Airmail: The Letters Of Robert Bly And Tomas Tranströmer (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
When I was young, growing up on a council estate, I saw older women as food shopping machines. There were no supermarkets so they visited ten different shops until they could carry no more and their only pleasure was to bump into someone in a similar position for a chat before going home to cook and then start the process again the following day (this was the fifties and sixties, and the sixties is a period covered by this book along with the seventies).Without prying you could piece together their conversations. First the important stuff, people who were seriously ill, who had married who, but then, formalities over, the bags dropped to the floor and gossip ensued.So it is with Airmail... Will you be interested in the sense given to words in the two poets work as they attempt to translate each other’s poems from Swedish to American English and vice versa? Or more interested in the gossip that comes after, discussing criticism, other poets, the war in Vietnam and the peace marches (and poetry vigils)?If you are lucky you will enjoy both.This lovely book is in no way a novel but has been edited to show actual correspondence between the two poets in an era when e mail did not exist and long letters were the order of the day. I am intrigued to know why both poets kept the letters they received as, obviously, if both of them hadn't then the book could not exist. We will never know other than to feel that perhaps each prized their received letters more than I, for example, did mine.Consider the following as a taste of conversation on the sense and meaning behind a single word in a poem (Tomas to Robert);-“From An African Diary – sounds so good in your English version that I wonder if it wasn’t conceived in English from the outset and the Swedish text isn’t a kind of translation. One thing in Swedish however, has caused a misunderstanding. HOTORG ARTIST is something special that you don’t know about. Hotorget is a square in Stockholm where formerly (and maybe also now) bad art used to be sold cheap. The sort of landscapes with pines and red cottages, portraits of gypsy women, sunsets. It refers in other words to mass-produced, conventional art. HOTARG ARTIST, in other words, is the same as the German Kitschmaler. Kitsch would be the German word, but what is the English?”I guess the English would now be Kitsch, borrowed from the German, but how is a Swede to know that? Is kitsch a word used in American English?Returning to my two lady shoppers exchanging important notes and then trivia, consider from later on in the book and Tomas talking of his cultural trip to Hungary and Czechoslovakia;-“They were desperately eager to keep some link with the rest of Europe so I suddenly felt the ridiculous character of the Swedish Institute, Cultural Exchange and such things disappear. I hope to be used some way in the future contacts. Sweden is in a position that gives opportunity to do something. Very little but something. My family is all right. Emma is very active; dancing, playing the flute, riding (she is mad about horses).”This is not an inexpensive book and is, probably, not your usual taste in reading, nor would it have been mine. I could not say it was a "can't put down book" as I read it in small chunks. Partly this was so that I could digest what had just been read, partly because the book is written in chunks and partly because I didn't want the book to end. For me it was not only an introduction to the minds of poets it was also new to me for being about an American and Swedish poet. You see I am from Wales in the U.K. and have been brought up on Dylan Thomas, R S Thomas etc. etc.A life changer, memory jogger, excellently written book to keep forever.
Two giants of post-WWII literature exchanging letters about poetry, translation, politics, family, and their own deep friendship makes for riveting reading. This wonderful book made me put a considerable stack of enjoyable reading on hold while I read it, and my first impulse upon finishing it was to start right over again from the beginning. Yes, it's that good.It's unfair to compare Airmail with Lisa Jarnot's Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography, of course, but since I read them almost back-to-back I have to say that the Robert Bly/Tomas Tranströmer correspondence delivers a clearer, deeper sense of what it is like to be a poet than Jarnot's exhaustive and exhausting tome. We get a sense of both these poets as men, as word-mad writers, and watch as their careers and their friendship deepen and broaden over a period of 36 years—until the correspondence suddenly ends, cut off by the stroke Tranströmer suffered in 1990, which left him unable to write in the old, free way that characterizes these letters. What a loss! Heartbreaking for all concerned—and thanks to this book, we as readers join in that concern.And yet the overall impression Airmail leaves is of the abiding comfort of friendship, especially when it thrives on both intellectual and emotional levels. The book quickly obliterates the image we have of poets as solitary garret-dwellers communing with the angels and shows us instead two deeply human beings seeking to heal the division between the inner and the outer life with searching intelligence and great good humor. Everything in Western culture militates against this healing, and yet this book illustrates that universal art (Tranströmer's poetry has been translated into 60 some languages) can arise from the attempt.It may be that one of these days Bly himself will get the Nobel Prize (I happen to think he deserves it), but prizes are ultimately irrelevant. What matters is the inner work and its artful expression. These two poets, in different ways, have already succeeded in changing how we receive poems into our lives, and by extension how we receive our own experience in the world. I imagine not a few readers will revise their ideas of friendship itself, especially male friendships, on the basis of these luminous letters.
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