Emil Hagström: 'Men gamla bocken'

 

MEN GAMLA BOCKEN

 

Liten killing hoppar omkring

och vill så lustig vara.

Han leker och dansar i rös och ring,

om världens sorg vet han ingenting.

Men gamla bocken skakar pả skägget.

 

Liten killing buffar på sin mor,

diar och hickar och nyser.

Han vet ganska litet om död och klor.

Han kastar och tvärar och önskar sig stor.

Men gamla bocken skakar på skägget.

 

 

 

BUT THE BILLY GOAT

 

The young kid only wants to spring

and finds life so amusing.

He’d so like to dance beyond pale and ring

of worldly sorrows knows not one thing

But the billy goat simply shakes his beard.

 

The young kid nudges at the doe,

suckles and hiccups and sneezes.

Of death and claws he is not in the know,

He butts and swerves and is eager to grow.

But the billy goat simply shakes his beard.

  

 

The Swedish word rös refers to a boundary stone, a heap of them can be called a cairn in English.

The English word pale derives from the Latin word pālus = a wooden stake or post. The term was used for a fence made of stakes (a palisade) and later the enclosed area or territory protected by that fence. Anyone going ‘beyond the pale’ became an ‘outlaw’, i.e. someone with no claim to or not deserving any legal protection.

 

 

Emil Hagström: 'Vittnesbörd'

 TESTIMONY

 

I’m dead pleased

that I’m the one I am

and not some other feller.

I’m dead pleased

that life’s the way that it is

and ain’t just what I think.

For if life was just

the way I thought it was

that’d be downright awful

I’m dead pleased

that God Almighty’s

what he maybe is,

for if he was what I thought

he was

that’d be downright awful.

 

To see the original Swedish poem, go to here.

Emil Hagström: 'Min blonda natt och sommar'

 

MY LIGHT-BLOND NIGHT AND SUMMER

 

I’m walking along the

bog’s black, greasy duckboard

and see when I gaze downstream

the mist fade out of view.

I thought that you were here,

yes, really close beside me,

but it was just the wind and

the memory of you.

 

Your dress was oh so thin

like feathered clouds in summer,

your cheek was as smooth

as petals roses wear.

And merely just to see you

and sense your utter presence

made me feel so childishly

sadly free of care.

 

My light-blond night and summer

when autumns pale and whiten

and withered grass crowds round the

lone walkway woebegone,

then you’re close beside me

where the far stream is gleaming,

my dragonfly are you

and a song that’s winter long.

To see the original Swedish poem, go to here.

 

 

 

Emil Hagström: 'I friveckan'

 

IN MY WEEK OFF

 

A week off’s what I’d like now,

nice and quiet would suit,

to lick my wounds in private,

place on my strings a mute.

I’d like to laze and feel I’m free

have no one who despises me

have no one there who envies me

for being who I am.

 

A week off’s what I’d like now

with my dear friend who’d come

with scarlet sage she’d picked for

her small herbarium.

She came so undeniably

was kind and gently cared for me

made harm and danger turn and flee

and simply disappear.

 

And all that now seems broken,

my friend, between us two

if not before in heaven will

one day be whole anew.

There I will laze and feel I’m free

have no one who despises me

have no one there who envies me

for being who I am.

To see the original Swedish poem, go to here.

 

 

 

Mario Benedetti: 'Ruta, poema inédito'

 

THE ROAD MAP, unedited poem

 

I found it in my pocket / it was a road map

I did not know where it might take me

but followed it roaming just at random

with all my deep-felt longings in my hand

 

it was an atlas of the soul / awareness

of things enacted and what lay in store

on the ground I saw what were my footprints

the path then was one already trodden

 

the former ocean depths now were no more

everything was firmer, more secure

quite suddenly I found myself beside

the river for which I had always yearned

 

then only did I take my own advice

returned the road map to my pocket

where it remained waiting for

another tomorrow

To see the original poem, go to here.

 

* The Spanish word nostalgia, like the German word Sehnsucht can be a longing both for things past and things to come, whereas nostalgia in English is not normally used in the plural and refers exclusively to the past, often with a tinge of regret.

