Exerpts from my translation into English of Lennart Sjögren’s latest poem Kalla mig Noa , Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 2014.

Call me Noah

or any other name

I met the great flood

I survived.

After the water’s annihilating power

names lack meaning

names you wear for stability’s sake.

Aimless I try to remember

I gather sticks for a building

everything is sticks

compared to the flood and the flood time.

The rain came, how long it lasted I don’t know

forty days and forty nights it’s been said

it could have been more.

Little by little it washed away

what we had built

at last it carried away the trees and the soil.

Our city lay close to the river

boats went away, boats came

we engaged a great deal in trade

sails surrounded us.

I owned a boat, therefore I was saved

a river boat it was

broad and built to carry cargo.

When the rain came, and it came again

a few of us gathered

we foretold

as it’s said that animals can foretell.

Others didn’t gather

they thought the gods would save us

they thought the rain came from the gods.

All we had was our eyes

we saw how the water rose

and it rose again

we gathered, we prepared.

After all, we were many that foretold

we were many that owned boats

I was the one who survived

we ought to have been more.

How the water filled the streets

filled the plains, turned into sea

those who could fled up toward the hills

the water caught up with them

fled toward the mountains, where the water also went.

The difference:

those who couldn’t flee

met death a couple days earlier.

Those of us that had boats

escaped the first death

the second death reached us

when the boats foundered.

The trees’ torn-off trunks

turned into rafts

those who traveled with them

soon lost the grip.

The flood’s meal was huge.

The rain turned the days into grey night

the nights became the cellars of the drowned

the stars disappeared

and with them the cardinal points.

Then I was still young

I brought with me

the woman I loved most

our three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.

Two daughters I’d had

the first-born

that death took, three years old,

the other

more beautiful than any

wasn’t allowed to live when the plague came

and a son between Shem and Ham

who was stillborn

and spared from wearing a name.

A couple of animals and doves

we also brought with us.

We still believed in a return

that life would be possible.

That our boat didn’t founder

I count among the enigmas.

It wasn’t better built than many others.

Who threw that die

I don’t know.

Much later a belief appeared

that I had spoken to the gods

and therefore had been saved.

I was taught that beliefs

can be dangerous to offend against

when many believe in them.

How silent the night became

when the drowned began to seek us

some with faces turned upwards

but mostly downwards

as if the depth

might reveal a truth

but I don’t believe they sought truth

terror seeks no truth.

Water was getting scarce

we gathered from the rain

but some drank from the river.

The rain gave us the mould

it gave us the rancid food

food that carried death within itself.

Den siste Göteborgskoloristen Lars Larson

I ett tidigare inlägg har jag skildrat hur den framstående konstnären Martin Åberg i våra dagar helt har fallit i glömska och hur hans verk slumpas bort för spottstyvrar på auktioner. Lika ledsamt är att kännedom om konstnärer verksamma i Skåne sällan når norr om Hallandsåsen. Jag vill här illustrera detta med en runa som jag den 15 juli 1993 publicerade i Svenska Dagbladet.

”Konstnären Lars Larson avled under en kvällspromenad tillsammans med sin hustru Sonja ovanför Villa Strandhem i Arild, som i tjugofyra år tjänade som deras sommarbostad. LL (så signerade han sina tavlor) förunnades inte att ännu en gång få uppleva augustiljuset över Skälderviken och Arilds hamn.

LL, som var 77 år och bodde i Höganäs, föddes i Göteborg 1915. Han studerade under Pär Siegård (1934) och på Valands Målarskola (1938-43), med Nils Nilsson som lärare. Han utställde separat i Stockholm (Modern konst i hemmiljö 1947; Färg och Form 1981 och 1986), Göteborg (Galleri Aveny 1949, 1953, 1975), Malmö (Galerie Holm 1971,1973), Höganäs Museum (1969, 1978) och Uppsala (Kavaletten 1981). Han finns representerad på bland andra Nationalmuseum, Göteborgs Konstmuseum och Malmö Museum.

