Literary Struggles

Someone at Private Eye is clearly not a Knausgaard fan...

A Tour Through the Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Gösta Ågren

History

History is thought, a

pattern that conceals the

true story, where

the swallow grows bloody

from flying through the

murky bombast and

facts stand like a higher

race above the souls'

morasses, and the annals

challenge in vain. The object

of this wild conversation is

the community, a magic behemoth,

a togetherness with no other shield

against the fire than ashes.

Self-reliance

The sunrise resembles

a religious idea; so

helpless is our existence.

Sometimes the sparse death

thickens to war. Then

the names sink away in

their own mass. Outside

society awaits bondage,

where the slaves' sick hearts

at last pound themselves

apart. But in here the freedom has shrunk to

decrees, and words are now so

clear, they signify only

sound. The silence is silenced

by music, but here

too you must

decide.

Compensation

God is a simplification

and the word soul says plainly

that human beings are only

symbolic, as if

there were houses without

emptiness. Alas,

nothing is compensated

in the eternal accounts. The

murdered are chosen,

the whipped still

burn. A rival overturned

Theagenes' victory statue, and came

finally first to the finish, crushed

beneath its weight.

Spiritual laws

That which is limitless cannot

be seen. It surrounds you

with its emptiness, which

slowly dissolves you like

a carnivorous flower

its prey. Only the quest

sustains you. Without

ideals no one can keep

their memories pure. Without

certainty and actions

the laws of matter take

over and turn

this wild event

into something lost.

Love

Love is a message

from the skin. Hands

begin to long for their meaning.

A story awaits, but

the one who has nothing

to lose does not dare

to losing that,

too. Only the one who has everything

to gain, is not afraid

of his courage. He has been

pitiable. Now

he turns

against himself. The heart pounds

like a helpless child,

but he writes his

bad poems. They cry

as wordless

cranes cry

in spring.

Friendship

Words of command

remain like a direction

in the silence. We must

obey or refuse

to obey. There is

no choice.

When words are clumsy

and hesitant like unfamiliar

footsteps on parquet,

they say something. When

they are handsome as enemies

they hide something. Do not

play with them: they are

laden. Only

friendly words say

nothing special.

They contain only

friendly words.

Prudence

Between the high years we glimpse

the ocean. Yet we must

arrange our life in a line,

for the present is merely something

constant; everything else

changes. We have control

of memories and plans,

two branches without a trunk,

but both require courage, great

as fear, and the steady

rhythm of the heart, that does not

constitute a symbol but is

a gymnast in the world of

the senses, whose only routine

consists in keeping the powerful

tree running.

Heroism

Heroism is a state

of cruelty, the hawk's sudden

line towards earth. Then all

that is cowardly risks fading, as though

history were something different

from life, and the days merely

sand beneath the weight of years.

But when the hero flees to the deed,

beside himself with contempt, trembling

like an engine with fear,

cowardice protects the seed as though

it were a sensitive emotion

in the sea of weeds, and thereby

keeps the escape route open for

the true route.

The oversoul

The soul is a daydream

outside our name, a garden

for the god, where mind

and will hysterically

degrade. Afterwards, the present

is too big; we dare not

fall asleep. Who can sleep

with a god in his soul,

an oversoul, that uses

us to be, and is itself

free? We should be operated on,

but no knife cuts him

apart, and never will

the spiritual heal

its victims. We ourselves

must

wake.

Circles

The circle has no centre:

it is a demented cell

that swallows everything, even

the emptiness that assails

feelings and days,

and the forgetfulness that

preserves everything. For

the essayist the circle is

life, but for the poet only

a horizon without habitations,

where people conceal themselves

by being, and the everyday

is inscrutable as a ritual,

the meaninglessness

a strange

freedom.

The intellect

The intellect is a room without

years and walls. You have to imagine

them. Well-worn footprints

point to principles, but

they are old now, prisons

waiting for their prey.

You have to go as

a stranger would go

into your brain and there

declare all the accumulated

commands invalid and expand

it to a lifetime without

the altar, a chapel where

you can think as though

everything was sacred.

Art

How could decorative

messages compete with

Altmira's bulls? They stand

in the darkness, sketches

of the body's drama. Art

is magic, but the light

in the museums glows as if

they had nothing

to hide, and the young

rebel against rules

as if form possessed

meaning. When the artist

fought the pictorial creature

in faltering torchlight

he was wild and pure

as arrogance. The journey

was towards the inner creature,

his real strength.,

that waited for him,

patient as his shadow.

