2014-10-29

Exerpts from my translation into English of Lennart Sjögren’s latest poem Kalla mig Noa , Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 2014.


Call me Noah
or any other name
I met the great flood
I survived.
After the water’s annihilating power
names lack meaning
names you wear for stability’s sake.
Aimless I try to remember
I gather sticks for a building
everything is sticks
compared to the flood and the flood time.
The rain came, how long it lasted I don’t know
forty days and forty nights it’s been said
it could have been more.
Little by little it washed away
what we had built
at last it carried away the trees and the soil.
Our city lay close to the river
boats went away, boats came
we engaged a great deal in trade
sails surrounded us.
I owned a boat, therefore I was saved
a river boat it was
broad and built to carry cargo.
When the rain came, and it came again
a few of us gathered
we foretold
as it’s said that animals can foretell.
Others didn’t gather
they thought the gods would save us
they thought the rain came from the gods.
All we had was our eyes
we saw how the water rose
and it rose again
we gathered, we prepared.

After all, we were many that foretold
we were many that owned boats
I was the one who survived
we ought to have been more.
How the water filled the streets
filled the plains, turned into sea
those who could fled up toward the hills
the water caught up with them
fled toward the mountains, where the water also went.
The difference:
those who couldn’t flee
met death a couple days earlier.
Those of us that had boats
escaped the first death
the second death reached us
when the boats foundered.

The trees’ torn-off trunks
turned into rafts
those who traveled with them
soon lost the grip.

The flood’s meal was huge.
The rain turned the days into grey night
the nights became the cellars of the drowned
the stars disappeared
and with them the cardinal points.

Then I was still young
I brought with me
the woman I loved most
our three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.

Two daughters I’d had
the first-born
that death took, three years old,
the other
more beautiful than any
wasn’t allowed to live when the plague came
and a son between Shem and Ham
who was stillborn
and spared from wearing a name.

A couple of animals and doves
we also brought with us.
We still believed in a return
that life would be possible.

That our boat didn’t founder
I count among the enigmas.
It wasn’t better built than many others.
Who threw that die
I don’t know.

Much later a belief appeared
that I had spoken to the gods
and therefore had been saved.
I was taught that beliefs
can be dangerous to offend against
when many believe in them.

How silent the night became
when the drowned began to seek us
some with faces turned upwards
but mostly downwards
as if the depth
might reveal a truth
but I don’t believe they sought truth
terror seeks no truth.

Water was getting scarce
we gathered from the rain
but some drank from the river.
The rain gave us the mould
it gave us the rancid food
food that carried death within itself.

