Well, now you'll have a very long problem with mic.
It's so long that it isn't finished.
And what is here are five parts translated
by Sam Charters who is a poet from California who
lives in Sweden.
Well, I have to talk a little first.
It's called Baltics, which is a non-existent plural
form of the Baltic.
And as you know, this is sea which
is East of Sweden and between Sweden
and Soviet, and between Sweden and Poland,
and Sweden and Finland.
And the whole poem is a sort of bag where I put everything.
It's nature of poetry, it's politics,
it's also by biographical things, it's about my ancestors
and so on.
Actually it's a documentary form, part of it.
What I tell you is absolutely the truth so
I didn't invent anything.
It started three years ago.
I found an almanac which was my mother's father.
My maternal grandfather had a--
he was a pilot.
And he had written down the ships he piloted.
There were many almanacs from 1882 to 1889.
I come originally from the archipelago
outside the Swedish East Coast, where I have my roots to say.
Well, some exotic names here which
are Swedish harbors and and also harbors on the other shore,
the other Baltic shores.
Well, part one.
It was before the time of radio masts.
My mother's father was a newly licensed pilot.
In the almanac he wrote down the vessels
he piloted, name, destination, craft.
Examples from 1884.
Steamer Tiger, Captain Rowan, 16 feet, Hull,
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],, Captain [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],, 8 feet,
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] and [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]..
Steamer St. Petersburg, Captain Liebenberg, 11 feet, Stettin,
Libow, Sundholm.
He took them out to the Baltic through the wonderful labyrinth
of islands in the water.
And the ones that met on board and were
born by the same hull for a few hours or a few days,
how well did they get to know each other?
Talking in misspelled English, understanding
and misunderstanding, but very little conscious lying.
How well did they get to know each other?
When it was thick fog, half speed, almost blind,
the headland coming out of the invisibility
with a single stride, it was right on them.
Foghorn blasting every other minute.
His eyes reading straight into the invisible.
Did he have the labyrinth in his head?
The minutes went by.
Land or reefs memorized like hymn verses
and the feeling of we are right here that you have to keep.
Like carrying a pail filled to the brim
without spilling a drop.
Glance down into the engine room.
The compound engine as long lived
as a human heart worked with great soft recoiling
movements, steel acrobatics, and the smells
rising from it as from a kitchen.
Two.
I should mention that [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] is
the Latin name of a shell, which the [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]..
Sailors often took home for decorate their gardens with.
Two.
The wind walks in the pine forest.
It sighs heavily, lightly.
In the middle of the island the Baltic also sighs.
Deep in the forest you're out on the open sea.
The old woman hated the sighing in the trees.
Her face hardened in melancholy when the wind rose.
You have to think of those out there in the boats.
But she also heard something else in the sighing as I do.
We are related.
We are walking together.
She has been dead for 30 years.
It sighs yes and no, understanding
and misunderstanding.
It sighs three children healthy, one in the sanitarium,
and two dead.
The broad current that blows some flames into life and blows
others out, conditions.
Its size, save me Lord the waters are coming onto my soul.
You walk around listening for a long time,
finally reaching the point where the boundaries begin
to open up.
Or rather where everything becomes boundaries.
An open square sank in darkness, people
streaming out of the dimly lit buildings around it murmuring.
A new gust of wind and the square
again lies solitary and still.
A new gust of wind, that size of other shores.
It deals with war.
It deals with places where the citizens are controlled,
where thoughts are built with emergency exits,
where a conversation between friends
is really a test of what friendship means,
and when you are together with somebody
you don't know well, control.
A certain frankness is all right if you just
don't lose sight of something drifting there
on the outskirts of the conversation,
something dark, the dark stain, something
that can drift in and destroy everything,
don't lose sight of it.
What can it be compared with?
A mine?
No, that would be too solid and almost too peaceful
since on our coast most stories about mines end happily.
The terror limited to the moment as this story
from the light ship.
Fall 1915, we were sleeping uneasily, et cetera.
A drifting mine was cited as it floated calmly
toward the light ship.
It was sinking, heaving up, at times hidden by the waves,
at times glimpsed like spy in the crowd.
The crew lying there in agony, shooting at it
with rifles without success.
Finally, they put out the boat and made the long line
fast to the mine and touted carefully and slowly
into the experts.
Afterwards, they set up the mine's dark shale
in the sand, the little stretch of park as an ornament.
Along with strombus shells from the West Indies.
And the gale makes its way through the dry pines
beyond the Tigris over the sand and the cemetery,
past the leaning stones, the names of the pilots,
the dry sighing of large gates opening and large gates
closing.
Part three starts with something I must explain.
It's a description of certain reliefs from the 12th century
by an artist who was a mixture of viking style artists
and early Christian style.
His name was [? Higvalde, ?] and that's
the only thing you know about him, that he had that name.
And he was working in Gotland, which
is an island in the Baltic.
I'm describing some of his scenes.
Robben Island is a prison island outside South Africa.
Yeah.
Three.
In the half dark corner of the Gotland Church
in the mildewed daylight stands a sandstone baptismal font,
12th century, the stone cutter's name
still there shining like a row of teeth
in the mass grave, [? Higvalde. ?]
The name is still there and the scenes here.
And on the sides of other vessels
crowded with people, the figures on their way out of the stone.
The eyes kernel of good and evil bursting there.
Herald at the table, the roasted cock flying up and crowing.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],, the servant was executed.
Close by, the child is born on the clumps
of faces as worthy and helpless as young monkeys.
And the fleeing steps of the pious drumming over the dragon
scales of sour mouths.
The scene stronger in memory than when
you stand in front of them.
Strongest when the fan spins like a slow rumbling carousel
in the memory.