Gustaf Fröding: 'Harens rätt'

 

Harens rätt

 

En hare må väl ha rätt

att mumsa på sin kål

och äta sig magen mätt

så mycket magen tål,

och njuta sitt liv det kära,

när ingen räv är nära.

 

Och söker en räv att tvinga

sig till ett mål på hare

att koka i kulans kettil,

har haren rätt att springa

med harben, höga och snare,

men kalla sig annat än hare,

har haren ingen rätt till.

 

 

The rights of a hare

 

A hare may well have the right

to munch its tasty kale

and eat till its stomach’s tight,

perhaps from top to tail,

enjoy a life it holds dear

when there’s no fox that’s near.

 

And should a fox ever seek

to try and dine on hare

by cooking it in a pot,

the hare has the right to streak

off on hare’s legs from there,

but call itself owt but hare –

that right a hare has not.

 

 

SECATEURS

 

A spring-like winter’s day for saw

and secateurs

he came to see his apple trees 

now on in years.

 

And when he’d left his plot of land

I saw his snow-prints there.

And I thought: How the cold this season

still lingers everywhere.

 

But what help does all earth’s warmth give

on the day that someone dies?

And secateurs the dead tree give

though a master’s hand them plies?

 

To see original Swedish poem, go to here.

 

 

(P.S. An Anglicised variant pronunciation is /ˈsɛk.əˌtɪəz/ rhymes with cheers)

Werner Aspenström: 'Ögonvittnet'

 

THE EYE-WITNESS

 

A short essay about the painter Monet

 

 

Monet goes out to paint.

‘It is a source of great joy and great suffering.’

 

Monet wants to paint what he sees.

It ought to be possible to see the River Seine.

 

Though everything we fix is already in the past.

No one can descend twice into the same stream of light.

 

Monet takes on what shimmers, steams,

the fleetingly beautiful, the dove-like neck.

 

A sharp knife he is unable to paint.

a brown ruler, a black cast-iron horizon.

 

He is besotted by snowflakes.

They melt when they are noticed.

 

The meadow’s black and white cattle, closely observed:

they are grazing rainbows.

 

The landscape is constantly changing.

‘I use up and waste a great deal of paint.’

 

A field of corn can be blue.

It is always harvest time for the one who grows light.

 

Poppy. Monet asks the children to fetch new canvases.

They come running like firefighters.

 

National Day, seen from the balcony:

A great waterfall of flags, human specks.

 

In Le Havre the sun chances to be red.

Monet rescues three very transient boats.

 

Round Belle-Ile the breakers are high.

Monet ties himself to the rock, trusses his easel with stones.

 

He now finds himself close to, and yet outside.

The dream: closer. To be buried in a bell-buoy.

 

There is no everlasting God. The altar dark.

Waves of light wash over the cathedral.

 

Truth flutters. The bricks tick like clocks.

‘An eternal torture and nothing else.’

 

The evening grows grey. The cathedral shrinks like a snail.

Monet lies sleepless. Where is the sun at night?

 

This is a whole life chasing a swarm of bees!

In poplars. In fishing boats. In haystacks. In parasols.

 

In the canals of Venice. In Dutch windmills.

In the parliament building in London.

 

In the cafés in Paris the theories of the day are consumed

by prismatic bodies, colour-playing countenances.

 

People start saying that Monet’s pictures are perfect,

Monet knows that his life is a failure.

 

It is impossible to paint what one sees,

write what one feels, eat what one hungers for.

 

His friends disperse. His wife dies.

‘I raise the walls higher around my land.’

 

What remains: the world’s light in the waterlily pond.

Then the eye refuses to see. Then the hand fumbles.

 

Claude Monet the painter will soon become blind.

He burns his last pictures of water.

 

And the water burns. Against the law of nature,

as a token of respect.

 

Emil Hagström: 'Det torra trädet savas'

THE DRIED-OUT TREE

 

We were imprisoned in time’s inky blackness

and high above us space lay black as soot

and what in past days we had known most deeply:

a dried-out tree with dead and withered root.

 

But then a clear-eyed dawn broke through the mist clouds

that brooded round the years’ dark-hooded land,

then in the dried-out tree a bird was singing

and tender plant shoots trembled in our hands.

