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‘The Baltic Sea’, by Tomas Tranströmer (translated, from Swedish, by Robin Robertson)

Posted on by Vaseline
‘The Baltic Sea’, by Tomas Tranströmer (translated, from Swedish, by Robin Robertson)

I first read Tomas Tranströmer in a class taught by the late Lucie Brock-Broido – either the poetry workshop I took with her during my freshman year of college, or her more advanced workshop called Radical Heat, which was organized around a idea that she later wrote about. as “a non-chemical energy transfer with reference to a temperature difference between a system (The Poet) and its environment (The Poem).” Alchemy, autumn and Emily Dickinson were Lucie’s muses. Tranströmer initially seemed to me the opposite of heat, with its frank, even grim lyricism. “Windows and Stones”: His writing maps the movement of thought, how certain distances and cool contemplation can shape a universe. But Lucie knew, and I soon found out, that behind his sometimes closed doors lay burning insights. At that moment, long before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011, his work convinced me.

A reconsideration of our world and its future pervades ‘The Baltic Seas’, Tranströmer’s long poem, here translated by the poet Robin Robertson. In Robertson’s rendition, the poem balances between telegrams and questions – ‘Has he kept a map of the maze in his head?’ – between walks with the dead, overturned gravestones and sea-bound logs. Tranströmer’s poetic seas are a place “where thoughts are constructed with emergency exits, / where a conversation between friends becomes a test of what friendship really means.”

The effect is meditative and moving, an urgent tranquility not always found in the Sturm und Drang that attends both our contemporary poetry and our politics. This is to say that the revelations of ‘The Baltic Seas’ – written and published in Swedish fifty years ago, during the Cold War – remain as sharp as they ever were. “No side is leeward. There is risk everywhere. / As it always was. As it is.” Tranströmer’s stoic yet all-encompassing narrative of history remains radical indeed, as his little epic reminds us of the stakes of war and the national boundaries we draw, even across our warming seas. (And, to quote the inimitable De La Soul, “Stakes Is High.”) His “dry sighs / of huge doors opening and huge doors closing” echoes through the decades.

—Kevin Young

I

This was a time before cell towers.

Grandfather was a pilot and recently got his driver’s license. In his almanac he recorded every vessel he piloted:
his name, destiny, depth.
Some examples from 1884:
Steamer Tiger Captain Rowan 16ft Hull Gefle Furusund
Brig Ocean Captain Andersen 8ft Sandöfjord Hernösand Furusund
Steamer Saint Petersburg Captain Libenberg 11ft Stettin Libau Sandhamn

He took them into the Baltic Sea, through the beautiful labyrinth of islands and water.
And those people who met on board and were transported together for a few hours, a few days,
how well did they get to know each other?
Talking in misspoken English, understanding and misunderstanding, but without real deceit.
How well did they get to know each other?

Thick fog: half speed and almost no visibility. Out of nowhere, the headland rose above them in one big step.
Every other minute a long blast on the fog horn. His eyes read straight through the void.
(Did he keep a map of the maze in his head?)
Minutes passed.
He had those shallow waters and shears sticking out of his head, like the verses of a psalm.
And that feeling of ‘we are here, here‘which you have to hold carefully, as if you were carrying a bucket filled to the brim and you didn’t dare to spill a drop.

A view down into the engine room.
The composite engine, as long-lived as a human heart, works in enormous, tender, pumping movements – gymnastics of steel – and the aromas rise as if from a kitchen.

II

The wind blows through the pine forest. Severely seething; light breathing.
The Baltic Sea also sighs in the middle of the island; deep in the forest you are on the open sea.
The old woman hated that sound in the trees, and she froze with sadness at the rising wind:
‘You have to think of them – there in the boats.’
But she heard something else in the sighing: we both hear it, because we are related.
(We walk together now, even though she’s been dead for thirty years.)
The wind sighs yes and no, understanding and misunderstanding.
The wind sighs three strong children, one consumptive and two disappeared.
The gust of wind that breathes life into some flames blows out others. The conditions.
The wind sighs: Save me, Lord, for the waters have encompassed my soul.
You walk for a long time, listening, and eventually reach a point where the borders open
or rather
when everything becomes a limit. An open space, sunk in darkness. And people stream in from the dimly lit buildings around them. Murmuring.

Another gust of wind, and the place falls empty again, and still does.
A fresh gust of wind, sighing from other shores.
There is talk of war.
It talks about places where citizens are controlled,
where thoughts are constructed with emergency exits,
where a conversation between friends becomes a test of what friendship really means.
So if you’re with someone you don’t know well: control. A little honesty is fine,
as long as you don’t lose sight of what’s happening at the edges of the conversation: that darkness, that dark spot…
it can invade and destroy everything. Don’t let it disappear from your sight.
How are you? A mine?
No, that’s too solid. Almost too peaceful; along our coasts the stories of mines are frightening at first, but they all end happily.
For example, this one from the lightship: “It was the fall of 1915 and we slept uneasily. . .” etc. A contact mine was spotted
floating towards the lightship, diving and rising in the swell, sometimes hidden by a wave, then glimpsed for a moment like a spy in the crowd.
The panicked crew shot at it with guns. Useless. Finally, they set out a boat, tied a long line to the mine and slowly and carefully towed it back to the experts.
Later, the black, pointed, empty shell was displayed in a sand garden as a decoration,
surrounded by Strombus gigaspink shells from the distant West Indies.

And the wind walks through the dry pines beyond, running over the sands of the cemetery,
beyond the leaning stones, the names of the pilots.
The dry sighing
of huge doors opening and huge doors closing.

III

In the half-dark corner of the Gotland Church, in the soft, moldy light,
There is a baptismal font made of sandstone – twelfth century – the name of the stonemason
still there, bright
like a row of teeth in a mass grave:
HEGWALDR
the name is still there. And his scenes
here and on the sides of other ships crowds of figures swarm out of the stone.
The eyes resemble split grains of good and evil.
Herod at the table: the roasted cock flies up and crows “Christus natus est” (the servant is taken out and killed)
while close by the child is born among clustered faces as grave and helpless as young monkeys.
The fleeing footsteps of the pious
echoing over the dragon-scaled mouths of the drains.
(These scenes are strongest in memory than when you are actually there
when the font spins slowly in the mind like a rumbling carousel.)
No side is leeward. There is risk everywhere.
As it always was. As it is.
Peace reigns only within, in the invisible water contained within the vessel.
but outside the battle rages.
Peace can come drop by drop, at night
maybe, if we don’t know anything,
or if we are connected to an IV in a hospital ward.

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