Away from introspection

An interesting and thought-provoking interview with Estonian poet Elo Viiding in the current issue of ELM (Estonian Literary Magazine), with reflections on poetry and the poet's task that times have echoes of earlier Nordic voices including, perhaps, Ekelöf, and even Tranströmer:

Recently I've been distancing more and more from introspection as beneficial. Instead of psychoanalysis, I'm more interested in how a person can realistically act for the good of someone with fewer opportunities, be those spiritual, intellectual or material. Not society -- that's too narrow a concept; society is made up of kindred thinkers who generally thumb their nose at others -- but rather to do good for those who suffer from abandonment, socially in a certain sense, instead of delving into yourself (and even into ideas). I'm striving to do that in this phase of my life.

In general, a varied and colourful issue of the magazine -- it's now one of the best English-language literary journals in the Nordic region, at times reminiscent of the now sadly dormant Books from Finland, but more often with a viewpoint and energy of its own, and quite unlike anything currently around in the U.K. or America. There's also a quiet tribute to the life and work of Estonian literary translator Eric Dickens.

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

Airmail

I've now finished Airmail: the Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer (Bloodaxe, 2013, 476pp), and found it an absorbing if rather lengthy read. The letters are a mixture of the personal and the literary, and while it's interesting to follow the careers and private lives of two men, most of the really attention-grabbing passages occur in connection with the problems of literary translation. This was a two-way process, for each poet translated work by the other: the result is a kind of poetic table-tennis match, with poems constantly in transit between English and Swedish, and the inevitable occasional misreadings and misunderstandings flowing out into bursts of creative energy which save the texts as poems in the "other" language. Some of the interchanges read like almost like language lessons, but the tension thus caused is nearly always defused by humour and wit. Although a few of the finished poems are reproduced in the volume, it would have been nice to have more of the completed translations to compare with the collaborative editing process that's revealed in the letters. Though this would have added to the length of the volume, the inclusion of more actual poems might have been preferable to the often less interesting career-related letters (with details of tours, readings, etc.) that occupy many of the pages.

Translating poetry

On the BBC news website, Robin Fulton talks about his translations of the poetry of Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer.