The Nordic Imagination Today
I remember discovering my first poem by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. It was Robert Bly's translation in, I think, The Sixties. A low plane throws a cross-shaped shadow over a man in a field. "For a fraction of a second he is right in the center of the cross. // I have seen the cross hanging in the cool church vaults. / At times it resembles a split-second snapshot of something / moving at tremendous speed." Here is fresh poetic imagination: vivid imagery, a genius for unpredictable but telling connections, and the power to launch our imaginations into new realms. We now have Bly's selection and translation of The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2001, 122 pp, $14, paper). Here is the same wry talent for connections ("Inside the church, pillars and vaulting / white as plaster, like the cast / around the broken arm of faith."). Each poem is anchored in the here and now, but each adventures out in space and time, transforming the literal. Listen to the end of "Guard Duty," where the duty of the guard is not only "to be where I am,"

But to be where I am . . . and to wait.
I am full of anxiety, obstinate, confused.
Things not yet happened are already here!
I feel that. They're just out there:

a murmuring mass outside the barrier.
They can only slip in one by one.
They want to slip in. Why? They do
one by one. I am the turnstile.

A radically different poet is the Dane Inger Christensen, who astonished me with her alphabet, translated by Susanna Nied (New York: New Directions, 2000, 64 pp, $10.95, paper). Reading a great deal of experimental poetry lately, I have been thinking about how poets who reject traditional form don't just "play tennis with the net down," but develop new architectures for their fresh insights. Abecedarian poems have recently engaged some of our most adventurous poets: Susan Stewart, Carolyn Forché, and, in these pages, Karl Elder. Elytis had one in The Little Seafarer (1985), and Inger Christensen published alphabet (in Danish) in 1981. Each approaches the alphabet from a different angle, and Christensen is one of the most daring. Think about this: she determines the number of lines in each alphabetical section by Fibonacci's thirteenth-century mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two that precede it (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.). I'll tell you before you ask: she quits at n. When she gets up to j (89 lines) she splits into two poems, and the following letters have clusters of five to seven poems. With n (900 lines) she has completed the internal structure of her poem and stops.

So much for the architecture. What about the content? She first establishes a rhythm of repetitions – a hymn to the natural world: "apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist." Then "bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries; / bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen," the catalogue expanding outward. Next:

cicadas exist; chicory; chromium,
citrus trees; cicadas exist;
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

prowling inward. Among the ds we find dioxin and days and death. And Christensen has established a hypnotizing lyric lilt: a singing celebration of the whole of the universe – light and dark, outer and inner, concrete and abstract. Proceeding, her syntax becomes more complex, with basses and cellos entering for the darker aspects of existence, so that by the time we get to g we are in deep:

guns exist; in the midst of the lit-up
chemical ghetto guns exist
with their old-fashioned, peaceable precision

guns and wailing women, full as
greedy owls exist; the scene of the crime exists;
the scene of the crime, drowsy, normal, abstract,
bathed in a whitewashed, godforsaken light,
this poisonous, white, crumbling poem

How many tonal shifts? And we're only up to g!

Christensen draws us through history, settling keenly on our own time. We drift through a dream sequence here, breathe through a lyric aria there. Forms become increasingly complex. A speaker who sounds like the poet, I, appears, throwing a stone into the sound, dreaming in a hotel room of, yes, an apricot tree. Images from earlier poems reappear with new significance. L begins as life, but after cobalt bombs appear, a new refrain rises: "there's no more to say." Where do we go from here, only halfway through the poem? We continue on a long, melodious, visionary adventure; each page introduces a new angle of vision in a new form. The prosodist in me can hardly wait to turn a page to savor what new figure she has created for her next leap of imagination.

I have rarely before read a translation that I could hardly believe was a translation. Susanna Nied has given us a rich poem in splendid English. I would love to hear it aloud in Danish; I would take any opportunity to read it aloud myself in English, to let the mathematical and the linguistic, the philosophical and the natural, the symphonic and the declarative, play through my lungs and throat and mouth – from the "naos, the innermost space of the cell," to the speculation whether "what's raven or starling or lark / lost for all time will find itself there / in eternity / eternity." Either Danish is in its music uncannily close to English, or Susanna Nied has done a miraculous job of finding English equivalents for the musical texture of the verse. For the architecture, translatable syntactical structure helps, as well as the verbal repetitions that (like apricot) take on chordal resonance as they recur. Listen to this, plucked out of the middle of an l-poem:

think; like a leaf on a tree
thinks; like shadow and light,

like shining bark thinks,
like the grubs beneath
the barkskin think, like lichen
on a stone and a bit of dry rot
think, like the squawroot thinks,
like the misty forest clearing
thinks, like the marshes think
where the rising of the rainbow
is reflected, think like a bit of
mud, a bit of raindrop
thinks, think like a mirror