Nowhere the leeside, everywhere risk, as it was, as it is.
Only inside there is peace, in the water
of the vessel that no one sees.
But on the outer walls the struggle rages.
And peace can come drop by drop, perhaps at night
when we don't know anything.
Whereas when we are taped to drip in a hospital ward,
people, beasts, ornaments.
There isn't any landscape ornaments.
Mr. B, my traveling companion, amiable in exile,
escaped from Robben Island says, I envy you.
I don't feel anything for nature.
But figures in landscape, that says something to me.
Here are figures in landscape.
A photo from 1865, the Steamer lies
at the dock in the channel.
Five figures, a lady in light green line,
like a bell, like a flower.
The men are like extras in folk drama.
They are all good looking, indecisive,
beginning to fade out.
They step on shore for a moment, they fade out.
The Steamer is an extinct model.
The high fan, owning, narrow hull, is completely strange.
A UFO that's landed.
Everything else in the photo is shockingly real.
The ripples on the water, the opposite beach,
I can stroke the rough rocks with my hand.
I can hear the sighing in the spruce.
It's near, it's today.
The waves are tropical.
Now 100 years later.
The waves come in from no man's water
and break against the stones.
I walk along the beach.
It isn't like it used to be to walk along the beach.
You have to swallow too much, keep too many conversations
going at the same time, you have thin walls.
Everything has gotten a new shadow
behind its ordinary shadow.
And you hear it dragging along even when it's completely dark.
It's night.
The strategic planetarium rotates.
The lenses stare into the darkness.
The night sky is full of numbers and they
are fed into a blinking cupboard, a piece of furniture.
Inside it, the energy of a grasshopper
swarm that devours acres of Somalia in half an hour.
I don't know if we are in the beginning
or in the final stage.
No conclusion can be made, no conclusion is possible.
The conclusion is the mandrake.
See the encyclopedia of superstitions.
Mandrake, miracle working plant which
gave such a dreadful shriek when it was thrown out of the Earth
that the person fell dead.
A dog had to do it.
Yeah.
Part 4.
It's the more relaxed thing.
The last word should be explained.
Liepaja-- that's the city-- it's the same city
as Libow in the first part of the poem.
It's in Latvia and it was--
before the war it was a commercial port.
We had much contact with it and now it's completely closed.
Its military port belong to Soviet Union.
Four.
From the leeside closeups.
Bladderwrack.
The forests of bladderwrack shine in the clear water.
They are young.
You want to emigrate there, stretch out
on your own reflection, and sink down to such and such a depth.
The seaweed holding itself up with air bladders the way
we hold ourselves up with ideas.
Bullhead, the fish that's a toad that wanted to be a butterfly
and made it a third of the way hiding himself in the seaweed
but pulled up in the net.
Hooked fast by his pathetic spikes and watched.
When you untangle him from the mesh of the net,
your hands shine with slime.
The rocks.
The small creatures hurry over the sand
warm lichens, rushing like second hands.
The pine casts a shadow, it wanders slowly
like an hour hand.
Inside me, time stands still, endless time.
The time it takes to forget all languages
and invent perpetual motion.
On the leeside you can hear the grass growing,
the faint drumming coming from underneath,
a faint roar of millions of small gas flames.
So it is to hear the grass grow.
And now, the stretch of open water
with outdoors, the open boundaries that
grow broader and broader the further you stretch out.
There are days when the Baltic is a calm limitless roof.
Then dream innocently of someone crawling out on the roof
to try to put the hell yards in order, trying to hoist the rag.
The flag that's afraid by the wind,
and smoked by the farmers, and bleached by the sun that it
could be anybody's.
But it's a long way to reappear.
Part 5.
My grandmother's story before it's forgotten.
Her parents dying young, the father first.
When the widow realizes the disease will take her too,
she walks from house to house, sails from island
to island with her daughter.
Who can take care of Maria?
A strange house on the other side of the bay takes her in.
They could afford to do it.
But the ones that could afford weren't the good ones.
By this mass cracks, Maria's childhood ends soon.
She's an unpaid servant in perpetual cold.
Year after year, perpetually seasick behind the long hours,
the solemn terror at the table, the expressions,
the pigskin crunching in her mouth,
be grateful, be grateful.
She never looked back.
But because of this, she could see the new
and seize it, break out of the bonds.
I remember her.
I used to snuggle against her.
And at the moment she died, the moment she passed over,
she sent out a thought so that I, a five-year-old,
understood what had happened half an hour
before they called.
I remember her.
But in the next brown photo, someone I don't know.
By the clothes from the middle of the last century,
a man about 30.
The powerful eyebrows, the face that
looks me right in the eye whispering, here I am.
But who I am is something that no one remembers anymore.
No one.
TB, isolation.
Once he stopped on the stony grass teeming slope coming up
from the sea and felt the black blindfold in front of his eyes.
Here, behind the thick brush, is the island's oldest house.
The low, not trim, 200-year-old fisherman's
hut with coarse gray heavy beams.
And the modern brass padlock has clicked together on all of it,
shining like the ring in the nose of an old bull that
refuses to get up.
So much crouching wood.
And on the roof, the ancient tiles
that collapsed across and on top of each other.
The original pattern erased by the Earth's rotation
through the years.
It reminds me of something.
I was there.
Wait, it is the old Jewish cemetery in Prague.
Where the dead live closer together than they did in life,
the stones jammed in, jammed in, so much encircled love.
The ties with the Lycan's letters in an unknown language.
All the stones in the archipelago people's ghetto
cemetery.
The stones erected and fallen down.
The ramshackle hut shines with a light of all the people borne
up by a certain wave, a certain wind, out here to their fates.
Yeah.
That was the end of that so far.