2014-10-23

Den siste Göteborgskoloristen Lars Larson

I ett tidigare inlägg har jag skildrat hur den framstående konstnären Martin Åberg i våra dagar helt har fallit i glömska och hur hans verk slumpas bort för spottstyvrar på auktioner. Lika ledsamt är att kännedom om konstnärer verksamma i Skåne sällan når norr om Hallandsåsen. Jag vill här illustrera detta med en runa som jag den 15 juli 1993 publicerade i Svenska Dagbladet.
”Konstnären Lars Larson avled under en kvällspromenad tillsammans med sin hustru Sonja ovanför Villa Strandhem i Arild, som i tjugofyra år tjänade som deras sommarbostad. LL (så signerade han sina tavlor) förunnades inte att ännu en gång få uppleva augustiljuset över Skälderviken och Arilds hamn.
LL, som var 77 år och bodde i Höganäs, föddes i Göteborg 1915. Han studerade under Pär Siegård (1934) och på Valands Målarskola (1938-43), med Nils Nilsson som lärare. Han utställde separat i Stockholm (Modern konst i hemmiljö 1947; Färg och Form 1981 och 1986), Göteborg (Galleri Aveny 1949, 1953, 1975), Malmö (Galerie Holm 1971,1973), Höganäs Museum (1969, 1978) och Uppsala (Kavaletten 1981). Han finns representerad på bland andra Nationalmuseum, Göteborgs Konstmuseum och Malmö Museum.
Hans närmaste är förutom hustrun Sonja, dottern Eva Birgitta Mattson med make Staffan och sonen Anders samt brodern Per Lanmark, Nyhamnsläge.
*
Bättre än kanske någon annan har Sven Delblanc förmått tolka Lars Larsons egenart som konstnär. I en essä som publicerades inför utställningen i Uppsala 1981, skrev Delblanc bl a följande. ’Egentligen är han den siste Göteborgskoloristen. Man behöver inte gå till biografiska data, en blick på hans dukar är nog för att slå fast samhörighet och tradition. Men han tillhörde alltså den siste koloristen på Valand, hans lärare var Nils Nilsson, hans äldre kamrater var nu glorifierade och högt värderade målare som Sandberg, Ivarsson, Schiöler. Möjligen bör man hålla i minnet, att det bara var tio år sedan Schiöler var nästan bortglömd och inte alls noterad på den kommersiella börsen. Reflexionerna gör sig själva …
I den hysteriska originalitetens namn hävdade man ett beroende av Kylberg, som på sin höjd var ytligt, motiviskt, variationer på ett givet tema, Lars Larson står fri från det nästan oroande spekulativa hos Kylberg, han är i grunden en sekulär mystiker. Här finns inga andra gudamakter än solen, och ljuset är dess manifestation. Man kan få i tankarna en annan ’ohelig’ mystiker, Gunnar Ekelöf, han som också trodde på skapelsens och de döda tingens egenliv. Lugn i vissheten om sin egenart kunde Larson variera motiv man tyckte sig minnas från Kylberg ─de bar ändå hans eget signum. Med hans egna ord: ’Att skilja tillfälligheterna från det varaktiga kräver ett ständigt aktgivande.’”

Lars Larson värnade sin integritet och hade inget till övers för dem som försökte gena mot målet. Hans stillsamma och underfundiga humor kunde stundom bytas i bitsk satir mot konstnärer som enligt hans mening förrådde sig själva i en strävan att göra andra till lags. Mig påminner Lars Larson om de forntida kinesiska konstnärer som hellre vistades fjärran från hovet än de underkastade sig de kejserliga smakdomarna. 


2014-10-16

The second instalment of my translation into English of Kjell Espmark’s poem Den inre rymden (The Inner Space)

I’ve been granted permission to search the house
and kick in the door of the villa
where for eighty years my parents
have quarreled about money.
I demand to know with what right
they decouple the laws of nature
and make a grim joke out of trust─
they quarrel so like the Olympian gods,
with mortals as their weapons.
But my parents, failing to understand, stare
at their inexplicably aged son
with a quivering permit in his hand.
And then throw themselves back into the quarrel
without seeing how the sharp words
are about to rough two human lives.


Was I a farmer’s youngest son
ineligible to receive any land
and therefore set to become a priest?
If so, I failed my father and his faith.
I might have become a dentist.
I have had a couple of German years
that yielded sympathy for Hitler’s Reich,
so I understand the eternity to which I am condemned:
this starved murmuring from the camp barracks.
My children have clearly disassociated themselves.
Two wives are there, as faint echoes,
the one is crying and martyrdom,
the other sarcasms and beatings.
I defend my only real memory─
an evening among silent mountains
a fragrance of bogmyrtle and cloudberry mire.
Above me a mute loon.


Let’s now examine an early picture.
The light in the room facing the lake is so strong
that the boys are translucent.
The birthday child is invisible─
my eye cannot perceive its frame. 
The truck, made as a fourth birthday present,
is enormous and black as fate itself.
It carries whoever dares to ride on its bed
into another future than the expected.
It’s here somewhere it will happen any moment now.
Every detail must be documented!
And the fingerprints on the doorhandles
must be carefully brushed into visibility.
I believe I was unwelcome in this life,
only temporarily married into reality.
What I remember are the chisel cuts of fear
to be forced to harm my boys,
the very ones who would revenge me.
I probably nourished them with my self-contempt
But yet I raised them to jobs with a status.
If only their eyes hadn’t become
critical flakes
of the same blackish stone as my own!
Even here I’m unwelcome,
in this land of silence and fumbling shadows.
My attempts to get out of this heritage of stone
and at last reach my boys with tenderness
scare the other frozen ones down here.