The poet

The seventeenth century was everywhere

but some still escaped

as though they were

in disguise, and only

needed to think in a

hitherto unknown way

in order to become empty

and pure as strangers.

In their poems form protected

many weak

lines, but suddenly

a verse could vibrate,

desperate as a wing

seeking its bird.

Experience

What we leave undone

is a part of our action.

Without the dreamed ship

the bark boat would capsize.

Without all that we merely

pass by we would never

get there. Even

the boredom is laden

with existence. Its emptiness

is only a form of

patience. The work

waits like an adversary,

and the footsteps begin

to point again.

Character

The events are small, but

the chains endless. There is

a wildness in every name,

an I that wants to go and leave

the shackles behind. But flight

too is only a link:

the chain cannot be broken.

Where you go, into the latent,

you always meet

the same figure.

Manners

Long ago people saw

that seriousness threatens small talk,

and began to smile the silence

away. Many

also sought protection in

phrases, but phrases

are words, and cannot

be revoked. At last

fellowship became sheer

politeness. They understood

finally how important

it is.

Gifts

A giver tries to grow

greater, not with the help of

the recipients' gratitude

but by diminishing them

with his gifts. Fame

or beauty work in the same

way, even if all they give

is their aura! When

a gift has permeated

the inscrutable defence

and reached the entrails' warm

hatred, the recipient

convinces only by making

his face and voice

manage on their own.

He himself goes. His back

is stiff as a shield

and his clothes do not hide him,

they reveal him. At

the roadside another back

sprouts when wings unfold.

It shimmers like blue

metal. Only the beetle is

its own present.

Nature

The cattle's language has only

one word. They think with its

meaning, an older and

wilder pilgrimage than ours:

it can only continue

and the goal is the beginning.

October burns like

a palace. Fate is larger

than in May, all darkness

higher. We approach

the lower, ruling

layers, where conversations

are dark chambers,

the arguments without other logic

than their existence, and the bodies

simplified to pilgrims while

the cries merge to become

a single word.

Politics

The word power means

violence. The words of the laws

are not symbols but

real. In the ruins of Ctesiphon

the state remains, a rainbow

of concrete. We are

masses; we have no

other choice. When we seekingly

look around us, we meet

only Medusa's poor,

cold gaze, but turned to stone

we still manage to think

our dream, the only finished thing

in the crude sketch

in which we live.

Nominalist and Realist

Whoever denies the real

confirms its power. Revolt

is hard. Whoever affirms

reality drains it

if death encounters no resistance

it is merely a clump of dust

where we slowly gather.

With theories as wings

we fly with no other

direction than away. But here

on the tenth line I begin

to hesitate. The denier has

perceived that if everything exists,

nothing else exists;

the affirmer says deep withiin

that perbaps everything

is something else.

New England Reformers

There is an indifference,

empty and dead as strict

demeanour. It surrounds us,

a pain relief, which those

people who fight apparently

refuse. Yet they are

totally dependent on this

poverty. Without it

reality would

conquer them with its

limitless masses, where

the individual is only

a throat, turned

towards their teeth.

A resumé

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote

his two volumes of essays

in order to become calm. Thoughts

are an unease that seeks rhythm.

They must be turned into waves

through the opinions; if

they harden to principles

they will be broken

apart on the shore's

reality. They are not

incorporeal: the metaphors

make hem visible, brutal

as walls or gentle

as sleepy hands,

but every time we sense

that the description

is incomplete.

From Dikter utan land, Schildts & Söderströms, 2015

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

SELTA

This is just another of our occasional brief reviews of SELTA, the Swedish-English Literary Translators Association. Actually, there isn't much to report this time: the group seems to be fairly stable as regards membership numbers, though its practical work and activity seem to be dominated by a rather small and tightly-knit network of members who know one another and are colleagues. There's also a noticeable age factor: again the small network appears to be composed of younger members, while the wider membership is rather older and takes little part in the group activity - this is noticeable with regard to meetings, where many of the older members no longer attend.

It's good that there is an organisation like SELTA, bringing some order to the potential chaos of publishers, editors, agents, agencies, translators and contracts - but it doesn't seem quite the same as it was in the 1980s and 90s, when it was more than a network, functioning as a forum for ideas and reflections on contemporary and classical Swedish-language literature. In fact, it feels as though the literary element may have receded quite a bit in recent times. Perhaps, however, the role is still fulfilled by Swedish Book Review, though again there's a sense of a rather restricted network in charge of its editorial functions.

