Showing posts with label Tomas Tranströmer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tomas Tranströmer. Show all posts

Thursday, June 29, 2023

to catch a look at yourself

 
 
 
 
 

 
 

I

I flinch from something that shuffles slantwise through sleet,
A fragment of what is to come.
A wall broken loose. Something without eyes. Hard.
A face of teeth!
A lone wall. Or is the house there
although I do not see it?
The Future: an army of empty houses
that grope their way ahead through sleet.

II

Two truths approach each other. One comes from within,
one comes from without--and where they meet you have the chance
to catch a look at yourself.
Noticing what is about to happen, you shout desperately: "Stop!
Anything, anything, as long as I don't have to know myself."
And there is a boat that wants to put in--tries to, right here--
it will try again thousands of times.
Out of the forest's dark comes a long boat hook
that's pushed through the open window
among the party guests who have danced themselves warm.

III

The apartment I've lived in most of my life is to be evacuated. It's already
emptied of everything. The anchor has let go--but despite the mournful
air it's still the lightest apartment in the city. Truth needs no furniture.
I've gone one round on life's circle and come back to the starting point: a
bare room. Scenes from my early life take shape on the walls like Egyptian
paintings inside a burial chamber. But they are fading. The light is too
strong. The windows have enlarged. The empty apartment is a big tele-
scope pointed at the sky. It's as quiet here as a Quaker meeting. Nothing
heard b ut the pigeons of the backyards, their cooings.
 
 
 
 
 
~ Tomas Transtromer
   Preludes
 art by Picasso


 
 

Sunday, June 11, 2023

words









Being tired of people who come with words, but no speech,
I made my way to the snow-covered island.
 
The wild does not have words.
The pages free of handwriting stretched out on all sides!
I came upon the tracks of reindeer in the snow.
Speech but no words.





~ Tomas Transtromer
translation by Robert Bly
from The Half-Finished Heaven



allegro










I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively and calm.

The music says freedom exists
and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on the world calmly.

I hoist the Haydnflag - it signifies:
"We don't give in. But want peace.'

The music is a glass-house on the slope
where the stones fly, the stones roll.

And the stones roll right through
but each pane stays whole.





~ Tomas Transtromer
from New Collected Poems
translated by Robin Fulton





Saturday, March 4, 2023

tracks










Night, two o'clock: moonlight.  The train has stopped
in the middle of the plain.  Distant bright points of a town
twinkle cold on the horizon.

As when someone has gone into a dream so far
that he'll never remember he was there
when he comes back to his room.

And as when someone goes into a sickness so deep
that all his former days become twinkling points, a swarm,
cold and feeble on the horizon.

The train stands perfectly still,
Two o'clock: full moonlight, few stars.





~ Tomas Transtromer
translated by Robert Bly



the name








I got sleepy while driving and pulled in under a tree at the 
side of the road.  Rolled up in the back seat and went to sleep.
How long? Hours. Darkness had come.

All of a sudden I was awake, and didn't know who I was?
I'm fully conscious, but that doesn't help.  Where am I?
WHO am I? I am something that has just woken up in a back
 seat, throwing itself around in panic like a cat in a gunnysack. 
Who am I?

After a long while my life comes back to me.  My name
comes to me like an angel.  Outside the castle walls there is a
 trumpet blast (as in the Leonora Overture)  and the footsteps
that will save me come quickly quickly down the long staircase.
It's me coming! It's me!

But it is impossible to forget the fifteen-second battle in the 
hell of nothingness, a few feet from a major highway where
the cars slip past with their lights dimmed.



~ Tomas Tranströmer
 


Thursday, February 23, 2023

standing up







In a split second of hard thought, I managed to catch her. 
 I stopped, holding the hen in my hands.  Strange,
 she didn't really feel living: rigid, dry, 
and old white plume-ridden lady's hat that shrieked out the truths of 1912.  
Thunder in the air.  An odor rose from the fence-boards,
 as when you open a photo album that has got so old
 that no one can identify the people any longer.

I carried her back inside the chicken netting and let her go. 
 All of a sudden she came back to life, she knew who she was,
 and ran off according to the rules.  Hen-yards are thick with taboos. 
 But the earth all around is full of affection and tenacity.  
A low stone wall half-overgrown with leaves.  
When dusk begins to fall the stones are faintly luminous 
with the hundred-year-old warmth from the hands that built it.

It's been a hard winter, but summer is here and the fields want us to walk upright. 
 Every man unimpeded, but careful, as when you stand up in a small boat. 
 I remember a day in Africa: on the banks of the Chari, there were many boats, 
an atmosphere positively friendly, the men almost blue-black in color 
with three parallel scars on each cheek (meaning the Sara tribe). 
 I am welcomed on a boat - it's a canoe hollowed from a dark tree.  
The canoe is incredibly wobbly, even when you sit on your heels.  A balancing act.
  If you have the heart on the left side you have to lean a bit to the right, 
nothing in the pockets, no big arm movements, please, all rhetoric has to be left behind.  
Precisely: rhetoric is impossible here. 
 The canoe glides out over the water.





~ Tomas Transtromer
from The Half-Finished Heaven
translation by Robert Bly
Photo by Will Baxter/CRS



Wednesday, January 12, 2022

the storm







The storm puts its lips to the house
and blows to make a sound.
I sleep restlessly, turn over, with closed
eyes read the book of the storm.

But the child's eyes grow huge in the dark
and the storm whimpers for the child.
Both love to see the swinging lamp.
Both are halfway toward speech.

Storms have childlike hands and wings.
The caravan bolts off toward Lapland
and the house senses the constellation of nails
holding its wall together.

