Tomas Tranströmer
trans. by Patty Crane
six POEMS
Prelude
Waking up is a parachute jump from the dream.
Free from the suffocating vortex,
the traveler sinks toward morning’s green zone.
Things flare upward. He senses—from the quivering skylark’s
perspective—the powerful tree root system’s
subterranean swaying lamps. But above ground,
the greenery—in a tropical flood—stands
with uplifted arms, listening
to the rhythm of an invisible pump. And he
sinks toward summer, lowering down
into its glaring crater, down
through shafts of green-dampened ages
quaking under the turbine of sun. Then
this vertical journey through the moment ends, and the wings spread
into the osprey’s repose over the flowing waters.
The Bronze Age horn’s
forbidden tone
hovers over the infinite.
In the day’s first hours, consciousness can take hold of the world
like a hand clutching a sun-warmed stone.
The traveler’s standing under the tree.
After hurtling through death’s vortex,
will a great light unfurl over his head?
At Work’s Edges
In the midst of working
we begin to yearn wildly for wild greenness,
for the Wilderness itself, pierced only
by the thin civilization of telephone wires.
—
The moon of Leisure orbits the planet Work
with its mass and weight. —That’s how they want it.
When we’re on our way home, the earth pricks up its ears.
The underground listens to us through the grass blades.
—
Even this very workday holds a private stillness.
Like a smoky inland where a canal runs through:
THE BOAT appears unexpectedly amid the traffic
or glides behind the factory, a white drifter.
—
One Sunday I walk past an unpainted new building
that stands before a gray body of water.
It’s half-finished. The wood has the same pale color
as the skin of someone bathing.
—
Beyond the lamplight, the September night is totally black.
When your eyes adjust, it lightens a bit
over the ground where large snails glide by
and the mushrooms are as abundant as the stars.
The Name
I grow drowsy during the drive and pull off under some trees by the side of
the road. Curl up in the backseat and sleep. For how long? Hours. Darkness
has fallen.
Suddenly I’m awake and don’t recognize myself. Wide awake, but it doesn’t
help. Where am I? WHO am I? I’m something waking up in a backseat,
twisting around in panic like a cat in a sack. Who?
Finally my life comes back to me. My name appears like an angel. Beyond
the walls, the clarion call of a trumpet (like in the Leonore Overture) and
rescuing footsteps come quickly quickly down the far too long stairwell. It’s
me! It’s me!
But impossible to forget those fifteen seconds struggling in the hell of
oblivion, a few feet away from the main road where the traffic slips past with
its lights on.
Start of a Late Autumn Night’s Novel
The ferryboat smells of oil, and something rattles the whole way like an
obsession. The floodlight is switched on. We’re approaching the dock. I’m the
only one getting off here. “D’ya need the ramp?” No. I take a long lurching
stride straight into the night and stand on the dock, on the island. I feel wet
and awkward, a butterfly that just crawled from its cocoon, plastic bags in
each hand hanging like malformed wings. I turn around to watch the boat
glide off with its shining windows, then grope my way to the house that’s
been empty for too long. All the houses in the neighborhood are vacant
. . . It’s pleasant falling asleep here. I lie on my back and can’t tell if I’m
sleeping or awake. A few books I’ve read pass by like old sailors headed for
the Bermuda Triangle to disappear without a trace . . . I hear a hollow sound,
an absent-minded drumming. An object the wind thumps again and again
against something the earth holds still. If night isn’t merely the absence of
light, if night really is something, then it’s this sound. The sounds of a slow
heart in a stethoscope, it pounds, quiets down for a while, comes back. As
if the creature was moving in a zigzag across The Border. Or someone was
knocking inside of a wall, someone who belongs to the other world but got
left behind here, knocking, wanting to go back. Too late! Didn’t make it down
there in time, couldn’t make it up, couldn’t get on board . . . The other world
is also this world. The next morning, I see a sizzling golden-brown branch.
A crawling uprooted tree. Stones with faces. The forest is full of castaway
monsters that I love.
Answer to Letters
In the bottom drawer I find a letter that arrived for the first time twenty-six years ago. A letter in panic, still breathing when it arrives the second time.
A house has five windows: through four of them the day shines clear and still. The fifth faces a dark sky, thunder and storm. I’m standing at the fifth window. The letter.
Sometimes a chasm opens between Tuesday and Wednesday, but twenty-six years can pass in a blink. Time isn’t a straight line, but rather a labyrinth, and if you lean close to the wall in just the right place you can hear the rushing footsteps and voices, can hear yourself walking past on the other side.
Was the letter ever answered? I don’t remember, it was a long time ago. The ocean’s countless thresholds kept on wandering. The heart kept on taking its leap from second to second, like a toad in the wet grass of an August night.
The unanswered letters gather high up, like cirrostratus clouds foreshadowing bad weather. They weaken the sun’s rays. Someday I’ll answer. Some day when I’m dead and can finally concentrate. Or I’m at least far enough away from here to find myself again. When I first arrive in the big city, on 125th Street, walking down the breezy avenue of dancing trash. I, who love to roam and vanish in the crowd, a letter T in the infinite mass of text.
Icelandic Hurricane
Not an earthquake but a sky-quake. Turner could’ve painted it, lashed down. A lonely glove just whirled past, a few miles away from its hand. I’m going to head upwind to that house over there on the other side of the field. I flap into the hurricane. I’m being x-rayed, the skeleton submits its resignation. My panic grows as I cross, I’m foundering, I’m foundering and drowning on dry land! How heavy it all is, everything I suddenly must lug along, how heavy for the butterfly to tow a barge! Arrived at last. A final wrestling with the door. And now inside. And now inside. Behind the large pane of glass. What a strange and magnificent invention glass is—to be close without being affected . . . Outside, a horde of transparent sprinters races giant-sized across the lava field. But I’m no longer flapping. I’m sitting behind the glass, still, my own portrait.
Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015) was a Swedish writer, poet and translator, whose poetry has been translated into over sixty languages. Acclaimed as one of the most important European writers since World War II, he was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Patty Crane’s translations of Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry have appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Blackbird, PEN Poetry Series, Poetry Daily, Trafika Europe, and The New York Times. Bright Scythe, a bilingual selection of her translations, was published by Sarabande in 2015.