Afterword by the Translator

In June 2007, I moved with my family to Tumba, Sweden, a town twelve miles south of Stockholm. My husband was the new managing director of a paper mill and printing plant. We had a three-year contract. I say “we” because it was a family decision—both the move and the duration. Our oldest daughter took a gap year before starting college and spent that year with us. Our youngest daughter, just entering high school, attended an international school in Stockholm. With no work visa and thus no hope of procuring a job, I immersed myself in the language, progressing from the state-sponsored Swedish for Immigrants course to assorted university classes; from halting exchanges to relatively fluent conversations in my everyday life.

A full year into our stay, I began a post-graduate semester at Vermont College of Fine Arts to focus back in on my writing. I attended the program’s summer residency, where two events set me on the path to translation. First, at a grad student’s lecture I was given a handout that included John F. Deane’s translation of Tranströmer’s “The Station” side-by-side with the original Swedish. By that time I could read both versions of the poem and was surprised to discover I had an opinion about its translation into my native tongue. Second, I sat next to Jean Valentine in the cafeteria one evening and when she heard I lived in the Stockholm area, she asked if I’d mind delivering her latest book, Little Boat, to her old friends Tomas and Monica Tranströmer.

October 10, 2008

I walk up the steep hill to Stigbergsgatan, headed for number 32. On the phone Monica said, “We are four floors up.” The brass sign on their door reads: TRANSTRÖMER. My heart pounds as I ring the bell. “Välkommen Patty,” Monica says. Welcome. Wood floors, and a sense of windows everywhere. Out one of them a flaming gold-orange maple tree all but blocks a view of the water. A series of small rooms opening into one another. Walls covered with photos and art. Some of the paintings, I notice, are gifts, personally addressed. I can see Tomas from the door. He’s sitting in a room, near a piano, extending one arm toward me. Tousled gray-white hair; long, narrow face; an easy smile. His eyes, gentle and bright. His lower right leg has a plastic brace velcroed outside his slacks. Right arm flexed and held against his chest as if in a sling. Right hand contracted. He’s slightly leaning toward his weak side. There’s a cane on the floor beside him. I take his extended hand in both of mine, then sit in the canvas deck chair nearest him—Tomas on my left, Monica on the couch to my right. As we move back and forth between Swedish and English, it becomes clear that Tomas is aphasic. He understands perfectly, is obviously engaged in the conversation, but cannot articulate a response, except for the reply “Det är mycket bra…” (It’s very good), which he repeats fairly often, with great facial expression, sometimes gesticulating with his left hand. Monica comments that while he continues to discover more and more of the language he lost, even this many years after the stroke, his English hasn’t come back. She seems to understand the nuances of his gestures and expressions, and has a casual, humorous way of acknowledging when she has no idea what he’s trying to say. The energy between them is palpable, lovely, and calm. While Monica pulls lunch together, Tomas plays several piano pieces, including one titled Tranströmeriana IV, composed for the left hand by Swedish composer and lyricist Maurice Karkoff. From where I sit behind Tomas, I see the notes magnified through his glasses. With his good hand, his playing hand, he turns the pages so deftly the music sustains. We eat lunch at the kitchen table, below the portrait of Tomas’s maternal grandfather, Carl Westerberg, who is the grandfather in his long, incredible poem Östersjöar (Baltics). We talk about Sweden—the light, the landscape, the archipelago—as well as travel, America, politics, poetry, the Nobel Prize. Monica mentions that many people called or emailed to say they felt Tomas should have won this year’s Nobel instead of Le Clézio. She says, “It’s nice that so many people had hope.” By the end of the visit I’m so enchanted, I nearly forget to deliver Jean’s book.

I translated my first poem, “The Station,” shortly after returning from Vermont. The decision arose from excited curiosity. I felt compelled to see how close I could come to honoring my reading of the original. I’d always loved Tranströmer’s work, but it occurred to me that I’d only really read Bly’s and Fulton’s Tranströmer. Now I could read Tranströmer’s Tranströmer. In the beginning, for me, the translations were an exercise, a way to enter Tomas’s poetry more fully while fine-tuning my Swedish. I had no idea how fascinating and rewarding the process would be—how, line by line, the poems would open up to me, and keep opening. Maybe it was the loneliness and strange reconfiguration of identity that came from living in an unfamiliar place, but I felt I was discovering a third language, born at the intersection of the English and Swedish, that helped me locate myself in the context of my foreignness. More than a new language, this intersection revealed a new terrain. A terrain mirrored in the poetry, where boundaries between inner and outer landscapes—the psyche and the world—seem to shift, open, and in some way merge.

I spent that winter translating Sorgegondolen (The Sorrow Gondola). I was fastidious, re-typing each translated line below the Swedish so as not to lose track of the original. In spoken Swedish there’s both word-stress and sentence-stress, creating an unmistakable musical accent, or lilt, not reproducible in English. I often listened to a CD of Tomas reading “Sorrow Gondola No. 2” and other poems, as well as performing on piano. I paid close attention to the rhythms, inflections, manner of speaking and even his playing—anything that might better inform the music and overall tone of the translations. I also listened to a recording of Miriam Gómez-Morán playing Liszt’s La Lugubre Gondola no. 2 on piano, amazed to realize how closely Tranströmer’s poem, and in some ways the entire book, mirrors the alternately turbulent and calm progression of Liszt’s composition.

