[Andrew Frisardi]

Now listen to Death

Now listen to Death
talking about the children.

One played by the rain barrel
Throttled it handily
there where it meekly stirred
It is a shiny little scoop
for cleansing life's sewers
Smiling, I slipped around the corner

One, bloody on the road,
I drank it
A leaky little tub
grief oozing in every direction
My knuckles gleamed wet
I simply shut the gate
to the meadow where filth grazes

Little crybaby, I took it
down by the ditch broad green
My hand snatched
his scream like a fly
Hidden in the grass I watched
sorrow soar like a bonfire of leaves

I'll ride you inside out
goad you wide awake and dew-drenched
Like a squirrel I'll peel
life right out of you
I'll tempt you I'll sleeping-doll you
put on the clothes and I'm your doll
I never close my eyes

I monkey around
peek-a-boo in delirium
I croon a landscape
of helplessness
lightweight fragile insipid tenderness
a flowery scent of fear nausea
grinning on sorrow's windowsill

So tremble sweetly at my bosom
I'll ease away your cramp like a diaper
Watch how I high-step
jerk up your despair like a fish
I'll bell your fear
pale as a midsummer night

I whisper like evening snow
do you hear me do you want me
I'll gladly dance with you.

—Sandro Key-Åberg, from Bittergök (Misanthrope, 1954)

Nu skall du höra

Nu skall du höra
Döden berätta om barnena

Ett lekte vid tunnan
Ströp det behändigt
just som när av blidhet det rördes
Det är en blänkande liten skopa
när jag rensar livets kloak
Jag smet leende runt knuten

Ett blodigt på vägen
Jag drack det
en gisten tina
med vemod läckande åt alla håll
Mina knogar var blänkande våta
Jag stängde bara grinden
till hagen där äcklet betar

Lilla skrikhalsen tog jag
nere vid diket det storgröna
Snappade med handen
till mig hans skrik som en fluga
Dold i gräset såg jag
sorgen flamma upp som en lövbrasa

Jag rider dig snedvänd
hetsar dig vaken och daggvåt
Jag skalar som ekorren
livet fram i dig
jag lockar jag blunddockar dig
du kläder på och jag är din docka
Jag blinkar aldrig

Märker du apan i mig
tittut i din yrsel
Jag sjunger ju
hjälplöshetens landskap
lätt bräckligt med utslätad ömhet
blomdoft i skräcken kväljande
flinar på sorgens fönsterkarm

Så darra vackert vid mitt bröst
Jag drar av dig krampen din som en blöja
Titta min åtbörd
drar upp din förtvivlan som fisk
Jag bjällrar en rädsla
så midsommarvit som natten

Jag viskar som kvällsnö
hör du mig vill du mig
Jag dansar så gärna

—Sandro Key-Åberg


[Crib]

Listen now to Death talking about the children.
One played at the barrel, [i] strangled it handily, just as mildly/meekly/gently stirred. It is a glittering little scoop [I can use] to cleanse life's sewers. I slipped smiling around the corner [of the house] – [hus]knut.
One [lay] bloody on the road. I drank it, a leaky tub [of the kind for watering livestock] with melancholy (tender sadness) leaking in every direction. My knuckles were gleaming wet. All I did was close the gate to the pasture where repulsiveness grazes. (In other words, death is doing the child a favor but not letting him become adult.)
Little loudmouth/screamer/crybaby, I took him down by the ditch, big, green. Snatched with my hand, his scream like [one would] catch a fly. Hidden in the grass, I saw sorrow flame up like a bonfire of leaves.
I'll ride you inside out, goad you awake and dewy/dew-drenched/wet as with dew. Like a squirrel [peels nuts] I'll peel [the kernel of life] right out of you[r shell]. I'll tempt you. I'll [turn you into a] doll that can open and close its eyes. Note; the phrase "du kläder på" is dependent on the context and can be understood in several ways. I interpret it to ambiguously mean both a child is dressed for burial holding death as a doll, and a child dressing a doll and death is the doll. I never blink/wink/close my eyes.
Do you notice how like an ape I am / how I monkey around. [Playing] peek-a-boo in your delirium, giddiness. I am singing a landscape of helplessness. Light (not heavy) easily broken (fragile) with smoothed/bland tenderness sensitivity. The smell of flowers is [mingled] in the [smell of] fear. [It makes one] nauseous. [Death leans/sits] grinning/grimacing on the window sill.
So tremble nicely/sweetly at my breast/bosom. I'll draw off your cramp as one draws off a diaper. Watch my movement [in the danse macabre]. I'll draw forth your despair as one draws a fish [out of the water]. I'll bell your fear [as one bells a cat]. So midsummer white like night (in other words, pale as the white nights of Scandinavian midsummer]
I whisper like evening snow. Do you hear me. Do you want me/ desire me. I'll gladly/with pleasure dance with you.