Hans närmaste är förutom hustrun Sonja, dottern Eva Birgitta Mattson med make Staffan och sonen Anders samt brodern Per Lanmark, Nyhamnsläge.

*

Bättre än kanske någon annan har Sven Delblanc förmått tolka Lars Larsons egenart som konstnär. I en essä som publicerades inför utställningen i Uppsala 1981, skrev Delblanc bl a följande. ’Egentligen är han den siste Göteborgskoloristen. Man behöver inte gå till biografiska data, en blick på hans dukar är nog för att slå fast samhörighet och tradition. Men han tillhörde alltså den siste koloristen på Valand, hans lärare var Nils Nilsson, hans äldre kamrater var nu glorifierade och högt värderade målare som Sandberg, Ivarsson, Schiöler. Möjligen bör man hålla i minnet, att det bara var tio år sedan Schiöler var nästan bortglömd och inte alls noterad på den kommersiella börsen. Reflexionerna gör sig själva …

I den hysteriska originalitetens namn hävdade man ett beroende av Kylberg, som på sin höjd var ytligt, motiviskt, variationer på ett givet tema, Lars Larson står fri från det nästan oroande spekulativa hos Kylberg, han är i grunden en sekulär mystiker. Här finns inga andra gudamakter än solen, och ljuset är dess manifestation. Man kan få i tankarna en annan ’ohelig’ mystiker, Gunnar Ekelöf, han som också trodde på skapelsens och de döda tingens egenliv. Lugn i vissheten om sin egenart kunde Larson variera motiv man tyckte sig minnas från Kylberg ─de bar ändå hans eget signum. Med hans egna ord: ’Att skilja tillfälligheterna från det varaktiga kräver ett ständigt aktgivande.’”

Lars Larson värnade sin integritet och hade inget till övers för dem som försökte gena mot målet. Hans stillsamma och underfundiga humor kunde stundom bytas i bitsk satir mot konstnärer som enligt hans mening förrådde sig själva i en strävan att göra andra till lags. Mig påminner Lars Larson om de forntida kinesiska konstnärer som hellre vistades fjärran från hovet än de underkastade sig de kejserliga smakdomarna. 

The second instalment of my translation into English of Kjell Espmark’s poem Den inre rymden (The Inner Space)

I’ve been granted permission to search the house

and kick in the door of the villa

where for eighty years my parents

have quarreled about money.

I demand to know with what right

they decouple the laws of nature

and make a grim joke out of trust─

they quarrel so like the Olympian gods,

with mortals as their weapons.

But my parents, failing to understand, stare

at their inexplicably aged son

with a quivering permit in his hand.

And then throw themselves back into the quarrel

without seeing how the sharp words

are about to rough two human lives.

Was I a farmer’s youngest son

ineligible to receive any land

and therefore set to become a priest?

If so, I failed my father and his faith.

I might have become a dentist.

I have had a couple of German years

that yielded sympathy for Hitler’s Reich,

so I understand the eternity to which I am condemned:

this starved murmuring from the camp barracks.

My children have clearly disassociated themselves.

Two wives are there, as faint echoes,

the one is crying and martyrdom,

the other sarcasms and beatings.

I defend my only real memory─

an evening among silent mountains

a fragrance of bogmyrtle and cloudberry mire.

Above me a mute loon.

Let’s now examine an early picture.

The light in the room facing the lake is so strong

that the boys are translucent.

The birthday child is invisible─

my eye cannot perceive its frame. 

The truck, made as a fourth birthday present,

is enormous and black as fate itself.

It carries whoever dares to ride on its bed

into another future than the expected.

It’s here somewhere it will happen any moment now.

Every detail must be documented!

And the fingerprints on the doorhandles

must be carefully brushed into visibility.

I believe I was unwelcome in this life,

only temporarily married into reality.

What I remember are the chisel cuts of fear

to be forced to harm my boys,

the very ones who would revenge me.

