Tomas Tranströmer: March 4, 1974

Tomas Tranströmer introduces and reads "Guard Duty" (translated by May Swenson, from Windows and Stones, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), after explaining his Swedish military service obligations, "Seeing Through the Ground" (followed by the poem in Swedish) and "Farther In" (both noted as unpublished translations by Robert Bly), then reads Baltics —"a long poem...not yet finished"— that he indicates is "a sort of documentary poem" that he began when he discovered a logbook kept by his grandfather, a steamer pilot on the Baltic Sea (translated by Sam Charters, to be published by Oyez Press, 1975). The third section, he notes, includes "Mr. B***, my traveling companion, amiable, in exile, / escaped from Robben Island...," who he identifies as South African poet Dennis Brutus. Note: Baltics Parts I-IV are as subsequently published; what he reads as Part V is later published as Part VI, the concluding section of the poem.

After reading Baltics, Tranströmer opens the floor to the audience. Michael Palmer remarks on differences between May Swenson's and Robert Bly's approaches to translation. Tranströmer asks about Charters' translation, to which Robert Duncan replies. Asked of his influences, Tranströmer notes "I started writing at 16 and I started reading at the same time" and that he read, early, Swedish modernist poets of the 1940s. Fraser asks what about poetry did he, when young, not find appealing, and Tranströmer speaks to the regimented ways poetry was taught in school. He notes discovering French poets Reverdy, Eluard, and others, and that Eliot "meant a lot to me" and influenced the long poem Baltics. He relates a conversation with George Oppen "in the car," on his wanting "either very good or very bad" translations: Pasternak, he notes is poorly translated to Swedish, though the experience of reading bad translation offers a lens and "stimulates your own imagination." He notes he's translated, with a Hungarian friend, some work by Hungarian poets. Swedish, he says, has fewer words, many ambiguous "which cover a rather large area." Duncan says that in English "we have to draw words back to their roots." Asked who he's translated from American poets, he notes W. S. Merwin, Bly, James Wright, Bill Knott, and Louis Simpson, and notes the relative ease with which Merwin's work "goes into Swedish," where Robert Creeley, "probably very much inside the American language," feels very abstract in Swedish. He talks of other problems of translation. He notes "I write very little...When something wants to be written." Then he notes the relative cultural presence of poetry in Sweden, Latvia, and Italy.

Tranströmer ends by reading "Snow Melting Time, 1966," "Elegy" (both tr. Bly, and both followed by the Swedish original), and closes with "Along the Lines" (tr. Bly).