P.C. Boutens: 'Perelaar'

 

Perelaar

 

De bloesemwitte perelaar

Laait uit de dunne schemering

In vlammende verheerlijking,

Geen boom in bloei meer, maar

 

Een naakte stofontstegen hulk

Omhuifd en overstraald

Met vuren sneeuw ontdaald

Aan blankbestervende avondwolk –

 

Herkent ge uzelf weêrspiegeld, ziel,

Die staat in aardsch geluk ontdaan,

Uw bloed in bloesem opgegaan

Tot dauw die uit den hemel viel?

 

Nog aardewortlend aardevrij,

O glimlach lach- en tranenblind,

Die liefdes wegen open wint

Aan leven en aan dood voorbij...

 

Stil, achter dooven spiegelbrand

Vangt ijmker nacht den dagverloren zwerm

Der sterrebijen aan den hemelberm

In de gekorfde schaduw van zijn hand.

 

 

Pear-tree

 

Through the approaching evening shade

Blazes a pear-tree, blossom-white,

Transfigured in its flaring light,

A tree no more, remade

 

A vessel whose ethereal shroud

And hood is sequin-cloaked

With fiery snow invoked

From banks of fading evening cloud –

 

Is this a mirror to your eye,

Soul, unconcealed in earthly bliss,

Your blood in rising blossom-mist

As dew returning from on high?

 

Despite its roots yet almost free,

Smile that is blind from tears and joy,

Gaining an entrance to love’s ways

Past life and death’s extremities...

 

Calmly, behind the gutting mirror-brand,

Does night the keeper hold at heaven’s verge

The swarm of star-bees, lost to daytime search,

Cupped in the hivelike shadow of his hand.

 

ZKV 34

 

Nearly 60 years later - same facade, door now grey-blue.

ZKV34

 

Blank screen for several weeks, then a night of digs lived in during the 1960s, shifting the walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, smells, atmospheres around me in the dark. Then the hand turning the kaleidoscope slows and stops and I am in the tiny back room of 26 Parsonage Street, Cambridge, a row of two-up two-down terraced houses, and my landlady, Florence Wolton-Carr (call me Florrie) is mounting the narrow, steep staircase with a washbasin in which a large pitcher of hot water is standing. Introibo ad altare dei. The morning ritual. There is no water supply except in the kitchen, the privy is out in the back yard across a stretch of concrete.

The room is minute, one sixth of it, the entire left-hand corner out towards the long, thin slice of back garden, consists of a white box from floor to ceiling. It contains the cold-water cistern of the house. Right of it is a large sash window which offers me a view of a single, slender pear tree that I attempt to photograph on nights when a full moon hangs above it. An armchair completes the back wall. The rest of the long left wall is an old-fashioned, highish bed with wooden railings at head and foot. The bedspread is bright green. A chest of drawers fills the short wall next to the door. There is a gas fire in the fireplace of the other long wall. A small square of carpet in the middle. About 7-8 sq metres all told. I live there for two years, in this crow’s nest of a cell, writing away on an esoteric Dutch poet. A chrysalis hoping to emerge. The creak of Florrie’s footsteps dies away on the staircase.

Lars Gustafsson: 'Etyder för en gammal skrivmaskin', I

 

Completed only a few months before his death, Lars Gustafsson’s last collection was Etyder för en gammal skrivmaskin (Études for an old typewriter), published on 10 October 2016 by Bonniers Förlag.

 

The three final poems of the Selected Poems anthology, published by Bloodaxe in 2015, are translations from that collection. I had been collaborating with Lars Gustafsson on the translation of the poems from his final collection in that year. His comments and suggestions were, as always, invaluable.

 

The English translations (apart from the three in the anthology) have not been published.

Here is the first section:

 

I.

The man, the dog, the shadows

 

In the mockingly ironic winter light

two blue shadows glided

towards the barrier of new-fallen snow.

First the shadow of a small dog

and then

the shadow of the man

who owns the dog

And the smaller shadow seemed to be

showing the larger one the way.

 

 

Chromatic fantasies

 

And then finally, 

yet again a kind of morning.

Light forces its way in

through many narrow chinks.

 

more and more clocks

join in and form a chorus.

 

From the bazaar of old tower clocks

As if cut out of sooted paper

 

To the light whirring, like swallows

of the very small clocks

                       *

 

More clocks the more the day proceeds. 

 

Here everything now happens very quickly;

The birds stiffen in the trees.

The old wood-turning chisels that slept

beneath blankets of cobwebs

wake up, sharper now

and long to cut

 into blackened oak  

 

The sort of wood that has waited

a very long time under water

deep asleep in its loneliness

and only friends with the channel’s movement

that constantly imitates itself. 

 

You great trees, you once green friends,

why do you stand so naked now? 