[Andrew Frisardi]

I was skeptical at first about this poem, since any piece of writing so unremittingly gloomy usually makes me feel I’m being preached to. (What did Yeats say? something about poetry’s needing to have some buoyancy?) But the translation won me over with its compression and surprises—“I’ll sleeping-doll you” for instance—and its effectively communicated sense of horror.

Using the excellent crib (for which, thanks), I was able to spot the translator’s resourcefulness in coming up with equivalents in English that didn’t necessarily adhere to the letter. For instance, “All I did was close the gate to the pasture where repulsiveness grazes” is brought over as “I simply shut the gate / to the meadow where filth grazes.” The Swedish, so far as I can make out, is similarly terse, which seems right for Death’s well-known tendency to be laconic.

I mentioned the striking phrase “sleeping-doll you,” and another thing I like about that passage of the translation is that it preserves the sense of ambiguity that’s glossed in the crib. Nice work there, though I wonder about “close my eyes”: for “Jag blinkar aldrig” a simple “I never blink” might be worth considering as a way to imitate the two beats (I think) in the original as well as the double sense of Death having no fear, as everyone does of him.

A couple of other questions I had: “there where” in the second stanza has a different sense from “just as,” which is in the crib and is much crueler: no sooner does the child meekly stir than Death strikes. The squirrel in stanza 5 “peels” the nut, which seemed like an odd verb to use for taking a shell off a nut: how about “Like a squirrel I’ll shell / life right out of you” (again, a double meaning which seems apt for the poem as a whole).

And lastly, in the next stanza Death is grinning on “sorrow’s windowsill” instead of just the windowsill. Just plain “windowsill” would be more horrible and stark.

A meta-observation. I mentioned in the Desbordes-Valmore thread that a common recent approach to translating poetry from former periods whose sensibility was very different from our own is to make the poetic structure spikier, more jagged, less symmetrical: i.e., postmodern-ish. For a poem such as this one by Key-Åberg obviously this isn’t an issue; we’re in more or less home territory and no one would consider taking these lines and making a Petrarchan sonnet out of them—or at least, they probably wouldn’t think of such a version as an accurate or faithful reflection of Key-Åberg’s poem. Half the point of this sort of poem is its fractured texture, which is intended in part to reflect the fracturing of sensibility in the wake of twentieth-century horrors. Besides the compression I have already mentioned—the staccato and disjointed statements—a key aspect of this would be the syntax of the original: what parts of it follows the expectations of idiomatic speech and what parts of it confound those expectations. Unfortunately this is an aspect I have no access to, and here is where a reader with native or near-native fluency in the language can read right into the designer-raggedy seams of the piece. I’ll be curious as to what the Scandanavian contingent might say about it.

[Maryann Corbett]

The poem in English is certainly chilling. Knowing next to nothing about the language of the original, I'm still curious about a superficial feature: the complete absence of punctuation in the original poem. Doing without punctuation adds--or so it seems to me--to the brutal spareness of the original. It looks as though the translator tried hard to match that feature most of the time but gave in to a desire for clarity in a few spots. I wonder if it's possible to achieve clarity any other way.

[Edward Zuk]

What an unnerving poem! Not knowing the poet at all, I wonder if there is much here beyond the desire to shock. I couldn't figure out why the poet had tackled his subject in this way from either the translation or the crib, so I assume that I'm missing some important context here.

Like Maryann, I'd wondered about the punctuation. I don't know that the two periods add much to the poem.

I'll let others sort through the individual passages. I find it hard to focus too closely on the imagery due to the subject matter.

[Don Jones]

… any piece of writing so unremittingly gloomy usually makes me feel I’m being preached to.

Certainly, Andrew didn’t lay down his statement, given above, against this poem. He found the translated poem an exception to this kind of judgment.

And we all know how easy it is to pick on religious verse and its preachy qualities, where hope is always around the corner no matter how hard things get.

Here, we have a poetry of something close to nihilism. If I had written and published such a thing I might have trouble sleeping at night.

On the other hand, do we really need to have poetry rehearse our virtues? Perhaps. But not without unremittingly acknowledging the underbelly of life and the death of children (e.g. Kindertotenlieder).

This poem also disturbed me but, being poetry, it gave me a tonic of realism, the barbarism that is also a big part of life and its innumerable cruelties. Why not face up to them?

Yet, to what degree is such a poem real and honest rather than puerile and indecent? It’s a line that's easy to cross. These rhetorical questions have no business being answered here but, even on the translation board, we can still speak of a poem as a poem and of its implications, and not only in terms of it as a translation. It is my favorite poem thus far on the TB thread. Yes, Petrarch and the Psalms are great poetry, but I really respond to a healthy splash of cold, cruel secular realism. Call it what you will. I mean, where is God in this poem?

