William JaySmith's translationofBerlin: theCityand theCourt by Jules Laforguewill be published inJulyby theTurtlePoint Press.

Smith has
poems forthcominginTheNew Criterionand The Yale Review.These poems are fromThe Forest ofChildhood:Poems fromSweden, edited by
William Jay Smith and Leif Sj?berg, forthcoming inOctober from New Rivers Press.

LeifSj?berg is theco-translator,withWilliam JaySmith,ofAgadir byArturLundkvist,published by the International

PoetryForum,Byblos
Editions II in1979;and Wild Bouquet NaturePoems by HarryMartinson,published byBkmkPress in1985.

Swedish Poets
Eight

from The Forest of Childhood:

Poems from Sweden

translated William Smith

by Jay
and Leif
Sj?berg
Drill at Nathanya
As strange as itwould be to encounter a five-legged zebra on the street
was it to see in the park at Nathanya, the new city on the coast of Israel,
that man in his elegant khaki-colored suit with the camera on his chest,

halting at every tenth step that he took, clicking his heels and bellowing
some commands inGerman, while his right arm, like a semaphore, struck
out in a salute, fatally reminiscent of the one that at one time was pre
scribed in the country that thought itself solidly established for a thousand

years. One, two, three . . . ten steps, then, click?he stood at attention and
roared out a corporal's commands. It was not long before with your inner

eye you saw him with his exterior completely transformed: itwas no longer
in a khaki-colored suit that he drilled but in the striped rags of the concen
tration camp; and behind the unfortunate figure rose the smoke from the
chimneys of the gas ovens, thick and black against the ash-gray heavens.

HARRY MARTINSON:
Harry Martinson (1904-1978) is considered one of the foremost nature poets of Sweden.
His years at sea as a deckhand became a source of much of his subject matter in
books such as Cape Farewell (1934);FloweringNettle (1935);Passad (TradeWinds, 1945);
and his epic poem Aniara (1956). In1974he shared theNobel Prize forliterature
with
Eyvind Johnson.

Winter Piece
Delicate ermine tracks
cross lightly
William JaySmith: photo by RobertTurney
in eights on the winter snow
there where a hidden ice-brook with its white fur roof
winds forward,

JOHANNES EDFELT: there where

a rippling bowl,
the swirling water had scooped out

Johannes Edfelt (1904- ) is a poet, translator, and essayist. He has been a member of
theSwedish Academy since 1968,and served on itsNobel Committee from1974 to 1989. the otter drinks from the ice-eye.
His poems fromsix decades are collected inEkolodning (Echo Sounding). In1989, When the children in red woolen caps come
Bonniers published Folieslagare (Companions), an anthology of his translations of poets
such as H?derlin, Rilke, Baudelaire, Yeats, and Whitman.
to hear the singing of this polar roof,
the otter digs into his cave

Closing Down theRailroad and watches their eyes through chinks in the ice.

The sleepers of the narrow-gauge

rails and railroad are long gone. The
embankment will soon be overgrown with common plantain, dandelion,
bindweed and pigweed; and anything more redundant than the aban The Henhouse
doned station house and the railway signal, that one-armed spectre, is The hens, arriving early from the day's pickings,
hard to imagine. The last handcar stands in a shed on its three wheels col circle a few times around the henhouse floor

lecting a layer of dust; the station-master's whistle is rusting in a corner, and arrange themselves in the current pecking order.
and ifyou could hear the weeds grow, you could also hear the moth gorge Only when this ismade clear
itself on the once flamboyant signal flag, now in a closet and unused for do they leap up to the roost.

many years. Soon they're all seated in rows around the rooster.

JULY/
AUGUST 1996 PAGE 41

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He makes a stab or two at sleeping to suck giant squid from the caverns of the deep,

but there will be no sleep for a while. and a mad man with breakers around his forehead?

