Eva-Stina Byggmästar - a poem

Only one poem from a collection of more than fifty. Because this author is tricky. But the poem does not involve too many multi-puns, except that curious word "bröstsocker" which means "candy sugar", while the literal meaning is "breast sugar" (!). It is regarded as archaïc usage in Swedish, the term now being "kandissocker".

I like these slightly fay, slightly pantheïstic, poems that Byggmästar writes, but she can test the translator to the limit with some of her multiple associations. This poem is the first in her 2008 collection Men hur små poeter finns det egentligen (But How Small Poets Are There Really).

*

POETRY IS
CANDY SUGAR SURELY
MOVING TOWARDS IT, little book
rocked asleep, the nearness, gladness
of small letters, now dreaming next to each other
about transparent libraries.

And if I were a green-clad poet,
in corduroy with hood,
with intrusive woodcocks,
what a blessed piece of luck,
you would walk as if on a naze,
a spit, a tongue of land along
the light word-swell
of small lakes,
like a mere ripple -


***

ETT BRÖSTSOCKER
ÄR DIKTEN VISST
MAKAR SIG DIT, lillboken vaggas
i sömnen, småbokstävernas närhet,
gladhet, drömmer nu intill varann
om genomskinliga bibliotek.

Och om jag var grönklädd poet,
med manchester och luva,
med närgångna morkullor,
vilken signad lyckoträff,
man gick som på näsa,
ett ed, landtunga lång
invid småsjöarnas lätta
ordsvall,
som en krusning bara –

Translated from Swedish by Eric Dickens

Rhyme, rhythm, doggerel

I find rhymed poetry the hardest thing on Earth to translate. Indeed, I sometimes avoid translating a poem altogether, because there are so many factors involved; and a translation would become pale doggerel, rather than a successful rendering. One such poem, I have already quoted in a reply on another thread here. It is from Eva-Stina Byggmästar's 2005 collection "Knoppar blommor blad och grenar". The poem is untitled:

Finns lindring i lindar!
Finns lönnfack i lönnar!
Men låt hundarna leka
att de gömmer sig i glesa
gluggar. Låt dem resa,
låt dem stå på glänt
mot allt som glindrar,
glittrar, glänser, glimtar.

The alliteration, the coïncidence of meaning leading to puns, and the many "gl-" sounds, all conspire to make a good translation of this poem nigh on impossible.

Some translators, however, say "it's doggèd that does it", but end up, alas, with doggerel. One such translator was the well-meaning Estonian translator William Kleesmann Matthews (1901-1958), known mostly as W.K. Matthews. He wrote a most useful introduction to his "Anthology of Modern Estonian Poetry", 1953. But some of his own translations prove only too clearly that the wages of forced rhyme is hilarity. Take this poem by Jaan Oks. I have never found the original, but somehow even without it, the translation is, shall we say, interesting:

As I Gaze Towards Ashen Arches

As I gaze towards ashen arches
Past the tall and rigid trees,
I can see a grin that starches
Lips, a nakedness of knees.
In my eyes are tips of flowers,
Black seed wedded to the earth,
Forests built by virid showers,
Madness in the throes of birth.

For me, this translation not only uses Procrustes' bed to obtain the rhyme, but uses imagery that becomes inadvertently amusing. Somehow, "ashen arches" remind me more of fallen ones than the lofty image Matthews is trying to create. "Rigid" somehow jars with "trees". For me "starch" is an old-fashioned way of stiffening shirts, rather than lips by way of a grin. "A nakedness of knees" sounds as if "nakedness" here is a quantity, like "a pound of butter". The tips of the flowers appear to be poking the poet in the eye. Can "seed" be "wedded"? "Virid" is a strange archaïc word. The last line is, for me, virtually the only one that avoids clashes and oddness.

Judging by other Matthews translations, where I have found the original, he tries his best with rhythm, and very laudably; but he forces the rhyme. Maybe the fact that he was not entirely a native-speaker of English led to such results. He went to the Russian grammar school in Narva, the son of an English textile engineer and an Estonian woman. He learnt English in Blackpool, studied both Slavonic philology and economics in Manchester, ending up at King's College, London studying comparative literature. He became a lexicographer and compiler and translator of poetry anthologies for Estonia and Latvia.