 

                      *

As if cut out of sooted paper

 

And even this dag  

moves with fluttering sail

into an absent-minded twilight:

the month of November’s 

harsh answer to our address: 

In the trees the birds stiffen now

and become their own shadows

 

 

In the evening

 

In the evening, says Mr B., one ought

analyse the day that has passed

as if it had been a dream.

 

Small insect on the window pane,

Mistaken for a free-flying bird

far out in the landscape 

 

creates an impression 

of someone travelling

at a dizzying speed 

 

 

American Typewriter

 

What I remember of that era

is the sound. It could

be like waves against a shore.

Single and melancholy downstrokes

or that cheerful clattering –

it picks up, here the water’s darkened

by a sudden gust of wind.

I recall how at New York Times’

Metropolitan Desk a lone Remington

could swell up into a cascade of downstrokes

only to fall silent just as suddenly again

It was an age

when one could still hear

people thinking.

How unpredictably thoughts come

and leave us again.

Like extremely self-important guests.

 

 

Kensington Blues

 

As a very young boy

I visited wonderful Kensington,

eagerly on my way 

between everything that had to be seen

I inspected there the sleepy

mummies in their coffins

that rest in Bloomsbury

The dinosaur in Kensington

Looked at the wonderful rocks

that nature produces.

Apparently without the slightest difficulty.

And wondered

if a place possibly existed

in this context

where one could quietly

feel oneself at home

 

 

The soloist

 

It is time.

For the third time the signal is heard.

A serious caretaker shows the way  

quickly through a long corridor.

He is greeted now by ovations

from a capacity audience

The clapping slowly subsides.

The large black grand piano

waits attentively

on its podium.

The silence is deafening.

He raises both hands. 

Here a mighty opening chord

can now be produced.

 

 

Here – strictly speaking – 

any number of mighty chords can

be produced

 

 

Now there is nothing more 

between the raised hands

and truth

 

Lars Gustafsson: 'Variations on a theme by Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe'

 

Lars Gustafsson wrote a series of variations on a theme by Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe. Here is what he wrote about them in the Postscript. You can find an English translation of this collection here. 

Postscript

 

 

The collection is of course based on the musical theme and variations. I have used experimentation to find a way forward. I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious, but I have actually modelled myself on Johann Sebastian Bach.

The idea of variations based on a short theme has been slightly influenced by the Goldberg Variations. The idea of moving from one key to another which is found in great masters such as Bach in his ‘48 Preludes and Fugues’ does not, however, have any feasible counterpart in poetry. On the other hand, one can to a certain extent experiment with the emotional layers as if they were keys. The poems feel their way forwards through various emotional layers and gradually crystallise out in a fixed form – the Villanelle. This fixed form then has to give way to a new chaos and a new process of organisation, in a number of such cycles.

As theme, or ‘aria’, I make use of a couple of lines from a poem by Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe ‘The End of the Summer Holidays’. They have a powerful innate force. ‘Why Silfverstolpe of all people?’ my friends often ask me. I have always thought of him as a friend. Why should one not have friends among the dead? He was a fine poet who never got the chance to develop fully since he died so young.

Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe (1893–1942) came from a Västmanland farming family that had many literary talents. His ancestor, Axel Gabriel (spelt without the ‘f’) is the best-known of these. He wrote, among other things, ‘Skördarne’ [The Harvests]** as well as an evening poem that is regarded as anticipating Bellman’s, and his was the unusual lot to have the entire Swedish Academy suspended, as the result of an politically incorrect inaugural address in 1795, by Reuterholm for some considerable time. Gunnar Mascoll was also a member, though for much too short a period – only from 1941.

If one is able to disregard the characteristics typical of the age, he much resembles Tomas Tranströmer in his combination of a powerful articulatory capacity, anchorage in everyday life and a morally sensitive, nobly humanistic attitude. He develops, you could say, from a regionalist to a universalist . Manuals tend to characterise him as  an ‘intimate realist of the everyday’, a designation that to a certain extent is based on a confusion between material and intention. In actual fact, Silfverstolpe’s poetry has strong existentialist features and is not far removed from Pär Lagerkvist. The difference, however, is that Silfverstolpe often anchors his issues in a concrete landscape, that of the Västmanland lake-and-plain landscape around Lake Mälaren, which he portrays with meticulously sensitive, almost watercolour-like nuances. He has probably also been influenced by the contemporary English poets he diligently interpreted.