June 26, 2009

While Tomas sits in the next room, listening to classical music, Monica and I begin to go through the poems. I have no idea what to expect. (I should note here that Monica has always been Tomas’s main reader and, as he put it in a 1989 interview: “My best critic.”) She modestly claims that her English has never been great and is fading, so she has Robin Fulton’s complete translations on hand for comparison. Perhaps strangely, this reassures me. Swedes generally regard his translations as the most literal. The Swedish summer light brightens the already bright room, and from across the water the muffled screams of Gröna Lund’s rollercoaster riders drift in through an open window, so distant they sound more seabird than human. Monica has the manuscript I sent, says she read the translations aloud to Tomas and they discussed them as she went. I notice, here and there, words underlined, sometimes twice, in faint pencil. We proceed line by line, stopping at the underlined places, where I explain in my self-conscious Swedish what that particular translated word, line, or concept means in English—translations of translations!—and Monica consults Fulton, and we discuss it a little more. We devote what feels like an hour to the final couplet of “Nightbook Page.” The literal translation “People with a future/instead of faces” sounded strange to me, so I had pluralized future to make the nouns agree: “People with futures/instead of faces.” Fulton had the same impulse, although his agree in the singular: “People with a future/instead of a face.” But Monica is very clear that Tomas means what he says: the people in command envision only one future, despite the plurality of faces. At some point, we take a break and wheel Tomas along the busy, old-town waterfront, touring their neighborhood, stopping in to visit their church, Ersta kyrka, taking in the rare nice weather. I am at their home for six hours. We only get through five poems.

October 6, 2009

Monica prepares another lovely, simple lunch. I bring blueberry muffins made from the berries my husband and I picked in the forest behind our house. Tomas seems delighted to see me—enthusiastically reaching out with a big, one-armed hug. He plays a moving piece composed for the left hand by Glière, a soft creaking emanating from one of the pedals. After lunch, Mustafa brings Tomas to physical therapy and Monica and I go to work, the coffee table spread with my loose pages, Fulton’s Great Enigma, and two different versions of Tomas’s Samlade dikter (Collected Poems). The conversation is pure Swedish now. At times I barely hang on, trying not to distract myself with worry over what might get lost in the gaps while I work to catch up to the words. As we make our way through the title poem of The Sorrow Gondola, Monica talks about what influenced its creation. The Tranströmers spent time in Venice, staying in a flat with, or possibly owned by, their friend Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-American poet. The flat was near where Liszt stayed, possibly even in the same building, when he composed La Lugubre Gondola no. 2. While there, Tomas slept restlessly—apparently the bed was too small—and had a series of vivid dreams that he incorporated into the poem:

Dreamt I visited a large hospital…Then everything magnified. Sparrows as big as hens / sang so loud that it briefly struck me deaf // Dreamt I had drawn piano keys / on my kitchen table. I played on them, mute. . . . Dreamt I was supposed to start school but arrived too late. / Everyone in the room was wearing a white mask.

How eerie those lines are when you consider that he finished writing the poem shortly before his stroke, particularly since Liszt’s composition was itself inspired by a premonition of Wagner’s death and funeral that ultimately came true. I can’t bring myself to ask if, at the time, Tomas saw this as a premonition of his own fate. Did he know? I find Tomas’s aphasia hard to accept and even harder to bring up. I leave their house five hours later, exhausted and elated.

February 16, 2010

Over lunch we talk about health care in America and Sweden. Later, when we go through the poems, Tomas sits with us. He’s been housebound for over a month. The city’s plows can’t keep up with the snow, and it’s impossible to push his wheelchair up and down their steep road. The sky’s a low gray. The maple, as if etched in fog. We drink tea and eat the chocolates I bought at T-Centralen. When we talk about Haiku Poems, I sheepishly admit my determination to adhere to the form. “Men, Patty” (But, Patty), Monica replies, eyebrows raised, “Tomas höll fast vid formen” (Tomas adhered to the form). They both smile and I’m relieved. I realize I’m more at ease with Tomas’s aphasia, somehow more open to that space between us. It feels less like silence now, and more like part of the new terrain.

That winter visit with the Tranströmers ended up being my last. Our schedules grew too cluttered, time flew, and before long I was living back in the U.S. The hours we spent going over The Sorrow Gondola—that line-by-line review—wasn’t what I was expecting or even hoping for, but at some point it dawned on me that the process was as much about honing trust as it was about honing the translations. We never went over the last handful of poems.

Monica once told me that after the stroke, when enough time had passed for Tomas to regain his sense of the world, he seemed much calmer, more at peace. His life up to then had been stressful. He was still actively involved in his career as a psychologist and was in high demand as a poet, frequently traveling for readings and other literary engagements. Apparently he was anything but calm. From the way she described the change in him, I gather what he experienced wasn’t entirely devastating. Perhaps what Tomas said in an interview—conducted less than a year before his stroke—sheds light on this surprising reaction. In response to a series of questions about his writing process, specifically the relationship between the interior and exterior landscapes, Tomas replied that, for him, inspiration is “the feeling of being in two places at the same time. Or, of being aware that you are in a place that seems very closed but that actually everything is open.”

And the emptiness turns its face to us

and whispers

“I am not empty, I am open.”

(“Vermeer,” trans. Patty Crane)