The hens fuss and shove. aboard a death-ship rattling with dry laurel?
them down. O love deep-sunken like a white tombstone
With peck and cawkle, he must quiet
Then there is a shifting and settling: or like a sail unfurling its unwritten poem!
one of the hens tries to remember the latest
worm she caught, II

but the memory is already fading,

Boots by the teeth of wild beasts,
marked
on its way down her crop.
teeth that had killed a stag beside the ruin,
Another hen, on the edge of sleep, recalling clearly
river disappearing forever into the mountain and
the rooster's prowess, rolls her eyes heavenward,
skin goose-pimpled under the tattooer's gaze:
her fluttering eyelids shutting out the world.
a man with his umbilical cord in the sea, in quest of

the stone of reality,

Tussock threatened by the whale-oil-barrel pulpit, and weighed down by

a petrified maternal bosom.
The tussock soaks up the sun
and quietly and slowly expels Oh, to live on beloved comrades' flesh salted by
shipwrecked,
the frost from its earth-body. sea water,

It spurs on its growth with spring sighs of accumulated warmth. and then to be punished by rescue on a deserted island with
The tongues and edges of the nearest snowdrifts pepper-grass and sickening eggs,
shrink visibly in the spring gale. thrown out into his endless memory of oceans, lured by
The drippings from the roof begin to mark time in the barrel. merciless distances and hurricanes,
where man was doomed to hang fluttering from mast or tentpole,

worn to a rag by the wind,

Peonies and more enslaved over nature!
more by victories
Summer grew, broadened out;
Outside of time, cleft between dark and light, with the
thickened into positive clumps.
Dark-red farm peonies in the rain. salt-throb of the ocean in his blood,
bulged
she came by, he was the ocean rider, helpless on land like the albatross,
When they opened their firm-knotted rag balls,
the lusty queen. his wings uselessly trailing,
a harpooner on the lookout for original roots and original sin,
She looked for heavy bouquets,
Leviathan of beginnings,
luxuriant repasts for the senses.
hunting whales breathing in the sea with lungs like blood-surging
The greenery was wet. Life-wet was the summer-saga:
forests,
She had prepared only for life, not for autumn.
to dark and depth but forced always to return to light
Deep in her flesh defiantly she knew relegated
that in time Death would wave to her and air.

with his banner of hay. a Greek a dark-skinned

His was love, nowhere domiciled, wayfarer
with coils of wet greenery around his limbs,
his truth was his dream madness, a crying voice
impossibility,
from the fellowship of the damned:

ARTUR LUNDKVIST: a dove seized by rage, oblivious of fear, and everything

Artur Lundkvist was a short story writer, novelist, essayist, translator, and magnified as at sunset,
(1906-1991)
in
poet. His book G/?d,published in1928,established himas thestrongest force Swedish an ocean rider who cursed fire,with the white scar carved
modernistpoetry. In1991,FourWalls EightWindows published his book Journeysin
and Annika with an by lightning's thrust along his body,
Dream and Imagination (translated by Ann B. Weissmann Planck,
introduction by Carlos Fuentes).
rebelling against the elements, against the fatherhood of nature,
the god of snow, being all powerful on its throne of skeletons,

Melville, America in a battle against the mountain of white myth, against the

i slavery which left his hunger unsatiated, cannibalistic,

an outcast among his sons, in fear of drowning, his sex eaten
He had spent his youth at sea, had read
by fish.
the ocean's books, leafed through islands' leaves, waded
the world's navel, racing over the ocean, his life
through the whale's brain, felt the heat of love's cheek. Circling
The sails breathed in his chest like albatross wings existed before birth, not beyond death,
but he gave in to the pressure, the traitor within him, the grafted
while he lived shut up in a house amid stifling trees?
with a woman as tough as a beached boat dread, the soured mother's milk,

in a landlocked love without waves or depths. he betrayed his damnation, lost his truth, his ocean, his

His darkened before the red eye of the night lamp, darkness and his struggle,
thoughts
birds numbly touched their brass became the man who had gone ashore, brotherless, among sisters
the morning's tongues.
The world's he bore within himself, a bellowing disguised, forbidden, witches averting their sex,
wailing
from oceans and sunken peaks. The horizon choked in this life,whitewashed with lime and snow,

revealed not a single sail. And in vain he sought victim for a sacrificial offering, for a murdered brother

the traces of a man's feet, broad as the leaves of waterlilies. made divine by treason,

did dust form on the lagoons of temptation? and he lost his manly voice, a eunuch of silence,
Why
I and thighbones and
did he see fires far off between tree trunks, but wheels continued to crush horizons
Why
and the whale's giant fin against the sky when it dived I distances were annihilated by firethat exploded in captivity.

THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW

pAGE 42

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