Tranströmer Tomas

Sorrow Gondola

April and Silence

Spring lies forsaken.

The velvet-dark ditch

crawls by my side

without reflections.

The only thing that shines

are yellow flowers.

I am cradled in my shadow

like a fiddle

in its black case.

The only thing I want to say

glimmers out of reach

like the silver

at the pawnbroker’s.

Insecurity’s Kingdom

The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X

and her earrings dangle like Damocles’sword.

As a spotted butterfly turns invisible in a field

so the demon blends in with the spread-open newspaper.

A helmet worn by no one has taken power.

The mother turtle flees, flying under water.

Nightbook Page

I stepped ashore one May night

into a chilly moonlight

where grass and flowers were gray

but their scent green.

I drifted up a slope

in the colorblind dark

while white stones

signaled back to the moon.

A time span

several minutes long

fifty-eight years wide.

And behind me

beyond the lead-shimmering waters

was the other coast

and those in command.

People with a future

instead of faces.

Sorrow Gondola No. 2

I

Two old men, father- and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, are staying by the Grand Canal

together with the restless woman who is married to King Midas,

he who changes everything he touches to Wagner.

The ocean’s green cold pushes up through the palazzo floors.

Wagner is marked, his famous Punchinello profile looks more tired than before,

his face a white flag.

The gondola is heavy-laden with their lives, two round trips and a one-way.

II

A window in the palazzo flies open and everyone grimaces in the sudden draft.

Outside on the water the trash gondola appears, paddled by two one-oared bandits.

Liszt has written down some chords so heavy, they ought to be sent off

to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis.

Meteorites!

Too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink straight through the future all the way down

to the Brownshirt years.

The gondola is heavy-laden with the future’s huddled-up stones.

III

Peep-holes into 1990.

March 25th. Angst for Lithuania.

Dreamt I visited a large hospital.

No personnel. Everyone was a patient.

In the same dream a newborn girl

who spoke in complete sentences.

IV

Beside the son-in-law, who’s a man of the times, Liszt is a moth-eaten grand seigneur.

It’s a disguise.

The deep, that tries on and rejects different masks, has chosen this one just for him—

the deep that wants to enter people without ever showing its face.

V

Abbé Liszt is used to carrying his suitcase himself through sleet and sunshine

and when his time comes to die, there will be no one to meet him at the station.

A mild breeze of gifted cognac carries him away in the midst of a commission.

He always has commissions.

Two thousand letters a year!

The schoolboy who writes his misspelled word a hundred times before he’s allowed to go home.

The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black.

VI

Back to 1990.

Dreamt I drove over a hundred miles in vain.

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

The neighbors came over to listen.

VII

The clavier, which kept silent through all of Parsifal (but listened), finally has something to say.

Sighs. . sospiri. .

When Liszt plays tonight he holds the sea-pedal pressed down

so the ocean’s green force rises up through the floor and flows together with all the stone in the

building.

Good evening, beautiful deep!

The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black.

VIII

Dreamt I was supposed to start school but arrived too late.

Everyone in the room was wearing a white mask.

Whoever the teacher was, no one could say.

Landscape with Suns

The sun glides out from behind the house

positions itself mid-street

and breathes on us

with its scarlet wind.

Innsbruck I must leave you.

But tomorrow

a glowing sun stands

in the half-dead gray forest

where we have to work and live.

November in the Former GDR

The almighty Cyclops-eye went behind the clouds

and the grass shuddered in the coal dust.

Beaten sore and stiff from last night’s dreams

we climb aboard the train

that stops at every station

and lays eggs.

It’s rather quiet.

The clonging from the churchbells’ buckets

collecting water.

And someone’s unrelenting cough

telling off everything and everyone.

A stone idol is moving its lips:

it’s the city.

Where iron-hard misunderstandings rule

among kiosk-attendants butchers

sheet-metal workers naval officers

iron-hard misunderstandings, academics.

How my eyes ache!

They’ve been reading by the glowworm-lamps’ faint light.

November offers caramels of granite.

Unpredictable!

Like world history

laughing at the wrong place.

But we hear the clonging

from the churchbells’ buckets when they collect water

every Wednesday

—is it Wednesday?—

that’s what’s become of our Sundays!

From July ’90

It was a funeral

and I sensed the dead man

was reading my thoughts

better than I could.

The organ kept quiet, birds sang.

The hole out in the blazing sun.

My friend’s voice lingered

in the minutes’ farthest side.

I drove home seen through

by the summer day’s brilliance

by rain and stillness

seen through by the moon.