Now Christensen has a new volume, Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, also translated by Susanna Nied (New York: New Directions, 2004, 128 pp, $13.95, paper). Here we have four long poems, moving from the most formal to what looks like prose. The title poem, the requiem, is a modified crown of sonnets. The reader never knows who, exactly, is dead, but the symbolic significance of the butterfly, with its cycles of renewal, is clear. The linked sonnets use strict Italian form, with content and syntax conforming exactly to the stanzaic grid. The metrical norm is, in this translation at least, iambic pentameter. But to my ear, the translator, possibly through fidelity to the word-by-word original, pushes the meter close to organic free verse, as in this tercet:

Here in its cocoon the admiral
once a spring-green, glutted caterpillar,
transforms itself to what we call a mind.

Here I admire what the poet does so well – the arresting observation of detail and the double transformation, literal and metaphorical. The meter, whether it scans or not, dramatizes the content, and makes me wonder what this sounds like in Danish.

The other three poems are formally different. "Watersteps" is eight "chapters" of five sections each, each section with five "paragraphs." The ostensive subject is the fountains, piazzas, and steps of Rome. The details keep recurring in a web of images; as I continue reading I experience a transformation of these sensuous details to verbal marble. The third poem, the "Poem on Death," is in stepped quatrains, organized in seven increasingly long sections. Consider one little stanza, so limpid in its diction, so unpredictable in its dance, so complexly resonant, in and out of context:

take death by the hand
            give it an apple
                        walk up to its grave
                                    bite the apple first yourself

This is a profoundly self-reflexive work, a poem about the difficulty of writing a poem about death. (If "profoundly self-reflexive" sounds like an oxymoron, believe me, it's not.)

The final poem, "Meeting," the longest, looks at first glance like prose in seven chapters. Reading it through the dramatic flashes that the translator captures eloquently, I feel as though I'm in the middle of a very condensed novel. But I'm inclined to avoid the term "prose poem" here, since read aloud this would reveal itself as richly cadenced poetry. Coleridge would have had no problem appreciating as true poems these tightly-organized, musically-formal works with the justified margins. "Meeting" has brilliantly accurate empathic imageination: "I think of a green little fir still with growing tip foremost this tingling down through the trunk." Say those words with your lips parted and savor the vowel progression Nied has composed.

     •

Deeper into Europe
I'd like now to address three Eastern-European poets of my generation, born within three years of each other but radically different in their lives and in their work.

If Inger Christensen is little known in the United States, the same is certainly not true of Paul Celan (1920-1970), whose obscurity and dark complexity have rather attracted than repelled our contemporary poets and critics. As J. M. Coetzee writes in The New York Review of Books (5 July 2001): "Even during Celan's lifetime there had developed a busy scholarly trade... based on him. That trade has today grown to an industry." This is my first wrestling match with this formidable poet, and I am glad of the opportunity to share what I have learned.

Let's start with an article by Lucia Cordell Getsi, "Poet as Reader, Reader as Poet: The Intertext of Translation," in The MacGuffin (Spring/Summer 2003). Here are the first two stanzas of an untitled poem, unpublished in Celan's lifetime:

Kleide die Worthöhlen aus
mit Pantherhäuten,

erweitere sie, fellhin und fellher,
sinnhin und sinnher.

