Song — Web Exclusive
By Tomas Tranströmer
Translated by Robert Hass
The white flock swelled: the swarms of gulls cried out,
Dressed in the ragged sailcloth of dead ships
But speckled from the smokes of outlawed coasts.
Alarm! Alarm! There's something overboard!
They crowded tight to form a signal flag
That fluttering read Look sharp! There's booty here
And the gulls steered across the water-widths,
Across blue pastures in the waves white foam
A streak of phosphor gone straightway to the sun.
But in his ancient journeys Vainamoinen
Sparkles on sea-swells in the ancient light,
The horses' hooves so swift they're hardly net.
And back of him: the green forest of his songs,
The oak tree poised to leap a thousand years,
A great mill turned by the singing of the birds.
And every tree imprisoned in its own roar,
With immense pinecones glimmering in moonlight,
When the sentinel pine was lit up like a lighthouse.
It's then the Other rises with his galdar;
The arrow springs wide from the bon, sees
With song in its feathers like a flight of birds.
A dead second when the horse abruptly stiffens,
And breaks up over the blue-grey waterline
Like storm-clouds under thunder's quick antennae.
And Vainamoinen heales into the sea
(A fireman's net the compass points stretch out).
Alarm! Alarm! The gulls swarming where he fell.
So too the man who stands without anxiety
Bewitched at the center of his fortune's wheel
With his eleven grain-sheaves gold and bowing.
The alpine peak of Trust humming in the ether,
Three thousand meters up where the clouds are holding
A regatta. Sleek and well-fed the shark wallows
All silent laughter dowm here, under the sea's surface
(Death and rebirth trading places in the breaking wave),
And the wind cycles peacefully through the leaves.
Then drums, then, on the horizon muffled thunder,
(A buffalo herd racing from a prairie fire)
The shadow of a fist tightens in a tree
And the man at the center of his fortune's wheel,
Bewitched there, is thrown down. And the heavens
Glow behind a wild boar's mask of evening sky.
His twin, his Doppelgänger, has grown jealous
And makes a secret pact now with his woman
And the shadow gathers itself, becomes a wave.
A wave in flood, dark, gulls riding aslant
The foam and the port-heart hissing in the crest.
Death and rebirth trade places in the breaking wave
The white flock swelled the swarm of gulls cry out
Dressed in the ragged sailcloth of dead ships
But speckled with the smoke of outlawed coasts.
The gray gull is a velvet-backed harpoon.
Up close, it looks like a snow-covered hull
With a pulse keeping time to a hidden beat.
His flyer's nerves in balance. He lifts and wafts.
He dreams, footloose, hanging in a heavy wind,
His hunter's dream, his certain marksman's beak.
Greed blossoming, he falls gently to the surf
And wriggles around his prey like a gray sock
Twitching. Then lifts again, all sky, all spirit.
(Rebirth is power's context, its blind métier,
more mysterious than the eel's migrations.
An invisible tree in blossom. And as the seal
In its fathoms' deep sleep rises gliding
To the ocean's surface, takes a shuddering breath
And dives, still sleeping, to the bottom,
So now has the Slumberer inside me secretly
Joined himself with it, and gone, while I stood
Here with my gaze fastened on something else).
And the diesel engine throbbing in the swarm,
Past the dark skerry, past the rock-crevices of birds
Where hunger's blossoms is the gaping mouths.
You could still hear them as the dark came on:
An undeveloped music, like the sound
The orchestra makes before the piece begins.
But on his ancient sea Vainomoinen drifted,
Shaken in the sea's pincers or sprawling
In the mirror's stilled solution where the birds
Are enlarged. And from a waste-seed, very far
From land, at the sea's end, from the heave of waves
From the banks of shrouded sea-mist it shot up:
An immense tree with scaly bark and leaves
Completely transparent, crystalline, and behind them
The billowing white sails of distant suns
Glided forward in a trance. And already taking off an eagle.
Tomas Transtömer is a Swedish writer, poet, and translator, whose poetry has been translated into over 60 languages. Tranströmer is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since the Second World War. Critics have praised Tranströmer’s poems for their accessibility, even in translation. His work is also characterized by a sense of mystery and wonder underlying the routine of everyday life, a quality which often gives his poems a religious dimension. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Robert Hass is an American poet who served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He received his MA and Ph.D. in English from Stanford University. From 1995-1997, during Hass's two terms as the U.S. Poet Laureate (Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress), he became a champion of literacy, poetry, and ecological awareness. He serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is a trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and works actively for literacy and the environment. He was awarded the 2007 National Book Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Time and Materials.