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.