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.