I probably nourished them with my self-contempt

But yet I raised them to jobs with a status.

If only their eyes hadn’t become

critical flakes

of the same blackish stone as my own!

Even here I’m unwelcome,

in this land of silence and fumbling shadows.

My attempts to get out of this heritage of stone

and at last reach my boys with tenderness

scare the other frozen ones down here.

How could the sky above Strömsund

one Spring day in 1934

suddenly be laced with cracks

and an ice-blue sheet of it fall down

and shatter to pieces over the roofs?

Equally incomprehensible is my name

which my parents quarreled about, resulting in

what has proved invalid abroad.

They did however agree on a face

that could attract misunderstanding─

already at the age of eight

I was condemned to a future prison.

The childhood they thoughtlessly forced upon me

spread cracks through my later life.

Extracts from my translation into English of Kjell Espmark’s poetry collection Den inre rymden, Norstedts, 2014

The Inner Space I

It’s hazy, like the dawn of time.

Across the fjord a freezing text rushes,

ripple upon ripple.

What might be a heron

tests its wings and takes flight. The promise

of leaves in the crowns of the trees is fulfilled.

And I rise slowly

from the shrunken man on the bench.

It’s time to invent the world.

Like when you clambered out of the pool

on treacherous knees one Friday,

testing the tiles with your foot

and sniggering with what remained of your lips

you shuffle now out of Mother Sea

carefully up among the seacliffs,

an armoured shark that breathes, amazed,

and stretches itself into hands and feet.

You may join in a new attempt

to realize the grand scheme.

Your head is full of memories

of all that is yet to happen.

I’m back in Leukas

and stand by the entrance to the Underworld,

a cleft hidden by thorny shrubs.

The footprints that took me here remain in the sand!

But this time I see something other

than the starting point for a second life.

It is here the Western world is said to begin.

The sea which is but a dazzling sun

hides the ships on their way through the centuries.

The darkness streaming out of the entrance to Hades

presses forth a philosophy.

And the crag Sappho shall throw herself off

elicits the vertigo in her poems.

When we walk up through the brushwood 

along what will be known as Ström’s watery vale

to find a height for our village

our steps still retain

our first steps across the savanna.

My clan memory reveals a touch of myth.

In that memory, the wife is standing at the strait, 

with the king’s pardon in her hand.

Her feet bleeding from the barefoot walk

from Stockholm all the way to Red Isle.

Her love believes it has saved her husband

from block and wheel.

But no boat is to be found on her shore,

everybody wanted to get across to see

how he fares who paid tribute to a losing king.

And so she has to stand on this side

and watch from afar her husband’s head fall.

It’s here the story seems improved 

in order to incise the helplessness of love

for grey cottages and consumptive youngsters 

and impress on them

the language of clenched teeth.

Three hundred years I have searched for proof.

The wife is still screaming in the laundry hut,

alone with the fire. The door is locked

by a crossbar─put there on purpose

or dropped in place by chance?

The farmer, firelight still in his beard,

was acquitted by the court.

But the suspicion remains. As prosecutor

I zealously search through later years

for the descendent the farmer is hiding in.

I wait for you to make a wrong move

that reveals his guilt.

In an outhouse on Listarum Slopes

with chisel and hammer Jakob Roos

stands and carves out an Assyrian lion.

His skill runs through two generations 

to me as I sculpt my text.

The vault of heaven in Komstad marble

bears traces of his chisel.

The blackbird’s song is sensually carved

and surrounded by a billowing foliage of stone.

I have pondered over the great comet

that remained so long in the sky last year.

Was it the comet that stole little Märit away?

It can’t very well have been a punishment,

since I’ve nothing to regret.

And every night I read in the brown book

that contains all human knowledge.

In that way I fulfill my duty to prepare

my unborn grandchildren who will take over

in the real university of life.

One day, when I leave my farmer’s body

and float away above the Hotag montains

neither sins nor negligence ought to weigh heavily.

I only fear that the last day

may not be allowed to call itself Justice.