The night is quiet above our floor
(where all the died-away footsteps
are lying like sunken leaves in a pond)
but outside the night is wild!

A more serious storm is moving over us all.
It puts its lips to our soul
and blows to make a sound.  We're afraid
the storm will blow everything inside us away.




~ Tomas Transtromer
translated by robert bly





Tuesday, February 2, 2021

blank postcards




I.
The calendar all booked up, the future unknown.
The cable silently hums some folk song
but lacks a country.  Snow falls in a gray sea.  Shadows
fight out on the dock.

 II.
Halfway through your life, death turns up
and takes your pertinent measurements.  We forget
the visit.  Life goes on. But someone is sewing
the suit in the silence.




~Tomas Transtromer
from The Half-Finished Heaven
translation by robert bly
art by picasso


haikudikter





The presence of God.
In a tunnel of birdsong
a locked gate opens.




~ Tomas Transtromer
excerpt from Haikudikter, The Sorrow Gondola
translations by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl



Wednesday, September 16, 2020

the half-finished heaven





Cowardice breaks off on its path.
Anguish breaks off on its path.
The vulture breaks off in its flight.

The eager light runs into the open,
even the ghosts take a drink.

And our paintings see the air,
red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything starts to look around.
We go out in the sun by hundreds.

Every person is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless field under us.

Water glitters between the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.



~ Tomas Transtromer
from Half-Finished Heaven
translated by robert bly
art by rolf harris



Wednesday, August 5, 2020

after a death






Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside.  It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.




~ Tomas Transtromer
from The Half-Finished Heaven
translated by Robert Bly



Sunday, July 19, 2020

in the kingdom of insecurity





As the under-secretary leans forward and draws an X
her earrings dangle like the sword above Damocles,
As a speckled butterfly turns invisible against the earth
the demon merges with the opened newspaper.
A helmet worn by no one seizes power.
A mother tortoise escapes, flying underwater.





~ Tomas Transtromer
from The Sorrow Gondola
translations by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl





Thursday, May 14, 2020

under pressure






Powerful engines from the blue sky.
We live on a construction site where everything shivers,
where the ocean depths can suddenly open.
A hum in seashells and telephones.

You can see beauty if you look quickly to the side.
The heavy grainfields run together in one yellow river.
The restless shadows in my head want to go out there.
They want to crawl in the grain and turn into something gold.

Night finally.  At midnight I go to bed.
The dinghy sets out from the ship.
On the water you are alone.
The dark hull of society keeps on going.




~ Tomas Transtromer
from Half Finished Heaven
translated by robert bly
art by van gogh


Saturday, February 15, 2020

romanesque arches






Inside the huge Romanesque church the tourists jostled in the half darkness.
vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.
A few candle flames flickered.
An angel with no face embraced me
and whispered through my whole body:
"Don't be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete, that's how it's meant to be."
Blind with tears
I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza
together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini,
and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.






Tomas Tranströmer
from The Half Finished Heaven
translated by Robert Bly


Friday, January 17, 2020

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 labrinths 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.
 
 
 


~ Tomas Transtromer 
 from Bright Scythe, 
translated by Patty Crane
with thanks to whiskey river
 
 
 
 

Thursday, March 12, 2015

language without words








Sick of those who come with words, words but no language,
I make my way to the snow-covered island.

Wilderness has no words. The unwritten pages
stretch out in all directions.

I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language,
language without words.




~ Tomas Tranströmer

translated by Robin Robertson

Monday, June 30, 2014

reply to a letter







In the bottom drawer I find a letter which arrived for the first time twenty- six years ago. A letter written in panic, which continues to breathe when it arrives for the second time.
A house has five windows; through four of them daylight shines clear and still. The fifth window faces a dark sky, thunder and storm. I stand by the fifth window. The letter.
Sometimes a wide abyss separates Tuesday from Wednesday, but twenty-six years may pass in a moment. Time is no straight line. but rather a labyrinth. and if you press yourself against the wall, at the right spot, you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.
Was that letter ever answered? l don't remember, it was a long time ago. The innumerable thresholds of the sea continued to wander. The heart continued to leap from second to second, like the toad in the wet grass of a night in August.
The unanswered letters gather up above, like cirrostratus clouds foreboding a storm. They dim the rays of the sun. One day l shall reply. One day when I am dead and at last free to collect my thoughts. Or at least so far away from here that l can rediscover myself. When recently arrived I walk in the great city. On 25th Street, on the windy streets of dancing garbage. I who love to stroll and merge with the crowd, a capital letter T in the infinite body of text.





~ Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Göran Malmqvist
from The Blue House
art by emile claus



Thursday, June 26, 2014

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, Upanishads 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
translated by Göran Malmqvist


Tuesday, January 29, 2013

three stanzas







1.

The knight and his lady
turned to stone but happy
on a flying coffin lid
outside time.

2.

Jesus held up a coin
with Tiberius in profile
a profile without love
power in circulation.

3.

A streaming sword
wipes out the memories.
Trumpet and sword belts
rust in the ground.




Tomas Tranströmer
from The Sorrow Gondola
translation by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl
photos of the tomb of Sir John and Lady Isobel de Sully
Sir John died in 1387 at the age of 106








Tuesday, March 27, 2012

april and silence





Spring lies abandoned.
A ditch the color of dark violet
moves alongside me
giving no images back.

The only thing that shines
are some yellow flowers.

I am carried inside
my own shadow like a violin
in its black case.

The only thing I want to say
hovers just out of reach
like the family silver
at the pawnbroker's.





~ Tomas Transtromer
translation by Robert Bly
from The Half Finished Heaven
photo by David Gray, Reuters