Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Harding
by PGR Nair
Guarding The Air: Selected Poems of Gunnar Harding
translated and edited by Roger Greenwald (Black Widow Press, 2014).
321 pages. ISBN 978-0-9856122-7-6. US $24
While many poetry readers are familiar with the Swedish Poet Tomas Transtrmer, the 2012
Nobel Laureate for literature, they may not know that Sweden harbors other great poets.
Guarding the Air pays wonderful homage to one of them, Gunnar Harding, by presenting work
that spans a lifetime of poetry.
For nearly half a century, as a poet, writer, translator, editor and literary critic, Gunnar
Harding has been at the center of Swedish literary life. He started as a jazz musician, studied
painting in Stockholm, and made his literary debut in 1967. He has published eighteen
volumes of poetry, as well as translations and nonfiction, and has won many prestigious
literary awards in Sweden, including the Dobloug Prize from the Swedish Academy.
Guarding the Air is the first comprehensive selection of Hardings work drawn from most of his
volumes of poetry written in verse (prose poems are not included). It begins with a crisp but
essential introduction by the translator and editor, Roger Greenwald, an American poet who is
well known for his translations of Scandinavian poetry. (His selections of work by such poets
as Norways Rolf Jacobsen and Tarjei Vesaas have won him many translation awards.) He has
also done readers a service by translating Gunnar Hardings prefaces to three of his Swedish
volumes of selected poems. The book also features line drawings by the poet that lend it a
special charm.
Hardings interest in poetry and culture spans many continents and cultures, and he is candid
in listing his inspirational sources. In a preface to one of his volumes of selected poems,
Wherever the Wind Is Blowing, he refers to the English orator Edward Youngs saying that we
are born originals but we die as copies. But Harding argues that in conversation with
others, we gradually become original. His evolution as a poet bears witness to that process.
Art, freedom, love, memory and shared experiences, the passage of time, sensuality, and
mortality are some of the many themes that get beautifully woven into the rich tapestries of
Hardings poems. The diversity of the subject matter helps to make this collection resonate,
whether in a poem about a wandering shoemaker or in poems exploring music and art. And
Greenwald has done a magical job in capturing the intensity and depth of feeling in the
poetry.
Life pulsating in many corners forms an integral part of Hardings poetry. His poems achieve a
fine balance of emotional and philosophical content. One can never underestimate his
capacity for tenderness, as in the first poem in this collection, Northwest Express, which
starts with these lovely lines:
even in our sleep there are cables
between us. we are coupled
to each other like the railway cars
on their way to the sea
For Harding, feelings are important in poetry. He articulates this in a preface: I know it
sounds sentimental, but I believe it is important to keep faith in this truth of the imagination.
Moreover even though it sounds still more sentimental I believe that it is important to
insist that the feelings that come from the heart are sacred. If they are missing, then we are
facing a devaluation not only of truth and beauty, but also of poetry.
Although love is the best balm for mans soul, the poet knows the absurdity and misery of
loving everyone, as finely evoked in these lines:
Of course you can love everyone,
but when you have loved everyone
theres no one left,
only the rustle of clothing
this collection. One can spot it in poems such as EuropeA Winter Journey, Davenport
Blues, Dannys Dream, Fr Elise, and The Flute Player. In Winter Tour, the poet
moves from depiction of a cold winter day when even the shining lake of summer has shrunk
to a traffic mirror to an evening immersed in jazz.
In the evening the landscape we traveled through all day
gets measured on the bass drum and illuminated by a light bulb.
Theres a lazy pulse coming from inside it,
beating in the stage floor, through my soles
and up through my body.
The band plays Moose March and I recite
Back to the beginning
when only the hundred thousand notes beyond the scale
are real. After the reading
I go backstage while the music continues in the hall,
one, two, soon three cigarettes from here.
The beginning of Persephone, a poem inspired in part by a Magritte painting, illustrates the
precision of Hardings imagery:
Silence, built of bricks from old tenements,
glued on with every layer of wallpaper
where spring is pressed into darkening floral patterns.
She opens the drapes and a feeble light describes
all these states of the soul, highly nuanced and distinct
but so sad that they lack names of their own.
Streaks of light so broad that she can walk on them
out above the roofs where the wind is tossing pigeons around, light
so distant that it cant remember its source,
and now it finally sinks to the ground
through the sun-panels on the linoleum.
Color symbols add richness to Rugosa Roses, with its sexual undertones:
The sky was improbably blue, soundless and blue
but our friend at the black lake had seen
the old airforce general sitting in his chair in dress whites
and he had said: Theres nothing to be afraid of.
Again at the end of the poem, when the couple muse over their stay in the house, the color
symbols turn into sensual images:
But the rose hedge has grown tall and dense.
It covers the whole house, and were the only ones who know about
the dark room inside
where the white flower flows out.
Hardings fascination with painting is evident in many of his poems. Painting has also meant
a great deal to me, says the poet in a preface. At one time that was really what I wanted
to devote myself to. This urge is sometimes stronger than the urge to write poems, as the
poet remarks with disarming (or defensive) humor in Watercolors. He steps into a river and
sees the beautiful reflection of blue sky, the mountains, and the landscape nearby.
My desire to write worse and worse poems
still isnt as strong as my yearning
to paint a really lousy watercolor
where a completely hopeless blue runs out into the water,
only distantly related to that blue
that just now seemed as momentous
as becoming water oneself and reflecting a mountain.
The underlying anxiety evident here about quality in art and in particular in painting crops up
in other poems, like 1958 (Miss Setterdahls Art School) and Imperfect Tense, from
Hardings sequence about Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
Yet a sea of flowers
still covers the black soil
just as his embroidered vest
covers the darkness in his heart.
Each flower has shown itself worthy
of having a portrait of its own.
Therefore he stands weeping in the garden.
His brush goes too slow.
The flowers wilt, the paint dries out.
The wardrobe stands there,
dark with her gowns:
they too are lifeless.
This is called The Post-Romantic.
He calls it his life.
In the brilliant title poem of this selection, Guarding the Air, contemplations of art slowly
evolve into a somber philosophical musing on the way we live and how we can change to find
the right path. The poem starts with these arresting lines:
Take a feather, dip it in ink and draw a swallow.
It will be a swallow thats missing one feather,
just the one that would enable it to fly.
This grand poem, which has a circular pattern, is replete with images and speaks about
unexpected correspondences in the urban space, our somnambulistic existence, freedom,
love, and the innocence of childhood.
How long will it take? How long
will it take you to think everything thats yours to think
and what will be left to think then? There will be nothing
to think then and you will be filled with a deep serenity.
Clothed in total silence you will be able to observe
how the pebbles crack like swallows eggs, but they crack without
a sound
and you understand the silence that pours out from inside them
Gunnar Harding (Author, Photo by Paula Transtrmer) and Roger Greenwald (Translator, Editor)