A poem by the Swedish writer Kristina Lugn (b. 1948)

I want you to come now!

I want you to come now!

I want you to come right now!

Bring your pocket calculator with you.

And the Steinway grand piano.

Bring along elastoplast aspirins eau de cologne and sanisept

a bottle of Ramlösa a bottle of gin a bottle of whisky and

a toothbrush mug

a bottle of Ajax and a large packet of sleeping pills a pot plant and

a pizza

and a respirator.

I want you to come right now!

Just you are to come right now!

And take me by storm.

You’re to switch off the ceiling lights.

And light the candelabras.

You’re to pull the phone out of its socket.

And inflate the rubber mattresses.

You’re to dry my tears and speak sense to me.

When the sun sets behind the Opera House.

And it’s time to go home.

That’s when you’re to come to me.

With your heart.

And your shot-gun.

So I never lose my head again.

In a tastefully furnished living room..

So I never stand once more on the window ledge.

And seem a bit nutty.

With a briar rose in my hand.

So I never crawl once more through the subways.

With an awful song.

On my cracked lips.

You must come now, you must come right now!

Quite simply because I can’t stand it otherwise.

Quite simply because it’s so bloody insistent.

Quite simply because I’m a completely ordinary woman.

Perfectly healthy and moderately overweight.

Quite domesticated, helpful and nervous.

Nice and kind and very frightened.

With general interests and an unexploited literary vein.

To see the original poem, go to here

A previously untranslated short tale by Hans Christian Andersen

The Potatoes

‘Sooner or later, whatever is good will be respected and revered!’ Grandma said. ‘Just bear in mind the potatoes – they could say a thing or two about that, provided they could speak, of course!’

They had certainly experienced not being appreciated. It didn’t even help when the minister preached from the pulpit that they were both useful and a source of delight – people simply didn’t believe it; even kings handed them out so they could be put down, but were they ever? Dear me, no! There was, to name but one, the great King of Prussia, who people called Old Fritz – now there was a man for you! – he took good care of the potatoes too, gave away a whole cartload to one of the towns in his kingdom and had everyone summoned to the town square to the sounding of the drum; the town council, no less, had to show people the new vegetable, and instructions were read out as to how it was to be planted, tended and prepared. But it all went in one ear and out the other – people didn’t understand what was being read out, and went straight ahead and took a bite of the raw potatoes. ‘Ugh, how terrible they taste!’ they said and threw them into the gutter, where they could see that not even the dogs would eat them. But there actually were some people who were willing to give it a try, and some of them stuck their potatoes into the ground, one here and one there, and waited for a tree to grow up so they could shake potatoes from it; others threw the whole lot into a big hole, where they all got tangled up into one great lump and went into leaf.

– The next year the king had to start all over again, but the idea only sank in very slowly. – ‘The same there as here!’ said Grandma. ‘People have failed to appreciate the best vegetable that’s ever come our way! But now the potatoes can stand on their own two feet! – Now they are appreciated. Whatever is good will be respected and revered, sooner or later!’

How often, when faced with much of what seems to have to suffer so badly in the world, have I not thought of the potatoes and Grandma’s words.

Poem by the Swedish writer Anna Maria Lenngren (1754-1817)

        The wearisome world

        Our vicar I observed the other day

        one morning, while as yet he lay

        stretched out exhausted ’twixt two sheets.

        His cheeks were rosy pink in hue,

        his podgy arms well-marrowed too,

        his massive belly hid from view

        surged t’ward his chin’s full-larded pleats.

A table by his bed, where breakfast was laid out

        stood ready for this man devout,

with butter and with chicken, such delicious food.

        This did the reverend set about

        and judged the sweet liqueur quite good.

        After displaying zeal aright,

        with swig on swig and bite on bite,

on his soft pillow did he sink back in despair

and cry out: “Mighty God, what is this life of clay?

        A fight ’gainst vanity and sin’s foul snare.

        Oh Lord, Thy strength grant me I pray

        so wearisome a world to bear!”

To see the original poem, go to here

Song from 'Fridolins visor och andra dikter' (1898) by the Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt

 

Song after the harvest

Here dances Fridolin,

on sweet wine he is drunk but serene,

on his fields’ yield of grain, berries’ juice like champagne,

and the tune of a waltz wild and keen.

See, with tight-fitting frock coat and tails on his arm,

how he dances each girl at the ball so warm,

till she leans – like a poppy whose drooping stem wanes –

on his breast, tired and blissfully calm.

Here dances Fridolin,

and the wine makes his memory keen –

here his father and forebears found solace so strong

in the fiddle’s high-droning careen.

But you sleep now, old ancestors, on such a night,

and the hand that made strings sing is no longer light,

and your lives and your times are a murmuring song

in which sighing and joy both take flight.

But here dances Fridolin!

See your son, he is strong, lithe and lean,

and with farmers speaks plainly the language they know,

but with learnèd folk Latin's routine.

Through your new land’s bright gold does his scythe sweep apace,

and his joy is as yours if his barn should lack space,

and his lass he lifts high, like his kin long ago,

t’ward the harvest moon’s red saucepan face.

For the Swedish original, go to here

If possible, listen to the poem, with music by Wilhelm Peterson-Berger,

sung by Sven-Bertil Taube 

A poem by the Flemish poet Hugo Claus

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

Here the soil is most rank.

Even after all these years without dung

you could raise a prize death leek here.

The English veterans are getting scarce.

Every year they point to their yet scarcer friends:

Hill Sixty, Hill Sixty-One, Poelkapelle.

In Flanders Fields the threshers

draw ever smaller circles round the twisting trenches

of hardened sandbags, the entrails of death.

The local butter

tastes of poppies.

A poem by the Dutch poet Victor Vroomkoning

Poppy

Orange-red crêpe paper round

a cobweb duster on a stem

of grey-white hair, it stands

ablaze, aflame. Groaning

and tearing in the wind,

its skins hang in tatters,

you find shreds left over.

The seed is blown away

from within to help you

to another world, only to

return twice as profusely, to

set fire to verge and flowerbed

where as a shower of sparks cock-rose

family does her best

to resemble it.

For a pdf version of the collection from which this poem has been taken, go to here

Another one by Aspenström

The inchworm

I stretch out full length from my cherry-leaf

and gaze toward eternity:

eternity is altogether too large today

altogether too blue and endlessly vast.

I think I’ll stay on my cherry-leaf

and take the measure of my green cherry-leaf.

A poem by the Swedish writer Werner Aspenström (1918-1997)

You and me and the world

Don’t ask who you are and who I am

and why everything exists.

Let professors go into that,

they’re paid for it.

Place the kitchen scales on the table

and let reality weigh itself.

Slip on your coat.

Switch off the hall light.

Shut the door.

Let the dead embalm the dead.

Here we are walking.

The one in the white wellingtons

is you.

The one in the black wellingtons

is me.

And the rain falling over both of us

is the rain.

Poem by the Danish poet Johannes L. Madsen (1942-2000)

spilt out sputtering with acid

        spilt out sputtering with acid

and with all thoughts ignited flailing

                        in divided mandarins

                separated and fully ripe lapping

        in green light and flight

                        with indifferent touches

                                sucked through the minute

                        seething with juice and spilt out

                from hopscotch and mandarins

        hopping on the flower

                in clumsy circles above

                        mirror-like puddles into

                                a face of smoke and no

                        fire ignited sputtering

                of mandarins but a face

        smoking with acid flash

and corroding in someone’s corneas

For a comment on the translation, go to here

The 'poem' that starts Dutch literature

all birds are a-nesting

save me and thee

why now do we tarry

For the background story, go to here