#robin fulton

[ivandurak]

“The Palace” by Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Robin Fulton

We stepped in. A single vast hall, silent and empty, where the surface of the floor lay like an abandoned skating rink. All doors shut. The air grey.

Paintings on the walls. We saw pictures throng lifelessly: shields, scale- pans, fishes, struggling figures in a deaf-and-dumb world on the other side.

A sculpture was set out in the void: in the middle of the hall alone a horse stood but at first when we were absorbed by all the emptiness we did not notice him.

Fainter than the breathing in a shell sounds and voices from the town circling in this desolate space murmuring and seeking power.

Also something else. Something darkly set itself at our senses’ five thresholds without stepping over them. Sand ran in every silent glass.

It was time to move. We walked over to the horse. He was gigantic, dark as iron. An image of power itself abandoned when the princes left.

The horse spoke: “I am The Only One. The emptiness that rode me I have thrown. This is my stable. I am growing quietly. And I eat the silence that’s in here.”

[majestativa]

And I was sorrow […] and I was pride.

— OLAV H. HAUGE ⚜️ 20 Contemporary Norwegian Poets: A Bilingual Anthology, transl. by Robin Fulton, (1984)

[whisperthatruns]

To Friends behind a Frontier

I I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn’t write swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship and drifted away at last through the night sky.

II The letter is now at the censor’s. He lights his lamp. In the glare my words fly up like monkeys on a grille, rattle it, stop, and bare their teeth.

III Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten and can at last sleep, become trilobites.

Tomas Tranströmer, tr. from the Swedish by Robin Fulton, text from Sean Singer’s daily email, The Sharpener

[i12bent]

Tomas Tranströmer (Aprl 15, 1931 - 2015) was a Swedish poet and Nobel Laureate. He has been translated into 60+ languages.

Here is a sample where Tranströmer borrows Keats’ nightingale and transplants it to a nature reserve in Sweden:

The Nightingale in Badelunda

In the green midnight at the nightingale’s northern limit. Heavy leaves hang in trance, the deaf cars race towards the neon-line. The nightingale’s voice rises without wavering to the side, it is as penetrating as a cock-crow, but beautiful and free of vanity. I was in prison and it visited me. I was sick and it visited me. I didn’t notice it then, but I do now. Time streams down from the sun and the moon and into all the tick-tock-thankful clocks. But right here there is no time. Only the nightingale’s voice, the raw resonant notes that whet the night sky’s gleaming scythe. (Translation, Robin Fulton, 2011)

[theshatterednotes]

Scottish poet and translator Robin Fulton

[kitchen-light]

The forest is full of abandoned monsters which I love.

Tomas Tranströmer, from his prose-poem ‘How the Late Autumn Night Novel Begins’ (translated by Robin Fulton)

[ivandurak]

“The Journey” by Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Robin Fulton

In the underground station. A crowding among placards in a staring dead light.

The train arrived and collected faces and portfolios.

Darkness next. We sat in the carriages like statues, hauled through the caverns. Restraint, dreams, restraint.

In stations under sea level they sold the news of the dark. People in motion sadly silently under the clock dials.

The train carried outer garments and souls.

Glances in all directions on the journey through the mountain. Still no change.

But nearer the surface a murmuring of bees began—freedom. We stepped out of the earth.

The land beat its wings once and became still under us, widespread and green.

Ears of corn blew in over the platforms.

Terminus—I followed on, further.

How many were with me? Four, five, hardly more.

Houses, roads, skies, blue inlets, mountains opened their windows.

[ivandurak]

Fantastic to feel how my poem grows while I myself shrink. It grows, it takes my place. It pushes me aside. It throws me out of the nest. The poem is ready.

from Morning Birds by Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Robin Fulton