When Gustav Suits' poem "Risti-rästi" became "Criss-cross", Matthews got the rhythm perfectly. That was a commendable achievement. But his forced rhyme detracted from that achievement. The first stanza:

Ei läinud, kuhu kästi,
teed käinud risti-rästi:
kas halvasti või hästi,
kas vägev ma või nõrk?

becomes

I paid no heed to thunder;
My ways have gone asunder;
And did I gain or blunder?
And am I strong or weak?

The literal meaning is:

Didn't go where ordered,
criss-crossed on the roads:
whether badly or well,
me, strong or weak?

The third stanza:

Kas kuulsid sa mu huiget,
kas silmasid mu tuiget,
kas märkasid mu muiget:
meist üle kummast kumb?

which becomes

Did you not hear me singing;
Blood in my temples dinging;
The pole and canvas swinging?
Which of us holds the field?

Literal:

Did you hear my whooping,
did you spot my pulsating [/throbbing],
did you notice my [wry] smile:
which of us is [/has come out] on top?

The really important question is simply: could another translator get nearer to the literal meaning without forcing the rhyme? Can a balance be struck between meaning and sound?

Eva-Stina Byggmästar

One Finland-Swedish poet who has now produced a significant number of collections in both Finland and Sweden is Eva-Stina Byggmästar (born 1967).

Since her first collection in the mid-1980s, she has undergone some transformation as a poet. She has also moved on in publishing her poetry. Her first books appeared witt the Ostrobothnian Författarnas Andelslag, then she published with the Helsinki press Söderströms, and now also with Wahlström & Widstrand in Stockholm. Gradually, she has attained the stature of one of the more important Finland-Swedish poets.

Byggmästar has always retained a childlike sensibility about nature and the world around her. Her poems are gentle, rarely harsh. The author focusses on everyday occurences, which are then raised to poetry. Small things generate whole poems. Stones, even the dead flies on the window sill, come alive. Her love poems are often directed to an unnamed person.

The title poem in her first collection "I glasskärvornas rike" (1986), can read like this, in translation. Not the only translation, but one possible one:

Every step I take
is a step in the realm of shards of glass
Every time I swallow
razor-blades slide down my gullet.
Every flower I see is someone dead in my heart.

Who can accuse me of pessimism
and an insane belief in
the land of hopelessness.
When they never borrowed my feet, my throat
or my heart.

She was around nineteen years of age when she wrote that. She illustrated her own cover and produced linoleum prints or woodcuts inside the book. Most poems were short, quiet with a hint of unrest, and fairly conventional. Ditto, the poetry of her second collection "Amuletten":

Blood is running here
by my naked feet.

Where are the bodies?

Still the taste of
salt from the air?

There are no
streams to follow
but the blood
runs constantly past
its own being.

By her fourth collection, "Drivkrafter", she was experimenting with form. Lines were split, fragments of sentences abounded. Impressions, associations:

metal metal metal

ks ex ex


gradually advancing

take take take
how can you distinguish


angling


one last look back

I know
where everything comes from
I know that the contents of everything is

Rek Rek

the many towers I see
all that

grazing cold, warms a finger on your cheek

a bell, a milk hare


Mint
Menthol pepper

Peep peep
Hurling itself forward, look there a little dot
rau rau rrrrr rrrr


take take take
those that no one sees hide

bell or fire

bell

fire

Hares appear to be her constant companions throughout her collections. But also experimentation. Even with lifestyle and religion. As critic Kaj Hedman says in a review for the Lukukeskus in Finland: "Byggmästar's approach has always been inimitable. Her thematic worlds are childhood - or, rather, being a child - and nature. Her new poetic discoveries have been a cross between these two factors. Her poetic methods have varied, the exceptionally free associations with disintegration and combination with no limiting demands have had surprising results. In her first two collections from the 2000s, Byggmästar moved onto a definitely spiritual path, which, in the first collections give expression to a quest, both for content and form. "Den harhjärtade människan" and ""Näckrosön" have an imagery that is clearly derived from Christianity, whilst in the collection "Knoppar blommor blad och grenar" (2005) there is a kind of fusion with green joy. In her latest collection "Älvdrottningen", joy is channelled into an intoxicating, irresistible love poem which covers the whole register from passion to tenderness." I think Hedman sums her up very well.

To date, Eva-Stina Byggmästar has published 11 collections of poetry. A selection of her poems has appeared in Finnish as "Onnenvaellus käydään varvasjuoksua" (roughly: "In Its Wanderings, Joy Runs on Tiptoe") in 2002.

I am hoping myself to be able to publish a selection of her poems, translated into English.