 

The dead root filled with sap deep in the darkness

as our dreams are awakened by a spring.

The star of bethlehem’s white stars are gleaming

and where a heart is beating sources sing.

 

 To see original Swedish poem, go to here.

Joke Koornstra: 'Gedicht' (141026)

 

Gedicht

 

Dat iemand nog een keer me zou bestrelen

en zeggen: bermbroei, land van maas en waal,

bloeiende betuwe. Verloren weelde

die poëzie van land en lijf en taal.

 

 

Such a beautiful, haunting poem. It is impossible to translate – I can find no way of creating any patterns of sound or sense that match or do justice to the feeling of loss, or to keep the same incantation of images. So what can be done in English? The word broei suggests ferment, smouldering, self-combustion and weelde opulence, abundance, plenty. The area of the Maas (Meuse) and Waal rivers lies in the south of the Netherlands. The Betuwe is an area originally made up of large fertile islands in the river delta of the Rhine and Maas – it is also known as ‘the fruit garden of the Netherlands’. The language of the poem is also like a fruit garden in rich soil.

  

 

Here is the fourth attempt to translate (thanks to new input from a Dutch-language poet)

 

Poem

 

That someone one more time should now caress me

say: steamy verges, land of Maas and Waal,

blossoming Betuwe. A lost abundance

that poetry of language, body and land.

Menno Wigman: 'Zwembad Den Dolder'

 

ZWEMBAD DEN DOLDER

 

Er zijn gevoelens die fascistisch zijn.

De vader die niet weet waarom hij slaat, 

de zoon die half verstikt in foto’s krast.

 

De mooiste idioot die ik ooit zag

lag op zijn rug een heel heelal te zijn.

Geen vader kreeg ooit greep op deze pees

 

die als een kosmonaut het bad door dreef,

geen moeder stookte in zijn vissenkom.

En wit en scheef en wijs zwom hij. Hij zwom.

 

 

THE SWIMMING BATHS AT THE DEN DOLDER CLINIC

 

There are emotions of a fascist kind.

The father who hits out but can’t tell why,

the son half-choked who scratches photos through.

 

The loveliest idiot I ever saw

lay on his back, a total universe.

No father got to grasp this basket case

 

that drifted through the pool like one in space,

no mother poked his bowl of fish around.

And skewed and pale and wise he swam. Swam sound.

ZKV 117 (timbre)

 ZKV 117 (timbre)

 

At a concert given in a local church last year, Michala Petri, an international icon among recorder players, included in her programme her own transcription of a Bach cello suite for treble recorder. And she preceded her performance by explaining what was so different about playing the cello suites on her instrument. Her remarks reminded me strongly of what happens when I translate poetry from one language into another and am asked about my priorities. After the usual discussions about form and content, denotation and connotation, rhyme, accent, prosody (the way the poem breathes), a question sometimes asked is: Why does the translation, no matter how good, always feel different? And the answer seems to have a lot to do with the sound picture of a poem in two different languages. An example:

 

 

Clearly, the cello and the recorder produce very different sounds. But Michala Petri asked us to pursue the subject more closely. The pitch of the treble recorder is much higher than that of the cello. The range of the cello is larger than that of the recorder. This means that it may be necessary to transpose the original key to another one, and to change the pitch of certain phrases if the notes lie outside what the recorder can produce. But that is only part of the difference. The cello is a string instrument – the sounds produced are produced by causing strings to vibrate with a bow. The recorder produces sounds by air being blown through a mouthpiece. The upper register of the recorder is produced by pinching the hole at the back of the recorder and increasing the intensity of the blowing. The cellist can modify sounds produced in volume by increased pressure on the strings, and modify the nature of any sound by moving the bow closer to the bridge. Fingers too can slide during the playing of a single note to produce a glissando. A cello can play more strings than one at the same time, whereas a recorder can only produce one note at a time. All these differences lead to a different timbre  the unique quality or colour of the sound, even when the same note is being played with the same loudness. And this explains why the music, despite all the notes being identical, feels so different when played on to musical instruments that differ in the way sound is produced. It is also why a Danish poem will ‘sound odd’ when translated into English, no matter how good the translation is. And the more the two languages differ, the greater the shift in timbre is going to be; just think of the cello suites played on a tenor saxophone, a bassoon – or a xylophone. 