There is something unresolved, a never clearly formulated conflict in Silfverstolpe’s poetry. He often writes, indirectly, of not really being the same as other people, of not being allowed to be involved in where the action is. This unresolved yearning for authenticity is evident in various forms in his poetry. There is a poem that has to do with an upper secondary school excursion on skates across the vast open expanses of Lake Mälaren, where the writer is suddenly placed together with a rheumatic classmate who cannot take part and who watches the departure from the quay. The same theme also permeates the extremely ambiguous and complex poem about the unveiling of the Finn Malmberg statue outside the Västmanland-Dala Students’ Association in Uppsala in 1931. Both Silfverstolpe and Malmgren, who later perished in the fated polar expedition of General Umberto Nobile in 1928, were the association’s first procurators. Once again, Silfverstolpe portrays himself as the one who did not have any destiny of his own, who was left sitting there as an onlooker. As part of this complex there is the intense longing back to his own boyhood and years at school, which become a kind of paradise lost in Silfverstolpe’s world.

Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe (1893-1942): 'Slut på sommarlovet'

 

Slut på sommarlovet

Det var den tid, då våra fickor spändes
av kantstött frukt med regnvåt lera på.
Det var den tid, då trädgårdsstaken tändes
och sken på kräftfat i en mörk berså.
Det började bli nästan kallt att bada,
och snåren sveptes in i spindelväv.
När sista lasset kördes till sin lada,
var rymden kyligt klar och blåsten sträv.

Det var de dagar, då man girigt vägde
var timma, som fanns kvar till lovets slut.
Det var den tid, då varje timma ägde
en egen kraft, som måste vinnas ut.
Och ändå hände det, man smög sig undan
från leken till en backe, där man låg
och såg med tioårig, svart begrundan
på svalors flykt och vita skyars tåg.

Så reste man en kväll, då solen väckte
en djupröd glöd ur alla timmerhus.
Man höll den avskedsgåva, sommarn räckte,
en påse astrakaner mot sin blus.
I tårögd tystnad for man till stationen,
och runt omkring en höjde syrsor gällt
den sista glädjedruckna sommartonen
från boskapstrampade och tomma fält.

 

End of the summer holidays

This was the time our pockets all hung low
with fall-clipped fruit now smeared with streaks of clay.
This was the time the garden candles’ glow
lit up the crayfish dish with quivering ray.
It almost felt too cold to take a swim,
and cobwebs draped themselves round scrub and fern.
When too the last hay had been taken in,
the sky was chill and clear, the wind quite stern.

These were the days when grudgingly one weighed
each hour till summer’s quota had been filled.
This was the time when every hour displayed
an inner force that was to be distilled.
And yet at times one left all play behind
sought out a hill where it was good to lie
and with a ten-year-old’s dark-musing mind
observe the swallows’ flight and clouds file by. 

One evening, with the wooden houses burnished

a glowing crimson by the sun, one left –

holding the farewell gift that summer furnished,

a bag of Astrakhans, clasped to one’s chest.
One rode off to the station, tearful-eyed,
while crickets, drunk with joy, still chirped and squealed
their final summer notes on every side
from what were empty, cattle-trampled fields.

 

 

ZKV91 (Maggie as Hedda Gabler)

 

 

  

 

IBSEN À LA CARTE

 

On 18 July 1970, Clive Barnes wrote a review in The New York Times on two interpretations of ‘Hedda Gabler’ by Henrik Ibsen – by Miss Worth (in Ontario) and Miss Smith (in London). He found them extremely different but equally valid. The latter was directed by Ingmar Bergman, whose interpretation ‘eloquently scales down the play to a point where heroism is an illusion and tragedy a lapse of good manners’. Bergman’s ‘total concern is the sad littleness of life’. No heroics, no passion, like that of the Hedda played by Miss Worth. ‘Miss Smith is something both more wary and more vulnerable. She is suburban rather than patrician […] and there is a dry bitterness, a kind of sad humor, to her portrayal that in context is both sardonic and pathetic.’

 

It sounds convincing, but it wasn’t quite the case. I know. I was there in London. And saw Miss Smith in action – Miss Maggie still-going-strong Smith, to be more precise. She was electric on stage, dominating it by refusing to do so. And since I was brought up to believe that ‘heroism is an illusion and tragedy a lapse of good manners’, I was surprised that I could be so convinced by any play whatsoever, with my built-in distrust of ‘theatricals’. More means less if a concert by one classical guitarist on stage seems more powerful than a symphony orchestra at full throttle. Bergman took liberties with Ibsen, because he had his own obsessions and demons he wanted to get across. Miss Smith did the job.

ZKV91 (originally posted in 2019)

Lars Gustafsson: Sonnet XXVII ('För den som är på isens undersida')

 

This sonnet, Lars Gustafsson wrote to me (with his highly distinctive typing), proved to be a lifesaver!

You can find it here

Lars Gustafsson: 'Svamparna' and 'Världens tystnad före Bach'

 

 

 

Fungi

 

 

When fungi start to appear at the end of July, on the forest paths, in the old thickets down by the lake, under the birch trees, it always comes as a surprise.

Their shapes are completely alien; clubs, hats, spikes, parasols, but only one word really applies: fungi. Just as unclear what they actually consist of. Where was the substance that caused them to grow?

