Dag T. Straumsvåg
trans. by Robert Hedin
Two POEMS
The Opera House in Trondheim
I was humming an aria from Wagner’s “Parsifal” when an opera lover tried to steal my cigarette. I had no difficulty fending him off and instead I offered him one from my new pack. This happens every time I light up a Pall Mall in Trondheim. The classic Reds are not for sale here. This is a city with many new hotels, but no opera house. Every day I wait for Pavarotti to check in, but he never does. The hotels look like influenza and no bakeries sell rhubarb scones. On the street one day I’m kidnapped by two men in tuxedos and taken to a camp deep in the woods. They serve tea and raisin scones and interrogate me for hours. Everyone carries bows and arrows, but no one knows how to use them. They’re in desperate need of a weapons instructor, and several times ask if I know one. “I know two,” I say, “but both hate opera.” One day troops of well-dressed men and women will march out of the trees, armed to the hilt, and turn all these new hotels into one big opera house, a huge glass dome lit with resplendent chandeliers, floors of inlaid Italian marble, a curtain of gold brochade. On opening night the house buzzes with small talk and the clinking of champagne glasses. The box seats are filling with prominent guests, the orchestra is tuning their instruments, the lights dimming low. A nervous silence falls over the audience. The curtain rises, and everyone begins to die.
Charles Bukowski
A stranger gets off the train at the Trondheim station and walks into town. As he crosses the railroad bridge it begins to rain and he slips into a convenience store. Two walls are covered with paperbacks in English. Tom Clancy, J. K. Rowling, Dan Brown, George R. R. Martin, Fifty Shades of Grey, plus half a shelf of books by Charles Bukowski. Later, he enters another store, this one with a larger selection, and it also has half a shelf by Bukowski. For the next three months he visits every convenience store and bookstore in the city, and it’s always the same. Half a shelf of Bukowski. Post Office, Ham on Rye, Come On In!, The Pleasures of the Damned, Factotum, Pulp, Women, Run With the Hunted, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. Except for a convenience store at the edge of town, which only has one copy of Post Office. He can’t figure it out. No one he asks has read Charles Bukowski, has any interest in reading Charles Bukowski, has ever bought a book by Bukowski. It boggles his mind. He can’t sleep at night. He begins talking to himself. “He danced like a mystic.” “I want to learn a new sickness.” “The room was dark, it looked like someone had to get out fast.” “There are pyramids buried under the streets of this town.”
Dag T. Straumsvåg was born in 1964 and raised in Tingvoll, a village on the sparsely populated coast of western Norway. The author of three books of poetry, most recently A Bumpy Ride to the Slaughterhouse and The Lure-Maker from Posio, both published by Red Dragonfly Press, he is a respected translator of contemporary American poetry. He currently lives in Trondheim.
Robert Hedin is the author, translator, or editor of two dozen books of poetry and prose, most recently At the Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). He is co-founder and former director of the Anderson Center at Tower View, a residential artist retreat in Red Wing, Minnesota, where he currently lives.