 

Translated poems from French

 French

Translated poems from German

German 

Translated poems from Norwegian

Norwegian

Translated poems from Dutch

Dutch

Translated poems from Swedish

Swedish

Translated poems from Danish

Danish

INDEXES

 

I have done a complete overhaul of indexes. The index for all entries is still in the same position as before, but I have used different colours to indicate which language is being translated from into English. Danish (red), French (violet), German (green), Swedish (light blue), Norwegian (dark blue), Dutch (orange) other languages (mauve).

Elmer Diktonius (1896-1961): 'Hunger i London'

 

HUNGER I LONDON

 

I

 

Var skall jag sova i natt?

Bobbyn jagar från bänken —

han menar ej illa säger han

men han har sin lön.

Jag menar ej heller illa

men jag har ingen lön

och vet ej

var jag skall sova i natt

 

*

 

II

 

Tidigt på morgonen

gick jag ut.

Tidigt på morgonen

lekte rännstensungar vid Hammersmith

i en murken pråm.

Längs Thames stränder

gick jag

tuggande pilblad

till Kew Gardens — trött var jag

när jag kom tillbaka

tuggande pilblad.

Herregud vad det är långt

från den hungriges morgon

till den hungrandes kväll.

 

*

 

III

 

Skinn lyser

genom sidenstrumpors maskor

i solskenet.

Jag vill bita i flickfötter

där vadmuskeln börjar

sin svällning.

Jag är hungrig efter kött

och kvinnokött.

 

*

 

IV

 

Hon är ung och vacker

talar många språk

har svällande delar

som nog fordrar sin man —

jag träffar henne emellanåt

i Hyde Park

när jag har litet pengar

och kan vara herre —

vi talar om livet

och jag försöker få henne att förstå

de hungrandes filosofi —

men hon är ung och vacker

och hennes farbror har målat en kejsare

och hon vet att hon engång skall sälja sig

för högt pris —

hon tycker jag är underlig

men förlåter mig

ty jag är konstnär.

 

*

 

V

 

Det vore gott för alla

att gå på gatan hungrande.

Att tänka: vore jag kvinna

att jag kunde sälja min kropp,

att föra sitt sista till pantlånaren

anande: det går ej det går ej.

Rännstenen har en filosofi

klarare än Kants och Jesuskristus’,

en kärlek — till brödet,

ett kategoriskt imperativ — magen.

 

 

HUNGER IN LONDON

 

I

 

Where am I to sleep tonight?

The bobby chases me from the bench –

No offence, he says

he’s his wages to consider.

I mean no offence either

but have no wages

and do not know

where I am to sleep tonight

 

*

 

II

 

Early in the morning

I went out for a walk.

Early in the morning

the gutter kids were playing near Hammersmith

in a rotting old barge.

Along the banks of the Thames

I walked

chewing on arrowhead

to Kew Gardens – was real tired

when I got back

chewing on arrowhead.

Good God what a time it takes

from the hungry man’s morning

to the hungry man’s evening.

 

*

 

III

 

Skin gleams

through the mesh of silk stockings

in the sunshine.

I want to bite into female feet

where the calf muscle starts

its bulging.

I am hungry for flesh

and woman’s flesh.

 

*

 

IV

 

She is young and pretty

speaks many languages

has swelling curves

that call for a real man –

I meet her from time to time

in Hyde Park

when I’ve a little money

and can be master –

we talk about life

and I try to make her understand

the hungry man’s philosophy –

but she is young and pretty

and her uncle has painted an emperor

and she know that one day she will

sell herself for a high price –

she thinks I am odd

but forgives me

since I’m an artist.

 

*

 

V

 

It would be a good idea for

everyone to walk the streets hungry.

To think: if I was a woman

I could sell my body,

to take the last one has to the pawnshop

vaguely aware: it’s no go, no go.

The gutter has a philosophy

that’s clearer than Kant’s and Christ’s

a love – of bread

a categorical imperative – the breadbasket.