The Cuckoo

A cuckoo perched and who-whoed in a birch just north of the house. It was so loud that at first I thought an opera singer was performing a cuckoo-imitation. Surprised I even saw the bird. Its tail-feathers moved up and down with every note, like the handle on a pump. The bird hopped, feet together, turned and cried out to all four directions. Then it lifted off and, muttering, flew over the house and far away to the west. . The summer is growing old and everything flows together into a single melancholy sigh. Cuculus canorus is returning to the tropics. Its time in Sweden is through. It wasn’t long! In fact, the cuckoo is a citizen of Zaire. . I am not so fond of making journeys anymore. But the journey visits me. Now when I’m pushed more and more into a corner, when every year the tree rings widen, when I need reading glasses. There’s always more happening than we can bear! It’s nothing to be surprised about. These thoughts bear me as faithfully as Susi and Chuma bore Livingstone’s mummified body straight across Africa.

Three Stanzas

I

The knight and his lady

were petrified but happy

on a flying coffin lid

outside of time.

II

Jesus held up a coin

with Tiberius in profile

a profile without love

the power in circulation.

III

A dripping sword

obliterates memories.

The ground is rusting

trumpets and sheaths.

Like Being a Child

Like being a child and an enormous insult

is pulled over your head like a sack;

through the sack’s stitches you catch a glimpse of the sun

and hear the cherry trees humming.

But this doesn’t help, the great affront

covers your head and torso and knees

and though you move sporadically

you can’t take pleasure in the spring.

Yes, shimmering wool hat, pull it down over the face

and stare through the weave.

On the bay, water-rings teem soundlessly.

Green leaves are darkening the land.

Two Cities

Each on its own side of a strait, two cities

one plunged into darkness, under enemy control.

In the other the lamps are burning.

The luminous shore hypnotizes the blacked-out one.

I swim out in a trance

on the glittering dark waters.

A muffled tuba-blast breaks in.

It’s a friend’s voice, take your grave and go.

The Light Streams In

Outside the window is spring’s long animal,

the diaphanous dragon of sunshine

flowing past like an endless

commuter train — we never managed to see its head.

The seaside villas scuttle sideways

and are as proud as crabs.

The sun causes the statues to blink.

The raging conflagration out in space

is transforming into a caress.

The countdown has begun.

Night Travel

It’s teeming under us. Trains depart.

Hotel Astoria trembles.

A glass of water by the bedside

shines into the tunnels.

He dreamed he was imprisoned on Svalbard.

The planet rumbled as it turned.

Glittering eyes passed over the ice.

The miracles’ beauty existed.

Haiku Poems

I

The high-tension lines

taut in cold’s brittle kingdom

north of all music.

~

The white sun, training

alone, runs the long distance

to death’s blue mountains.

~

We need to exist

with the finely printed grass

and cellar-laughter.

~

The sun lies low now.

Our shadows are goliaths.

Soon shadow is all.

II

The orchid blossoms.

Oil tankers are gliding past.

And the moon is full.

III

Medieval fortress,

a foreign city, cold sphinx,

empty arenas.

~

Then the leaves whispered:

a wild boar plays the organ.

And the bells all rang.

~

And the night streams in

from east to west, traveling

in time with the moon.

IV

A dragonfly pair

fastened to one another

went flickering past.

~

The presence of God.

In the tunnel of birdsong

a locked door opens.

~

Oak trees and the moon.

Light and mute constellations.

And the frigid sea.

From the Island, 1860

I

One day as she rinsed her wash from the jetty,

the bay’s grave cold rose up through her arms

and into her life.

Her tears froze into spectacles.

The island raised itself by its grass

and the herring-flag waved in the deep.

II

And the swarm of small pox caught up with him,

settled down onto his face.

He lies and stares at the ceiling.

How it had rowed up through the silence.

The now’s eternally flowing stain,

the now’s eternally bleeding end-point.

Silence

Walk past, they are buried. .

A cloud glides over the sun’s disk.

Starvation is a tall building

that moves about by night—

in the bedroom an elevator shaft opens,

a dark rod pointing toward the interior.

Flowers in the ditch. Fanfare and silence.

Walk past, they are buried. .

The table silver survives in giant shoals

down deep where the Atlantic is black.

Midwinter

A blue light

is streaming out from my clothes.

Midwinter.

Jingling tambourines of ice.

I close my eyes.

There is a soundless world

there is a crack

where the dead

are smuggled over the border.

A Sketch from 1844

William Turner’s face is browned by weather;

he’s set up his easel far off in the breaking surf.

We follow the silver-green cable down into the depths.

He wades out in the long shallows of death’s kingdom.

A train rolls in. Come closer.

Rain, rain travels over us.

Content

Tranströmer Tomas Sorrow Gondola

April and Silence

Insecurity’s Kingdom

Nightbook Page

Sorrow Gondola No. 2

Landscape with Suns

November in the Former GDR

From July ’90

The Cuckoo

Three Stanzas

Like Being a Child

Two Cities

The Light Streams In

Night Travel

Haiku Poems

From the Island, 1860

Silence

Midwinter

A Sketch from 1844