The frenetic high pitch of this kind of unrelenting stare into the abyss is found in Plath. The antidote is Wilbur.

I appreciate the translator sharing this author with us. The poem woke me up a lot faster than my coffee did this morning when I first read it. Thank you.

One played by the rain barrel
Throttled it handily
there where it meekly stirred
It is a shiny little scoop
for cleansing life's sewers
Smiling, I slipped around the corner

The child becomes an “it” (“Throttled it handily”) just as genocidal murderers perceive their victim as an “it” and reduce them to an “it.” (BTW: I'm not saying this is a poem about genocide but its gruesomeness lends much to the imagination).

The cliché of death is with the scythe and black hooded cloak. Now, via this poem, it could be a child predator. Death is personified as human in this poem (“handily” or “behändigt”). That makes Death a lot more creepy. No wonder more kindly sorts turn away their heads.

Now how does this sepsis relate to poetry? For one, we can assert that there might not be any subject that can’t be treated by poetry. Then, there is the counter-factual assertion about poetry’s limits, its boundaries, even to the point of poetry's extinction:

The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today, once wrote Adorno. That is, of course, ridiculous.

Sandro Key-Åberg knows this and has the courage to proceed.

Little crybaby, I took it
down by the ditch broad green
My hand snatched
his scream like a fly
Hidden in the grass I watched
sorrow soar like a bonfire of leaves

There's that hand again. Broad green is heart-breaking because it is a beautiful day. Yet nature is no refuge. Only a grave.

Unforgettable and no punches pulled.

Without access to Swedish I have nothing concrete on offer via translation. However, as English there is, as already pointed out, Like a squirrel I'll peel. It is awkward.

Here’s something on the subject:

Teeth: 22 teeth. Incisors feature a hard layer of enamel that keeps teeth sharp. All food is bitten or shredded with incisors, and molars are use to grind the food. (http://lewand.tripod.com/sqbio.html).

Peel could be skin (the verb) but that, too, would just as unnecessarily anthropomorphize the critter. Yet the factual claim would have the animal bite into and rip open, as Death does to children. If peel for some reason works in Swedish, I don’t think it works in English. How about Like a squirrel I’ll open up/bite into, etc.?

Glad to learn of this disturbing poet.

Don

[Birthe Myers]

What a peculiar and frightening poem – dying children, indeed. It starts out so callously with death’s bragging of the ease with which he dispatches little ones, but he also bells fear, eases cramp, and removes despair - by bringing death. The children who die are spared the ‘filth’ of adulthood.
Death is a buffoon, a monkey, a dolly. The most poignant part to me is the nauseating flower smell mixed in with fear and grief

[Spindleshanks]

The difficulty I have with this is judging it on its merits as a translation. The poem itself, in my view, has no redeeming features. It's horrible. But that's not to say that the translator hasn't achieved a successful translation. I don't know, having no familiarity with the language. But I suspect it is well wrought; the excellent crib would suggest so.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I need to think more before commenting this, but I am reminded of Sophocles.

There is no wedding song or dance in death
but Hades' emptiness and end of breath.
Never to be born is best for man,
and next, in haste return to whence he came.

Also Baudelaire.

I may be wrong. I don't think it is as simple as it seems at first read.

[Andrew Frisardi]

I agree with Don (see post #5). From a certain perspective, not unfamiliar to us, life is hell and people are not very nice. What's wrong with a poem being about that? Peter, why is the poem "simply horrible"? I take it you mean its subject matter, but why would this subject matter make this a bad poem?

Poetry should tell a truth in some way, and that this poem tells a painful truth is hard to deny. For me, "nihilism" doesn't have to be a general philosophy; it is a state of mind that has real consequences. This poem is about that. It's limited in scope, for sure, but it forces us to look at the underbelly as Don says. That's a worthwhile thing to do.

Whether it's good technically or not is another question. The translation is well on its way to being a strong poem, I think.

[Spindleshanks]

Yes, Andrew, the subject matter as represented by the poem. It may not apply to the poetry. I should have made that clearer. The poem may be masterful poetry—again, the language barrier prevents me from making that assessment, as I have stated—but I find its cavalier flaunting of evil repelling, just as I would find in a rock spider’s blow-by-blow graphic of child sexual abuse, no matter how artistically presented. If I can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s because the thicket is overwhelmingly gloomy.
Don says: This poem also disturbed me but, being poetry, it gave me a tonic of realism, the barbarism that is also a big part of life and its innumerable cruelties. Why not face up to them?
We are forced to do so every day, Don. My question is, why should I gratuitously choose to do so?
Of course there is a market for this type of confrontational assault on the senses, just as there are cult devotees of Freddie Krueger; to each his own. For me, it’s horrible, which appellation may or may not apply to the poetry, as stated, though I’m not personally drawn to the style, content aside.

Peter