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
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