This post is the work of poet Jessica Johnson.–TM
Tomas Transtr??mer has been frequently appreciated in the blogosphere since his collected poems, The Great Enigma, came out last year. See Via Negativa and Reading the Maps, where readers voted him Greatest Living Poet.
One of his best known poems, “Andrum: Juli” (“Breathing Space July”), available in several translations here, derives its considerable power from a neat series of inversions. The third-person voice is unemotional ??? detached from the poem’s events, an impartial narrator. In his recent blog post on sincerity, Tyler pointed out how hard it is to write effectively about sincere feeling. Through this poem’s cold, clean mechanism, Transtr??mer points to warm & fuzzy stuff: death as a natural motion that starts in the height of life; the possibility of radical sympathy.
The poem consists of three stanzas. In each there is a man in relationship to some other, and in each, Transtr??mer inverts the relationship between the two.
Each inversion is different. (All excerpts here are from Robin Fulton’s translation). In the first, “The man lying on his back under the high trees/ is up there too. He rills out in thousands of twigs“” He experiences the tree’s experience. His being “up there too” illuminates the tree.
Note the sureness with which Transtr??mer posits the inversions: the man is up there too. And, within the bounds of the poem, he never comes down.
In the second stanza, “The man down by the jetties narrows his eyes at the water.” The jetties are then described in human terms.
The jetties grow old more quickly than people.
Their timbers are silver-grey, they have stones in their stomach.
The blinding light beats straight in.
They collectively have one stomach. They are becoming the man, about whom nothing more is said. Their experience is illuminating his experience.
In the final stanza, we learn the man’s fate. The man is “traveling all day in an open boat/over the glittering straights.” But he “will sleep at last inside a blue lamp/ while the islands creep like large months across the glass.” In this final movement, the “other” is the globe, the thing the man is traveling across. It’s what holds him up, it’s the underpinning of his existence. Finally, in death, he slips inside of it, joining it, while the islands ??? literally, parts of the globe; figuratively, other travelers ??? assume the man’s former place.
In the poem’s universe it is the height of summer. Different selves have different experiences ??? selves are not frighteningly interchangeable ??? but the boundaries of self, first in life, and ultimately in death, can be crossed in smooth motions filled more with wonder than with terror.
New work from Jessica is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner and The Paris Review. Find one of Jessica’s poems here. ???TM