Getsi works up a "translation lexicon" and urges you, dear reader, to try your hand.

auskleiden (to line [as in sewing with material], dress, undress, dress out) German joins the preposition and the verb in the infinitive to make new meanings; in the present tense, the preposition and verb split, as here.
Wort (word) Höhlen (hells, holes, caves, caverns)
Pantherhäuten (panther skins); antre is French for panther,
also
erweitern (widen)
sie (them)
fell hin fell her (fell is the same in English, can mean pelt of an animal, or the membrane lining the muscles, has same resonance of to fall; hin is toward the subject, her away from, roughly, to and fro or here and there
sinn (sense, faculty of perception)

Now that you have tried your translation, Getsi admits that after thirty-three years she is still not "reading," only translating, Celan, since he cannot be simply "read." She provides three of her own translations, the first to capture "the semantic vectors of body and religion... at the expense of the foregrounding of linguistic deconstruction": "Line the word pits / with panther skins // widen them out. Fell back and fell forth, / sense back and sense forth." Her second attempt emphasizes "aspects of wealth and royalty": "Dress the word caves out / in panther furs // stretch them, fur to and fur fro, sense to and sense fro." Her third tries for more complexity: "Line the word holes / with panther skins // expand them, fell forward and fell back, / sensing forward and sensing back." "I have never gotten out of his wordhellholes," Getsi concludes.

I have before me Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan, translated by the husband-and-wife team of Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/University Press of New England, 2000, 167 pp, $24.95, hardbound). The translators have favored poems not previously translated in English, so that you will not find here his best-known works, such as the "Death Fugue." Admitting that no one can "reproduce in a language other than German Celan's tragic relation to the language which was his instrument and life," they decide not to give the German, loathe to seduce the reader into line-by-line comparison that "fatally distracts attention from what matters first: the experience of a poem's coursing, cumulative power."

If you were to read nothing but the translators' preface you would be well rewarded, since Popov and McHugh share Celan's passion for transformative language; they respond in their preface and notes with a style that reflects his mercurial linguistic imagination; they understand the palimpsest of meaning in each German word and are at home in his landscape of cosmic consciousness. They have the verbal muscle to create English analogues to his stutterings, the splittings and reunitings, puns, inventive compounds (eye-slit crypt), neologisms, paronymies, and dramatic truncations. What's more (and a great deal more), like Lucia Getsi and like Anne Carson in her Sappho they provide detailed notes (really essays) on the problems and discoveries in the poems. Thus I get to share the adventure of translation. One example, explaining the book's title: "Kehlkopfverschlusslaut, the German term for 'glottal stop' (lit. occlusion of the head of the throat) is such a throatful that it can choke even a native."

How do Popov and McHugh handle the poem Getsi essayed? "Upholster the word-hollows / with panther pelt, // enlarge them, furback and furforth, / senseback and senseforth." Here is how their version of the rest of this poem ends:

give them vestibules, ventricles, valves,
furnish them with wilds, parietal,

and listen for the second,
every time their second, second

sound.

Upholster and hollows seem to me inspired for their sensuous sound. And this poem provides a fine example of Popov and McHugh's genius at creating a lyric – an English lyric – through alliteration and assonance, through the cumulative mini-rhythms Celan sets in motion, and the internal coherence through the echo of furnish back to the furs – providing the poem's "coursing, cumulative power." This is one poem Popov and McHugh choose not to annotate, but I want to say how, working through it with all this assistance, I have come to accept it as my window into Celan's work. I had to labor to learn to listen for that "second, second / sound," but now am profoundly impressed with his poetry, with the architecture of each poem, and with the text of this translation, the texture of both German and English. I can begin to appreciate why Celan has been called the poet of the twentieth century.

Now try another McHugh/Popov version, straight:

Ring narrowing Day under
the heavenleaf's web of veins.
Across large cells of empty time, through
rainfall, climbs
a black-blue thing: the
thought-beetle.

Words in blood-bloom
throng before his feelers.

After an explanation of the three-part coinage of Engholztag in line one (the table of contents hyphenates Ring-narrowing), the translators provide a gracefully written appreciation of this poem in itself and in the context of his other work. I enjoyed the note, but, actually, I already had the impression that I was "reading" the poem simply as a poem by way of this translation.

The Yugoslav poet Vasco Popa (1922-1991) was born only two years after Celan, but his Collected Poems, translated by Anne Pennington, as revised, expanded, and annotated by Francis R. Jones (London: Anvil Press, 1997, 464 pp, £25, hardbound) takes us into a different world, a world in which, as Ted Hughes writes in his introduction, terrible things "happen within a containing passion – Job-like – for the elemental final beauty of the created world." Popa conducts the reader directly into the imaginative life of a people – the ancient people of the Serbs. For those of us whose impression of the Serbs comes from the news spots during the horror in Kosovo, reading this life-work in poetry (with its valuable notes) helps us to understand both the passion of a people for whom a fourteenth-century defeat in battle can retain an impact comparable to that of the Holocaust in my generation and the profound role poetry has played in this passion.

