Yes, someone must be ready to start this discussion.
What do you consider the most difficult thing for you
about writing?
What's the hardest part?
He asked what the hardest part of the writing was for me.
Well, it's a very difficult question
because it's often very hard for me to write.
And I can give almost a sociological explanation of it
because my writing is very much disturbed by all
the other activities that I have to do.
I have a job, and I have a family and all these things,
which in themselves, are very important to me, but just
for writing it's not very good to have a big job
and family you really want to be with and so on.
So this is the practical problem for me
just to come into a situation where
I feel that I can write without being disturbed.
That happens in the summer often when I'm on vacation and so on.
I need some margin to sit down and concentrate.
And in my job, for instance, the language I use there--
I am psychologist, and I have to write reports
about people and so on.
The language there is absolutely eating up the poetical language
inside me.
I can feel that.
So what I need to write it is a place where
I can just concentrate on it.
And that's the most difficult for me to arrange it that way.
But at the same time I know many writers
who can handle these things very well.
So I think there must be a deeper
explanation to the whole thing.
It probably has to do with--
in order to write, I must have a feeling
that this is very important.
This is something I really--
I can do something for some creative thing for mankind
or so.
I think it's some morality involved in the whole thing.
I must have this feeling.
It belongs to my inspiration that this is very important.
And I seldom gets that feeling.
I often find that I have sort of well, attitude
to the whole thing which--
as if I were excusing myself all the time,
apologizing for writing.
That sounds strange to you because now I
have been here in America for some time doing readings,
and so on, and so on.
But this feeling is still there, somewhere.
I don't know.
You will understand that, I think.
We talked about it.
Do you have friends that feel the same way?
I don't know.
No, yeah, probably, maybe.
All right, the problem is also, of course,
that I'm too critical.
I don't-- often this self-criticism starts just when
the poem is on its way.
And this is deadly.
So I often-- a good thing is if I
could start a very serious poem in a very playful way,
as if it were not meant to be something serious.
And then, I can double cross this whole inhibition a little.
So I can-- the poem can come forward
for quite a bit until I suddenly realized oh, this is serious.
And then, it might be too late for the inhibition
at that time.
For instance, this prose poem about Funchal, about my visit
to this Portuguese place.
It starts like you play with this visit to the fish
restaurant and so on, which was just something I noted down
as a memory of a fantastic day.
But the problem is very serious.
It became serious, but it was already so much written,
so it had to go on, you see.
I have not found that these inhibitions are less
because of this translation.
It's because of certain fame and so on.
On the contrary, it wasn't the way more easy 15 years ago.
Does this make any sense to you?
Because I'm not speaking about technical things, which
are not that the real problems in writing, I think.
I think the real problems are somewhere deep inside,
psychological things.
What was the most important advantage of your childhood?
Oh.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
I have to think it over, but you could tell your most important
event, warm me up a little.
In childhood everything is very important because what
you experience between the first year of your life
and until you become 18 or so it's
impossible to make a list of where one thing is definitely
more important than another thing.
I have described the one important thing was
the death of my grandmother, probably,
which I described in this poem.
But I don't think it was the most important thing.
What's important is not the particular event,
but the surroundings you live in, the continuous things.
That's more important than the events themselves,
your relationships and so on.
Do you have this?
I don't want to be too confessional.
I could tell you things.
Please.
What other people are trying to say
is acknowledging that poetry is to you, when
you start to think about their version of what you've written.
[AUDIO OUT] --those translations,
I agree with them.
What do you think about that?
Yes.
I am-- the three or the four translators that
have made many translations of me
as well as Bly, as it is with Fulton, and Charters.
I know them personally all, and I have collaborated with them.
And I think that's very important
because no one of them know Swedish extremely well.
And Bly, for instance, knows Norwegian, which
is similar but not Swedish.
And Bly and I were working together.
He was on my island, and we were sitting for two weeks
doing translations and discussing together and so on.
So that's the right way to do translation, I think.
When you do it by correspondence,
it is so taxing to sit there and write long, long, long letters
which you could explain a certain thing
very easily if you were sitting next to the fellow.
You have to sit on the same bench with the translator.
And the best thing is if the translator is in the same place
as the poem takes place, which happened with this Sam
Charters, for instance.
The Baltics is very much in the archipelago, and he was there,
and he knew the surroundings very well.
And how he would translate the certain thing,
it was not a question about dictionaries,
we just went to the place, and I pointed it out and said,
that's the word.
So he could see what it was he was going to translate.
That's the ideal situation for translation, I think.