How could the sky above Strömsund
one Spring day in 1934
suddenly be laced with cracks
and an ice-blue sheet of it fall down
and shatter to pieces over the roofs?
Equally incomprehensible is my name
which my parents quarreled about, resulting in
what has proved invalid abroad.
They did however agree on a face
that could attract misunderstanding─
already at the age of eight
I was condemned to a future prison.
The childhood they thoughtlessly forced upon me
spread cracks through my later life.

2014-10-09

Extracts from my translation into English of Kjell Espmark’s poetry collection Den inre rymden, Norstedts, 2014

The Inner Space I

It’s hazy, like the dawn of time.
Across the fjord a freezing text rushes,
ripple upon ripple.
What might be a heron
tests its wings and takes flight. The promise
of leaves in the crowns of the trees is fulfilled.
And I rise slowly
from the shrunken man on the bench.
It’s time to invent the world.

Like when you clambered out of the pool
on treacherous knees one Friday,
testing the tiles with your foot
and sniggering with what remained of your lips
you shuffle now out of Mother Sea
carefully up among the seacliffs,
an armoured shark that breathes, amazed,
and stretches itself into hands and feet.
You may join in a new attempt
to realize the grand scheme.
Your head is full of memories
of all that is yet to happen.

I’m back in Leukas
and stand by the entrance to the Underworld,
a cleft hidden by thorny shrubs.
The footprints that took me here remain in the sand!
But this time I see something other
than the starting point for a second life.
It is here the Western world is said to begin.
The sea which is but a dazzling sun
hides the ships on their way through the centuries.
The darkness streaming out of the entrance to Hades
presses forth a philosophy.
And the crag Sappho shall throw herself off
elicits the vertigo in her poems.

When we walk up through the brushwood 
along what will be known as Ström’s watery vale
to find a height for our village
our steps still retain
our first steps across the savanna.

My clan memory reveals a touch of myth.
In that memory, the wife is standing at the strait, 
with the king’s pardon in her hand.
Her feet bleeding from the barefoot walk
from Stockholm all the way to Red Isle.
Her love believes it has saved her husband
from block and wheel.
But no boat is to be found on her shore,
everybody wanted to get across to see
how he fares who paid tribute to a losing king.
And so she has to stand on this side
and watch from afar her husband’s head fall.
It’s here the story seems improved 
in order to incise the helplessness of love
for grey cottages and consumptive youngsters 
and impress on them
the language of clenched teeth.

Three hundred years I have searched for proof.
The wife is still screaming in the laundry hut,
alone with the fire. The door is locked
by a crossbar─put there on purpose
or dropped in place by chance?
The farmer, firelight still in his beard,
was acquitted by the court.
But the suspicion remains. As prosecutor
I zealously search through later years
for the descendent the farmer is hiding in.
I wait for you to make a wrong move
that reveals his guilt.

In an outhouse on Listarum Slopes
with chisel and hammer Jakob Roos
stands and carves out an Assyrian lion.
His skill runs through two generations 
to me as I sculpt my text.
The vault of heaven in Komstad marble
bears traces of his chisel.
The blackbird’s song is sensually carved
and surrounded by a billowing foliage of stone.

I have pondered over the great comet
that remained so long in the sky last year.
Was it the comet that stole little Märit away?
It can’t very well have been a punishment,
since I’ve nothing to regret.
And every night I read in the brown book
that contains all human knowledge.
In that way I fulfill my duty to prepare
my unborn grandchildren who will take over
in the real university of life.
One day, when I leave my farmer’s body
and float away above the Hotag montains
neither sins nor negligence ought to weigh heavily.
I only fear that the last day
may not be allowed to call itself Justice.