In the ground? In the air?

Between the end of July and the end of October it is as if an other, perhaps an older, vegetation were trying to conquer nature, and is then forced to retreat once more.

 

 

The starry sky, the staring of the galaxies.

The stubborn capacity of the universe to maintain unheard-of distances, as opposed to our just as eager attempts to see the world as small, as surveyable, frequentable for signals and observations.

The quantum logic of physics and chemistry. The same thing: the stubborn refusal of matter to be anything else than probabilities, shadows that play over bare rocks in the sunset, sudden gusts of wind that pass through a solitary aspen in the coppice yet leave the aspens next to it completely still. And our stubborn eager struggle for a substance, particles, individualities that refuse to exist in real physics.

This world of distances and shadows and random leaps between spectral lines, this frightening silent dance is what I mean by the silence of the world before Bach.

 

 

Human existence must thus be conceived as something enacted on a narrow spit of land between one sea and the next sea.

That narrow strip of knowledge between two vast realms of ignorance, deep as unconsciousness or death.

So how do we know if that narrow strip lies still, that it is not constantly in motion, is fast drifting in a maelstrom?

A spit of land. A strip of land. What speaks for it being so large? Perhaps what we are now talking about is as thin as the membrane of a rainbow, where the colours waver and  move in Newtonesque interference patterns?

 

 

It just came to me, one says about the great, the liberating ideas in one’s life, by which we mean from within.

The world outside us is like a sea, or a space that loses itself in black transfinite depths.

The accounts of astronomers have long since accustomed us to gain at least a diffuse picture of this.

It is harder though to accept the idea of an inner space that is not us.

The existence of historical schemata on the basis of which we unknowingly act, categories of concepts which we acquire without realising that they exist, and the sudden shifts and glides in these systems that every hundred years can take place and suddenly demonstrate how random they are, provide us with an inkling that these depths actually exist.

 

In old books of physics, 19th century books of experiments with lithographs, 18th century ones with woodcuts as well as those even older, one can see just how unsure and changeable the landscape of natural science is.

Earlier, electricity was thought to be a fluid and from that period we still have the Leyden jar, once light was thought of as a ray than could be broken and sifted, since when there are lenses and prisms.

Like flocks of birds in the autumn, hypotheses can sudden break out from an area and roam into another one, all questions can wander off from a landscape into another one where other instruments and other hypotheses flourish.

Knowledge roams through the world without ever wanting to stay in one and the same place for a sufficient length of time to take up residence there.

 

                       (Lars Gustafsson, Valda Skrifter 1, pp.389-391)

 

 

The silence of the world before Bach

 

There must have existed a world before

the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor Partita,

but what was that world like?

A Europe of large unresonating spaces

everywhere unknowing instruments,

where Musikalisches Opfer and Wohltemperiertes Klavier

had never passed over a keyboard.

Lonely remote churches

where the soprano voice of the Easter Passion

had never in helpless love twined itself round

the gentler movements of the flute,

gentle expanses of landscape

where only old woodcutters are heard with their axes

the healthy sound of strong dogs in winter

and – like a bell – skates biting into glassy ice;

the swallows swirling in the summer air

the shell that the child listens to

and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach

skating silence of the world before Bach

 

                       (Lars Gustafsson, Valda Skrifter 1, p.369)

 

Dèr Mouw: 'Laag hangt de zon'

 

Laag hangt de zon. De lange bossen, dijken

van ondoorschijnendheid, weren de baren

van ’t rode licht, dat afdruipt van de blaren,

doorsijplend, waar tot lek de twijgen wijken;

 

de vlakke stromen, die ’t doorzichtig strijken,

kan niet het voorland, ruigbegroeid met varen,

niet kan de takkenglooiing doen bedaren

de steile vloed, die heen spoelt over de eiken;

 

over de kruin en – dijkbreuk – door de wanden

stort zich de oranje branding op de landen,

wijd vloeiend goud, als uit een fabelbron;

 

in ’t oosten bouwt de nacht zijn wolkendammen;

meezuigt de zon de vloed van koele vlammen,

en ze ebben weg onder de horizon.

 

 

The sun hangs low. The long woods, dike-like shield

of dense opacity, hold back and sheathe

bars of red light that drip down from the leaves,

seeping through leaks where twigs and branches yield;

 

the foreland, roughly fern-clad, can no more

hold back the flat, transparent streams that stroke

now over it than can slopes topped with oak

the steep waves sweeping over all the shore;

 

over the crown and – dike breach – one thick band,

the orange breakers sweep across the land,

liquid gold surge, as from a fabled spring;

 

out in the east the night builds cloud-bank dams;

the sun sucks up the flood of cooling flames

that ebbs away beneath the skyline’s ring.