I translated a poem of his the other day, yesterday,
and I was in the desert, almost.
I mean this is I think it's necessary for translators
to travel a little.
Is there a place in this country that you
identify with strongly?
What do you say?
Is there a place in this country--
That you identify with strongly with the desert,
or a Latin country or what?
Well, it's very strange sometimes,
that I was in Virginia, 10 days ago, and the country.
And the strange thing was that it was very much like Sweden,
in a way.
But at the same time, completely unlike Sweden.
So the first impression I got from the landscape
was that this is like home.
But when I looked closer, there was nothing to recognize,
everything was different.
And that's very disturbing, in a way, because it makes
you feel like a dead person who returns
to his old surroundings, and everything is different,
but everything is the same.
In a strange way, I found that the south around Atlanta
was, in a way, more like Sweden.
I was very surprised by this.
I can't explain it.
Probably New Hampshire would be like Sweden.
I have never been there.
This desert is so different.
So I feel very relaxed here because there is no ambition
to try to make it like Sweden.
But something that is similar is the feeling
you get of being a solitary figure in the landscape, which
is very important experience, and which
is probably the basic position for me as a poet.
And that's a situation you always are in here, when
you move out from the city.
Then, of course, I find certain parts
of New York very fascinating.
So I love certain parts of New York
because I have lived there for well,
maybe, three weeks in different locations.
So this city is very--
a part of it I hate, but a part of it I love.
So I can identify with certain parts of New York.
Do you ever get ideas about poems to write from your work?
Yes, the same question I got from a class here studying
Scandinavian literature.
Are there any from this class, here?
No one.
So I can repeat what I answered them.
Because my job is very important for me,
it goes into other writing some way or another.
But I don't know if it can be detected.
It's one poem of mine, an earlier one, who is really--
where the whole scene is directly taken
from a situation in my job.
And I might read it, now.
But there are many other poems where there are parts of my job
are sneaking in.
I have one very gloomy thing called,
"Night Duty," which is partly about my position
as a thinking and writing person in the late 1960s, in Sweden,
but partly also is a sort of--
it borrows a lot from my time as a psychologist in prison.
And I was a psychologist in a youth prison
for some time and these experiences
are very important because they have made me--
they had changed some of my ideas
about what society is like, and what people are like.
But also, I think, the surroundings,
they sneak into the poems from that time, very much.
Well, but I'll read this poem from my job, from 1957.
At that time, I was a very newly licensed psychologist,
and I was not experienced at all.
I was working in an office connected with the Stockholm
University.
And we made tests.
We tested people for different reasons.
And it was-- one day it was a 20-year-old boy with--
he was epileptic, and he had had a fit just before.
And when he was on his way to our testing,
and he broke his jaw, so he had a bandage.
And I was probably nervous about the whole situation.
I was quite new and I didn't know
what to do with the person who has an epileptic fit in front
of you.
So this tension is probably in this poem, very much.
Well, he was sitting in front of me,
and behind him was the reproduction of a van Gogh
painting.
This is the poem.
"After the Attack."
The sick boy locked in a vision with tongue stiff as a horn.
He sits with his back toward a painting of a wheat field.
The bandage around his jaw reminds one of an embalming.
His spectacles are thick as a diver's.
Nothing has any answer and is sudden as a telephone
ringing in the night.
But the painting there.
It's a landscape that makes one feel peaceful
even though the wheat is a golden storm.
Blue, fiery blue sky and driving clouds.
Beneath in the yellow waves some white shirts
are sailing, threshers.
They cast no shadow.
At the far end of the field, a man
seems to be looking this way.
A broad hat leaves his face in shadow.
He seems to look at the dark shape in the room here,
as though to help.
Gradually, the painting begins to stretch
and open behind the boy who is sick and sunk in himself.
It throws sparks and makes noise.
Every wheat head throws off light as if to wake him up.
The other man in the wheat makes a sign.
He has come nearer.
No one notices.
Yes, you can also see that the part in the poem I
read the "Baltics," the part about the Russian composer,
his stroke.
And this is something I met in my work.
I've been working very much with traffic accident victims,
and I was interested in--
I have been interested in brain injuries.
And I met the description of his case,
I met in a Soviet scholar paper by the Russian brain
specialist, Luria.
And it was reprinted in the Journal of Neuropathology
or something, here in America.
Well, so the job comes in different places
in the writing.
It's both giving and taking, this job.
It might be time to go to sleep, now.
So it's in the night, according to the newspaper, isn't it?
3:00.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]