’s northern limit. Heavy leaves hang in trance, the deaf cars race towards the neon-line. The nightingale’s voice rises without wavering to the side, it is as penetrating as a cock-crow, but beautiful and free of vanity. I was in prison and it visited me. I was sick and it visited me. I didn’t notice it then, but I do now. Time streams down from the sun and the moon and into all the tick-tock-thankful clocks. But right here there is no time. Only the nightingale’s voice, the raw resonant notes that whet the night sky’s gleaming scythe.

TOMAS TRANSTRŌMER

“Six Winters”

______________________

1
In the black hotel a child is asleep.
And outside: the winter night
where the wide-eyed dice roll.

2
An élite of the dead became stone
in Katarina Churchyard
where the wind shakes in its armour from Svalbard.

3
One wartime winter when I lay sick
a huge icicle grew outside the window.
Neighbour and harpoon, unexplained memory.

4
Ice hangs down from the roof edge.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract cattle, udders of glass.

5
On a side-track, an empty railway-carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journeys in its claws.

6
Tonight snow-haze, moonlight. The moonlight jellyfish itself
is floating before us. Our smiles
on the way home. Bewitched avenue.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
“Track”

____________________

2 A.M. moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon
As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember he was there
when he returns again to his view
Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm
feeble and cold on the horizon
The train is entirely motionless
2 o’clock: strong moonlight, few stars

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

“Two Cities”

Each on its own side of a strait, two cities

one plunged into darkness, under enemy control.

In the other the lamps are burning.

The luminous shore hypnotizes the blacked-out one.

I swim out in a trance

on the glittering dark waters.

A muffled tuba-blast breaks in.

It’s a friend’s voice, take your grave and go.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER - “November”

When the hangman’s bored he turns dangerous.
The burning sky rolls up.

Tapping sounds can be heard from cell to cell
and space streams up from the ground-frost.

A few stones shine like full moons.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER - “A Winter Night”

The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to get a tone.
I toss and turn, my closed eyes
reading the storm’s text.

The child’s eyes grow wide in the dark
and the storm howls for him.
Both love the swinging lamps;
both are halfway towards speech.

The storm has the hands and wings of a child.
Far away, travellers run for cover.
The house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.

The night is calm in our rooms,
where the echoes of all footsteps rest
like sunken leaves in a pond,
but the night outside is wild.

A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

“The Blue House”

It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush,  from the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.

Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create…draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.

The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER - “November”

When the hangman’s bored he turns dangerous.
The burning sky rolls up.
Tapping sounds can be heard from cell to cell
and space streams up from the ground-frost.
A few stones shine like full moons.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
“The Indoors Is Endless”

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.

The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills.
The wild geese are flying northwards.

Here is the north, here is Stockholm
swimming palaces and hovels.

The logs in the royal fireplace
collapse from Attention to At Ease.

Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes,
but the city wells breathe heavily.

Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas
are carried by night over the North Bridge.

The cobblestones make them stagger
mamselles loafers gentlemen.

Implacably still, the sign-board
with the smoking blackamoor.

So many islands, so much rowing
with invisible oars against the current!

The channels open up, April May
and sweet honey dribbling June.

The heat reaches islands far out.
The village doors are open, except one.

The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence.
The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience.

It happened like this, or almost.
It is an obscure family tale

about Erik, done down by a curse
disabled by a bullet through the soul.

He went to town, met an enemy
and sailed home sick and grey.

Keeps to his bed all that summer.
The tools on the wall are in mourning.

He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter
of night moths, his moonlight comrades.

His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain
against the iron-bound tomorrow.

And the God of the depths cries out of the depths
‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’

All the surface action turns inwards.
He’s taken apart, put together.

The wind rises and the wild rose bushes
catch on the fleeing light.

The future opens, he looks into
the self-rotating kaleidoscope

sees indistinct fluttering faces
family faces not yet born.

By mistake his gaze strikes me
as I walk around here in Washington

among grandiose houses where only  
every second column bears weight.

White buildings in crematorium style
where the dream of the poor turns to ash.

The gentle downward slope gets steeper
and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER - “Icelandic Hurricane”

No earth tremor, but a skyquake. Turner could have painted it, secured by ropes. A single  mitten whirled past right now, several miles from its hand. Facing the storm I am heading for that house on the other side of the field. I flutter in the hurricane. I am being x-rayed, my skeleton hands in its application for discharge. Panic grows while I tack about, I am wrecked, I am wrecked and drown on dry land! How heavy it is, all that I suddenly have to carry, how heavy it is for the butterfly to tow a barge! There at last. A final bout of wrestling with the door. And now inside. Behind the huge window-pane. What a strange and magnificent invention glass is—to be close without being stricken… Outside a horde  of transparent splinters of gigantic shapes rush across the lava plain. But I flutter no more. I sit behind the glass, still, my own portrait.