grinding to an end at last. Now and then we get a day above freezing, and we have the pleasure of hearing the water gurgle in the gutters and along the roof. Till it freezes again the next day. I’ve sent wife and children off to Stockholm so that Monica can get out a bit, and so she can parasitize her mama, who has quite a lot of money, for a few days. Our shortage of money is comical—toward the end of the month we go around and shake all our old clothes in the hope that a stray coin might fall out. The poetical deadlock has been broken, however, and I’m hard at work on a poem about COMPUTERS—about the world when computers have propagated themselves and taken over completely! At the same time I’m translating “The Hospital Window” by James Dickey and “Three Presidents” by you. Jackson is easy. Roosevelt fairly easy. Kennedy very difficult. What do you really mean by “I ate the Cubans with a straw”? Did he SUCK THEM OUT with a straw (reed)? Did he eat them with chopsticks like a Chinaman? Did he point at them with a straw and hey presto! they were consumed...And in Kennedy, what is meant by “Able to flow past rocks”—I don’t understand it purely in the language sense, either. And then all that about the crystal in the sideboards etc., I would be grateful for a more detailed explanation of that! It’s such a damned splendid poem, and fantastically exciting to translate. 1
I have become culturally active in Västerås through becoming a member of Kulturrådet (The Cultural Council or whatever it would be called in the U.S.). We have strenuous meetings. We aren’t paid, unfortunately, but are invited to dinner once a year by Kulturnamnden (The Culture Department?), which is made up exclusively of the city’s bigwigs, politicians and the like. My debut in that company was unfortunate—I chanced to fall into a deep sleep after the dinner, in the middle of a solemn debate about the problems of the theater. This was observed by the elders, some of whom came up and congratulated me with heavy irony on my good sleep and a woman in the theater business bade me an ice-cold GOOD-NIGHT in a loud voice. I’m thinking about spreading the word that I suffer from a grave and mysterious illness that causes me to fall asleep abruptly.
On Friday I’m going to Lund, the university town in Skåne, to do a poetry reading for the students. The impoverished student union will pay for my lodgings and my publisher for travel expenses. [------]
A note on a note on Ekelöf! It’s accurate except for Part Two, about the proletariat and the aristocratic writing. I read that part with something of the same strange feeling as a Hottentot must have when he reads about himself in a tourist brochure. It’s certainly true that one can speak of a “proletarian writer,” but that would primarily be a novelist (Ivar Lo-Johansson, Jan Fridegård, Vilhelm Moberg) who—especially in the Thirties—published thick, widely read books in a realistic style, with autobiographical stuff from proletarian reality. It’s hardly possible to think of a single equivalent in poetry. The so-called “Five Young Men” (Martinson and Lundkvist, among others) certainly came from working-class or farming backgrounds, but the very two who devoted themselves primarily to poetry quickly took an “intellectual” line. Besides that, “Aristocratic” is misleading—I think you misjudge the number of aristocrats in Sweden and Europe. There aren’t all that many, besides Christina of course. Compare your, and all Americans’, strange interest in our monarch (he’s still reading Ord & Bild ). In U.S. literature as everyone knows, there is a firm division between the COWBOY-SCHOOL (Robert Bly, Erskine Caldwell, Emerson and Carl Sandburg) and the Hollywood-school (Ray Bradbury, Pearl Buck, W. H. Auden and e. e. cummings).
The most recent issue of the Literary Review, to take one example, in which Professor Vowels has invented an entirely new
I have become culturally active in Västerås through becoming a member of Kulturrådet (The Cultural Council or whatever it would be called in the U.S.). We have strenuous meetings. We aren’t paid, unfortunately, but are invited to dinner once a year by Kulturnamnden (The Culture Department?), which is made up exclusively of the city’s bigwigs, politicians and the like. My debut in that company was unfortunate—I chanced to fall into a deep sleep after the dinner, in the middle of a solemn debate about the problems of the theater. This was observed by the elders, some of whom came up and congratulated me with heavy irony on my good sleep and a woman in the theater business bade me an ice-cold GOOD-NIGHT in a loud voice. I’m thinking about spreading the word that I suffer from a grave and mysterious illness that causes me to fall asleep abruptly.
On Friday I’m going to Lund, the university town in Skåne, to do a poetry reading for the students. The impoverished student union will pay for my lodgings and my publisher for travel expenses. [------]
A note on a note on Ekelöf! It’s accurate except for Part Two, about the proletariat and the aristocratic writing. I read that part with something of the same strange feeling as a Hottentot must have when he reads about himself in a tourist brochure. It’s certainly true that one can speak of a “proletarian writer,” but that would primarily be a novelist (Ivar Lo-Johansson, Jan Fridegård, Vilhelm Moberg) who—especially in the Thirties—published thick, widely read books in a realistic style, with autobiographical stuff from proletarian reality. It’s hardly possible to think of a single equivalent in poetry. The so-called “Five Young Men” (Martinson and Lundkvist, among others) certainly came from working-class or farming backgrounds, but the very two who devoted themselves primarily to poetry quickly took an “intellectual” line. Besides that, “Aristocratic” is misleading—I think you misjudge the number of aristocrats in Sweden and Europe. There aren’t all that many, besides Christina of course. Compare your, and all Americans’, strange interest in our monarch (he’s still reading Ord & Bild ). In U.S. literature as everyone knows, there is a firm division between the COWBOY-SCHOOL (Robert Bly, Erskine Caldwell, Emerson and Carl Sandburg) and the Hollywood-school (Ray Bradbury, Pearl Buck, W. H. Auden and e. e. cummings).
The most recent issue of the Literary Review, to take one example, in which Professor Vowels has invented an entirely new
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