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

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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