2 am. Moonlight. Train stopped
\nin the middle of a field, cold city lights
\nflickering on the far brink of sight.<\/p>\n
As if someone has sunk so deep into dream
\nshe’ll never remember she was there
\nonce she gets back to her room.<\/p>\n
Or somewhere someone has slipped so deep
\ninto sickness that his days all become a flickering
\nswarm of points scattered thin on the brink of sight.<\/p>\n
The train stands utterly still.
\n2 am. Stark moonlight. Few stars.<\/p>\n
*** P\u00e5 natten klockan tv\u00e5: m\u00e5nsken. T\u00e5get har stannat Som n\u00e4r en m\u00e4nniska g\u00e5tt in i en dr\u00f6m s\u00e5 djupt Och som n\u00e4r n\u00e5gon g\u00e5tt in i en sjukdom s\u00e5 djupt T\u00e5get st\u00e5r fullkomligt stilla, *** So I tracked down some \u00a0Swedish textbooks and ordered a bilingual Kindle edition of twentieth-century poetry, in which I found this poem, which was speaking to me as I decrypted it word by word. It felt as if I were plumbing depths. A key word in the poem is in fact\u00a0<\/em>djupt, deep<\/em>.<\/p>\n Deftly, Transtr\u00f6mer equates depth with distance, referring in the same breath to <\/em>djupt and to <\/em>synranden, the rim or orbit of sight, the horizon. We are lucky in English to have <\/em>brink to join the two ideas.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Others have translated <\/em>sp\u00e5r as tracks, because of the train, or maybe the sense of horizonality we get from English <\/em>spar. But\u00a0<\/em>sp\u00e5r can also mean trace, as in German <\/em>Spur. And tracks can also be traces.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I am sure that professional translators will\u00a0find flaws in my version, which fell together in front of my eyes within an hour or two of work, work which felt like inspiration, and therefore was not work.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nFrom Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer,\u00a0Sp\u00e5r<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nmitt ute p\u00e5 sl\u00e4tten. L\u00e5ngt borta ljuspunkter i en stad,
\nflimrande kallt vid synranden.<\/i><\/p>\n
\natt hon aldrig ska minnas att hon var d\u00e4r
\nn\u00e4r hon \u00e5terv\u00e4nder till sitt rum.<\/i><\/p>\n
\natt allt som var hans dagar blir n\u00e5gra flimrande punkter,
\nen sv\u00e4rm, kall och ringa vid synranden.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nKlockan tv\u00e5: starkt m\u00e5nsken, f\u00e5 stj\u00e4rnor.<\/i><\/p>\n
\nI don’t have much use for the Nobel Prize in Literature, so when Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer won it a few years ago, I took no more than a cursory look at his poems. What brought me back was the<\/em> Nordic noir\u00a0TV series <\/em>Wallander in its\u00a0subtitled Swedish version. \u00a0The more I attended to the Swedish the more I was lulled\u00a0by waves of cognitive dissonance, as if I were hearing English coming up out of what the Maya call a <\/em>cenote, a well from which occult messages — well, they well up. <\/em><\/p>\n