It's to be hoped that SELTA will continue to evolve. The founding of a sister organisation DELT is an interesting development: this blog has always advocated the forming of a pan-Nordic translators' association, and will go on doing so. Perhaps at some point SELTA and DELT will merge!

Stand Magazine

Not a specifically Nordic topic, but it's encouraging to see that Stand Magazine continues to publish work in translation, as well as much contemporary British and North American writing. Stand is where a number of the translations and essays of Göran Printz-Påhlson first saw the light, as well as some of the early English versions of the poems of Tomas Tranströmer. The magazine began publication in 1952 - it's wonderful that it has survived to the present day.

Hat tip: Neil Astley

Tracks from My Album

Anni Sumari 

Tracks from my Album 

Translated by David McDuff and Sarka Hantula

Anni Sumari was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1965, and studied literature and media/communication studies at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, including Selected Poems (2006), The Years Above the Waters (2003), Train Play (2001), Sinerian (2000), and Measure and Quantity (1998), for which she won the Finnish National Broadcasting Company's Dancing Bear Prize for best poetry book of the year. She also received an artist's grant from the Finnish Ministry of Culture for 2004-2006. She is active in translation and editing, and her works have been translated into 24 languages including English, German, French, Swedish, Danish, Belorussian, Serbian, Macedonian and Italian,  Slovene and Hebrew. She was shortlisted for the Runeberg Prize, and in 2016 was elected Best International Poet of the Year by World Poets Quarterly Magazine (Multilingual) and the editorial department of Chinese Poetry Abroad). She was the first Finn to receive this meritorious award. She is a member of the Board of the Finnish PEN Center. She recently received an artist's grant from the Finnish Ministry of Culture for 2007-2011, and has edited and translated a book called Odin's Steed: The Scandinavian Myths, which has just come out in Finnish. She is the co-editor of The Other Side of Landscape, published by Slope. 

Anni Sumari's poems have been translated into English by David McDuff.

The sky, Swiss air space, December

  

We slide on the tray of noon,

we ski, we slalom on the expanse of the clouds.

On the plane’s wing it says: Do not step

outside this area,

I would never dream of it, I promise you,

anyway it’s cold out there, -65°C.

The snot runs, what joy

to be able to pick an anthrax sample

from one’s nose, I long for you! even

in the deep frost I can’t

concentrate on what is,

be where I am.

We are 

unquestionably at an altitude

of at least 11,880 metres.

That cloud is tall

for its age, the hairs on its crown

touch the angels of heaven. So

at night it’s the starry sky,

one must be thankful for that,

if on top of everything else one wasn’t

thankful, what would happen then?

Europe lies under an eiderdown

weary of those things that come

from the sky, from the blue, the bolts

the ribs of the clouds slamming down

into the divine comedy. 

Be quiet, be quiet, encyclopaedia.

The concepts burn your ears

as you don’t know what is behind them,

gratitude, freedom, love. Innocence

is a white house and an empty bottle,

are you wiser now. From above the rural landscape

is a threadbare suede coat

a moth-eaten stuffed reindeer, what else is

missing from this picture. The shadows of

the trails of jet planes ticking

over it. 

The earth’s face has always been hidden by plants

and encrusted with bivalves. Is it any wonder

that some of them were preserved, perpetuated

in stone or resin, marble, softness.

But is it possible

that even one portion of spaghetti Bolognese

will be preserved in any circumstances?

The mountains grow bearskin,

then turn to cinders,

the romantic beaches grow fossilized,

the messages vanish from the answering machine,

but the most haphazard one of the most tender things

preserves its form, remains, moves minds,

is put on display, receives its value by chance,

a nucleus of meaning. 

The granite flickers.

A human being wants to know

his exact location, approximately

by rule of thumb

the bedrock, and how long

a finger can be held in the candle flame

before it burns –

and if there is stone underneath

is there also stone on top? and what

meteor would fall

on my head, if I lived long enough? and

have I already lived beyond the moment when

I ought to have died?

and will I push my head

through the grey granite

even in the graveyard. 

But here is a surface 

which will not be breached: the horizon.

You can freely choose

an arbitrary point

anywhere on the globe,

and you will notice that all

gazes finally turn there.

Before that, however, they perform

an inconceivably complex

figure-dance at the fourth dimension

of the system of coordinates. 

Through the oval window

I watch us reach our goal.

I am not touched at all.

In the sunlight, seen from above,

the cities are broken mirrors

in which your memories

are distorted in reflection.

You clench your fist

you caress the emptiness.

The dead would do well

to weep for the living

and not the other way round

 translated from Finnish by David McDuff