Nothing in an intelligible language - Lars Gustafsson's profession

The first two books of Lars Gustafsson’s that I read were collections, tiny little selections from his work covering a career of twenty years or more.  I read each poem as a poem, but I also read the books like I read novels, like I read Niels Lyhne, scouring them for the little markers that connect one poem to another the way Jacobsen’s flowers and moss pulled distant scenes together.

Or more simply if I do not understand a poem I move to the next one.  Perhaps it will have a clue to the previous poem.

A well-written novel, within my usual sense of “well-written,” has to contain such clues.  A book of poems, especially a selection, has so such obligation.  Individual poems may well be radically dissociated.  Not usually, though.

Thus I discover that Gustafsson is fond of images of flight – birds or balloons or the Wright brothers – and that he loves dogs.  “I don’t know if I like cats. / Dogs are more my sort of animal” (from “Sleeping with a Cat in the Bed”).  And he has not just a poet’s but a philosopher’s interest in language.  In “Of Course Superman Is Clark Kent” Gustafsson describes his early philosophical training in the ideas of W. V. O. Quine “who always  / greeted me so kindly at the tobacconist’s / on Harvard Square,” including their preposterous results (“that Clark Kent is not Superman…  Did we really believe all this / in my youth?”).

A Time in Xanadu (2002, tr. 2008 by John Irons) is the one complete book of Gustafsson’s poems available in English.  It begins with a poem about language:

(Let L be a language
composed as follows:
V is a vocabulary
with words for love, hate, despair,
dreaming and waking, snaps and stinging nettles.  (“Monologue for Some Prince in Denmark”)

Until those snaps and nettles appear this promises to be the worst poem ever written.

In this book, Gustafsson kindly organizes the poems by subject – Reminiscences (mostly about Gustafsson’s Swedish childhood), Philosophies, Everyday Life (like that cat) – which encourages me to read across the poems.  If, for example, I do not get much out of the moldy surreal “Walk through a Dream Landscape,” I at least note “the boats / Tugging at their moorings” at the end of the poem, since they seem to reappear several poems later:

The Tired
The tired old boats
break their moorings in the first autumn gale
and go adrift,
heavy, half waterlogged,
melancholy
and quietly philosophical
until they start to rot away in the reeds

Or I can wonder about a later dream landscape in “I Often Dream Here,” more clearly Swedish, that inspires a cry of “What does his place want of me?”

Whether any of this is intended I do not know.  Do the poems follow a plan or do they spill out of the same place?  “I did not choose this profession.  \ This profession chose me” Gustafsson writes in “The Profession,” where poetry or inspiration is like a radio that is always on.

Not the old set there, you blockheads!
I mean a different one, a so-called “inner” radio
where four or five stations fuse
crackling into noise and interference!
And nothing in an intelligible language!

So the poets job is clear enough.  “Of course Superman is Clark Kent.”  L and V “may grow into a song.”

four words and a fifth which is conjectural - the poems of Lars Gustafsson

Has anyone read the novels of Lars Gustafsson? Anyone who stops by Wuthering Expectations I mean.  New Directions has published a half dozen of them, some with first-rate titles: Funeral Music for Freemasons or The Death of a Beekeeper.  I do not believe I have ever come across an article about Gustafsson or review of his books written by anyone besides Michael Orthofer.

I did stumble across his poetry, which I recently read in bulk and enjoyed quite a bit.  The bulk is not so bulky in English, just three tiny books of 116, 69 and 84 pages, and since these are books of poetry those pages are nearly blank.

Fragment

I’ve always had a liking for fragments.
The shred of papyrus, threadbare, brown
as an autumn leaf in the park in spring.
A philosopher quoted only once,
and then imperfectly, distorted,
by a very grudging patriarch,
who can’t hide the golden glow
issuing from four words and a fifth
which is conjectural.  *

Fans of Sappho and Heraclitus will appreciate that.  Of course I picked a poem with a literary subject.  Gustafsson is himself a philosopher as well as a poet and novelist, and was a longtime professor of philosophy at University of Texas – Austin.  He often writes about his childhood in rural Sweden, but also about Texas, where

there was music in the humidity.  It came from every
street.  Ballads and blues and a special kind of

pensive jazz.  It resembled nothing else I’d heard.
It came from warmer air, smelling of earth.

…

Never again to need my wool mittens,
sleeping like nice kittens in the closet! (“Austin, Texas”) **

Gustafsson frequently uses those unrhymed couplets.  Or maybe they rhyme in the original, although I doubt it.  All of the poetry was translated into English in close collaboration with Gustafsson.  Christopher Middleton notes that some of the “deviations in the English occasionally led to changes in the original” (Stillness, xii).

One more complete poem tonight.

The Stillness of the World Before Bach

There must have been a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor Partita,
but what kind of world?
A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,
everywhere unawakened instruments
where the Musical Offering, the Well-tempered Clavier
never passed across the keys.
Isolated churches
where the soprano line of the Passion
never in helpless love twined round
the gentler movements of the flute,
broad soft landscapes
where nothing breaks the stillness
but old woodcutters’ axes,
the healthy barking of strong dogs in winter
and, like a bell, skates biting into fresh ice;
the swallows whirring through summer air,
the shell resounding at the child’s ear
and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach
the world in a skater’s stillness before Bach. ***

I know, isolating “isolated churches” is almost too cute.

*  From The Stillness of the World Before Bach: New Selected Poems (1988), tr. Christopher Middleton.
**  From Elegies and Other Poems (2000), tr. Yvonne L. Sandstroem.
***  From Stillness, tr. Philip Martin.