Black Picture Postcards

#TomasTranströmer#blackpicturepostcards#poetry

Odradek

for Bo Cavefors 

Es klingt etwa so wie das Rascheln in gefallenen Blattern 

Their cases are locative or instrumental.
Here, in this place, I see the leaves falling
 on the fabulously stayed crosses and inscriptions, as they fell on the Homeric simile of generations. 

You have heard them, the little dissuaders,
whispering in the attics, or from behind the creaking stairs, with their busy spools and laughter, seemingly 
from no human lungs. You proceed to ask:
What’s your name? Answers: Odradek.
Where do you live? Unbestimmter Wohnsitz.
They cannot die but cease to exist
 when you do not listen. In another place,
in Paris, a car is stopped: a little dog
in the lap of a young girl exploding
 like a ripe autumnal fruit in her hands. Her
lover is already carved in half by bullets.
There are cleaner cases, more winsome
uses for the accusative. Do not heed them anymore.
 Here we all die, in bits and pieces. 

 Göran Printz-Påhlson


The Starlings

Late one afternoon in October
I hear them for the first time:
loud-voiced palavering, whistles, murmurs,
quarrels, bickering and warbling, croaking and chatter
in the high plane trees of the street.
The leaves are all turning yellow this time of year,
causing huge yellow sunlit rooms
to appear at the level of the fifth and sixth floors
opposite the barracks, where the tram turns off
from the Via delle Milizie.
Solid branches, twigs, and perches:
every bit of space is taken up in this parliament of starlings!
They are tightly bunched together there among the leaves;
and the hundreds of thousands of starlings
that perform their flying exercises
against the backdrop of the evening’s mass of motionless cloud
will surely soon have lost their places:
there are myriads of swarming punctuation marks out there,
starlings flying in formation,
sudden sharp turns, steep ascents,
swarm on delightful swarm
against a rosy cloud bank in the east.
The October evening is cool.
The shop windows of the Via Ottaviano are shining.
And the starlings are chattering, quarreling and laughing,
whispering and quietly enjoying themselves, when suddenly 
a blustering as of ten thousand pairs of sharp-edged scissors
passes through the republic of the plains--
it is as though an alarm had sounded,
heard as an echo over the muffled traffic.
Soon the darkness of night will fall.
But the starlings up there won’t stop talking,
they move together, push one another, chatter and flit.
Virgil must have had them in mind when somewhere he likens
the souls of the deceased to flights of birds
which toward sundown 
abandon the mountains and gather in high trees.
I seem to be standing in an Underworld
in the midst of a swarm of birds.
The block is Virgilian; the street is crossed
by the Viale Giulio Cesare,
where you lived
for some time before you died.
That’s why I am stopping here.
The souls of the dead have gathered in the trees.
Their number is incredible, suddenly it seems ghastly;
is this what it will be like?
For a moment I am a prisoner
of the poem I am writing.
There must be an exit.
The soldier coming up to me
has noticed that I have been standing
for quite some time looking up into the foliage--
into the darkness of feathers, bird’s eyes, and beaks.
The peasant boy inside him apprises me
of the fact that starlings come in vast migrations
“from Poland and Russia”
to spend the winter in the south:
“And things go very well for them!
In the daytime they fly out to the countryside
and spend the night in here,"
he explains with great amusement, turning his gaze
up toward the swarm of birds. Their anxiety seems to have ceased;
in just a moment they all seem to have fallen asleep.
Only single chirps and clucks are heard
from starlings talking in their sleep.
What are they dreaming of? Ten thousand starlings are dreaming in the 
darkness
about the sunlight over the fields.
As for myself, I am thinking of the tranquility
in certain restaurants in the countryside,
in the Albano Mountains and on the Campagna--
the tranquility at noon on a sunny day in October.
I am filled with the clarity of the fall day.
And am touched by something immeasurable, transparent,
which I cannot describe at first 
but must be everything we never said to each other.
There are so many things I’d like to say.
How shall I be able to speak?
Today you are not shade, you are light.
And in the poem I am writing you will be my guest.
We are going to talk about Digenís Akrítas,
the Byzantine heroic poem
with the strangely compelling rhythm;
and since the manuscript of the poem
is preserved in the monastery at Grottaferrata
I shall order wine from Grottaferrata,
golden and shimmering in its carafe;
we shall talk about the miraculously translucent autumn poem by Petronius
which appears first in Ekelöf’s Elective Affinities;
and about Ekelöf’s poems, to which you devoted such attention.
Did Ekelöf ever come to Grottaferrata?
I seem to detect your lively gaze.
And we shall see how the starlings come flying
across the fields in teeming swarms.
They will come from Rome and spend the day out here 
where they will eat snails, worms, and seeds
and suddenly they will fly up from a field
as at a given signal
and make us look into the sun.

In Memoriam Ludovica Koch (1941-93)

Jesper Svenbro

Three-toed Gull, Sighted Near the Lighthouse of Kullen

I was familiar with the sense of soaring from the music
of Lars-Erik Larsson: he must have seen
the same water surfaces as I, been filled by the same light
along the same curving coastline,
and felt the slowly rising movement of the summer
in an outer world which already was an inner one:
it was as if one stood and looked northwest
where the northern Sound has imperceptibly become the Kattegat
on a day when all the sea is placid and the sky light-blue
and a hazy fog seals the horizon –
the blank shining ground-swell
with a single floating tuft of seaweed
or a bit of plank which heaves, heaves
slowly mirroring itself, while the sea’s
cool and intensely shining mist
rises up in microscopic crystals of salt –
soaring in the air where the Sound opens out
on an unfathomable beyond and a single three-toed gull
which, battered from some afterworld of flight,
comes in view as flying’s sole survivor
gliding inland towards the lighthouse at Kullaberg –
Winddriventhing at rest in the bluest of hazes
or perhaps an optical illusion in the prisms of the lighthouse
open toward monotony of air –
all alone on a summer’s day,
which sees the loss of the horizon,
takes a giddy gyroscopic turn and topples over in memory
without a sense of anything but height and depth
as if shutting its eyes to the infinite
with wings spread wide, rising and sinking and soaring
seems to free itself at last
from the immense and sparkling blue. 

Jesper Svenbro, from Three-Toed Gull: Selected Poems. Translated by John Matthias and Lars-Hakan Svensson. Evanston: Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press, 2003

La Mer

Once in a while our table conversation might

concern the perception of the sea in Charles Trénet’s “La Mer”

which was recorded in the mid-forties.

I myself had grown up by an entirely different sea

but seemed to share

a sea which was not mine but yours:

I suggested that our perception

was determined by “a certain way of filming the sea”

which we associate with the forties –

black-and-white, of course, but above all

with slow, almost dawdling reflections of the sun,

single, slowly twinkling silver flashes

in the sea shot looking south,

in the sea at noon.

Black shadows in the foreground –

they make the soundless play of the sun

seem even more dazzling out at sea.

It is as if these dawdling reflections had given me access

to a world which was not mine –

for a moment I really believe

that communication is possible,

that the images have an inner life to convey,

see you on the Mediterranean beach:

the periphery is blurred but in the middle of the picture

the definition is so strong

that I see the glitter in the little girl’s eyes

where she stands in the glittering waves,

where she is overcome by the sea today,

by merely existing near a summer sea,

where without a doubt she hears voices shouting

though she cannot make out what they are saying in the surge

– while the clouds imperceptibly have come to a halt

in the depth of the clearest of bays.

Jesper Svenbro

© Translation by John Matthias & Lars-Håkan Svensson

After a Death

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Tomas Tranströmer
Translated by Robert Bly