First of all, these are short lyrics – less than a page. We get only one stanza in Serbo-Croat, but it gives us an idea of how exquisitely-composed these poems are. Just listen (stressed syllables in italics):

Providan golub u glavi
U golubu glinen kovceg
U kovcegu mrtvo more
U moru blazen mesec

Much of this incantatory structure comes through in translation – of stanzas, whole lyrics, and the divisions of Popa's books into tightly-interrelated cycles, sometimes liturgical groups, even sometimes symmetrically constructed to "open like wings." After some poems influenced by the French surrealists are some imaginative vignettes of country life. The decapitated hen

    jumps away
From her bloody head
Which thrusts her into night

She jumps away
To fly up to her roost

Year by year the poems expand in scope – always with playfulness; always a folkloric flavor, always the shock of imagination; typically with a dark or bitter edge. The sun, a Near-Eastern solar deity, sometimes suggests Christ. The totemic wolf who prowls through many of the poems was associated with the Serbs' patron saint, the folk figure St. Sava, and comes to represent the Serbian people. Here is "Wolves' Tenderness":

We're lying in the grass
On Wolf-Meadow above Vršac

They say
The wolves were killed here
Every last one

Only their name
Was left alive

An animal tenderness reaches us
From under the alert grass

And stirs our lips
And limbs and blood

We love each other without a word
My young she-wolf and I

The third poet in this group is still alive: Wislawa Szymborska, well-known as Nobel laureate and through her publication in many literary magazines (including this one). The edition I have is Miracle Fair, translated by Joanna Trzeciak (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001, 192 pp, $24.95, cloth). Trzeciak worked with the poet on these translations and on the imaginative organization of this collection – not a chronological "collected," but in chapters by theme, each chapter introduced with a visual collage by the poet herself and a line from one of the poems in that chapter. The translator has worked to maintain the form of each poem, including the rhyme scheme; she provides more than ample notes, some of which explain untranslatable Polish.

Though Szymborska's poems vary widely to the eye, they often have an iterative rhetorical structure – sometimes a catalogue, sometimes incremental repetition. Start with a love poem, "A Man's Household," which opens:

He's one of those men who want to do everything
   by themselves.
You need to love him along with drawers, cabinets,
   and shelves,
with what's on top of cupboards, or inside or sticking out.
Everything is going to come in handy without a doubt.

Then follow sixteen lines cataloguing everything from "squeezed-out tubes, dried-out glue" to "a dead beetle in a soap dish" and concluding:

May I throw out a thing or two? – I put this to him dearly,
but in response the man I love just looked at me severely.

Here we meet her winning playfulness, her affection, and her sense of wonder.

She is, all the same, as Czeslaw Milosz acknowledges in his foreword, a seriously grim poet. "Psalm" comments lightly enough on "How leaky are the borders of man-made states!" when clouds and sands and birds and squid move freely over and under them:

How can we speak of any semblance of order
when we can't rearrange the stars
to know which one shines for whom?
Not to mention the reprehensible spreading of fog!

The poem concludes with a wry glance at Terence:

Only what's human can be truly alien.
The rest is mixed forest, undermining moles, and wind.

Her poems on Nazi freight trains, on the history of torture through the ages, and on the end of what was to have been a glorious century are eloquent, memorable (worth memorizing), and, yes, grim.

All these poets have this sensuous sense of the depth of time – biological, historical, mythic. All at one point or another enter into the life of the old world of nature, as in Celan's "Across large cells of empty time, through / rainfall, climbs / a black-blue thing: the / thought-beetle." The evolution of the human race weighs on these poems, if only to lead us ironically to Szymborska's "only what's human can be truly alien."

Beloit Poetry Journal

Editors:
John Rosenwald, Lee Sharkey

Editor for Reviews and Exchanges:
Marion K. Stocking

Copyright © 2005 by The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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Poetry Daily / Amazon.com

Selected books cited:
The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, tr. Robert Bly — Paperback
alphabet, Inger Christensen, tr. Susanna Nied — Paperback
Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, Inger Christensen, tr. Susanna Nied — Paperback
Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan, tr. Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh — Paperback
Collected Poems, Vasko Popa, tr. Anne Pennington — Paperback
Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska, tr. Joanna Trzeciak — Paperback

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