108 - Evening Land ("Aftonland")

Evening Land ("Aftonland")
By Pär Lagerkvist (Translated by W. H. Auden and Leif Sjoberg)
Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1975. 193 pp. $12.95.

I wanted to know
But was only allowed to ask,
I wanted light
But was only allowed to burn.
I demanded the ineffable
But was only allowed to live.

I complained,
But nobody understood what I meant.

The foregoing lyric is a typical sample from the ninth volume of Pär Lagerkvist's poems, first issued in Stockholm in 1953 and now for the first time rendered into English by the late W.H. Auden and his collaborator, Leif Sjöberg, Professor of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature at State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Lagerkvist (1891-1974) was a prominent Swedish man of letters to whom his fellow-countrymen awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1951. Although several of his dark and brooding novels have been published in the United States, his poetry is little known among us, and this volume helps to fill the gap in our knowledge.

What makes the book most interesting to students of literature and theology is the evidence of a genuine psychornachy in the poet himself. Born to devout parents whose evenings were habitually devoted to the reading of Scripture, The Book of Common Prayer, or collections of homiletic sermons designed for family use, he early rebelled against the "oppressions" and rigid dogmas of his ancestral religion and according to Sjöberg soon became an outsider, a loner, a stranger, or what might be called a reluctant apostate.

One is sometimes reminded of what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about his friend and fellow-novelist, Herman Melville, that he could "neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief," and yet was "too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other." Like some of the protagonists in Lagerkvist's fiction-Barabbas, Ahasuerus, or "The Sybil," for example-the poet is by choice a Thomas Dubitimus, and his concept of the Deity, as he wrote in The Sybil, is that of "a riddle which is intended not to be solved but to exist. To exist for us always. To trouble us always." Outside his fiction, he was characteristically forthright about his position. "I am a believer without a faith," he wrote in 1934, "a religious atheist. I understand Gethsemane, but not the j ubilation over the victory." Such negative affirmations as this cause his editor-translator to say that "Lagerkvist more vigorously than anyone else in Scandinavia has explored the religious concerns of both the modern heretic, influenced by natural science, and the

109 - Evening Land ("Aftonland")

modern brooder-searcher, desperately wanting to believe in the traditional religious values."

This is the poet who in another of his lyrics prayerfully cries:

May my heart's disquiet never vanish.
May I never he at peace.
May I never be reconciled to life, nor to death either.
May my path be unending, with death its unknowable goal.

and speaks of his god as a mysterious stranger:

My friend is a stranger, someone I do not know.
A stranger far, far away
For his sake my heart is full of disquiet
Because he is not with me
Because, perhaps, after all he does not exist?
Who are you who so fill my heart with your absence?
Who fill the entire world with your absence?

Anyone who sees Auden's name on the dust-jacket of the hook and takes it up expecting to find inside any evidence of his prosodic pyrotechnics is likely to he disappointed, Sjöherg and Auden began their collaboration in the early 1960's when they translated Dag Hammarskjold's best-selling Markings (1964). Their method then was the same they have followed here. Professor Sjöberg prepared literal

110 - Evening Land ("Aftonland")

transcripts of Lagerkvist's lyrics and these were then modified and polished by Auden. At the time of his death in 1973, Auden had completed work on fifty-one of the sixty-two items in this collection. Sjöberg prints the literal texts of the other poems in an appendix. Neither in tone nor vocabulary nor syntax do they seem to differ significantly from Auden's own redactions. Sjöberg also provides the Swedish texts face-to-face with the translations. Even to one who does not know the language, the poet's free-verse lines seem on the whole to be so simple that they probably reach us in a fashion roughly similar to the way they struck the native Swedish audience twenty-odd years ago.

Robert Frost used to say that "poetry is what gets lost in translation." But it would seem that there is a kind of poetry, simple, fundamental, universal, using large symbols whose meaning differs little from age to age or from country to country, which transfers itself from language to language without loss. These poems, in any case, seem to have survived their flight across the Atlantic without dissipation of their original force. That force is perhaps basically elegiac:

Some day you will be one of those who lived long ago.
The earth will remember you, just as it remembers the grass and the forests,
The rotting leaves.
Just as the soil remembers,
And just as the mountains remember the winds.
Your peace shall be as unending as that of the sea.

Or, take this beautiful hymn to evanescence:

Like the clouds,
Like a butterfly,
Like the light breathing on a mirror,
Accidental,
Transitory,
Gone in a short while.

Lord over all heavens, all worlds, all fates,
What have you meant by me?

But these lines, like those by Hammarskjöld, are only markings, way-stations in Lagerkvist's pilgrimage, words of a stranger addressed to strangers about a Stranger. My own favorite sequence in this volume is made up of nine lyrics under the title "The Morning of Creation." It is an attempt to recapitulate the narrative of Genesis, only this time in an imaginative construct that has little metaphorical relation to the Hebraic story.

The sequence takes the form of a series of speaking personifications, beginning with "God" as maker, followed by two utterances from the "fledgling" just made, then the words of a cloud, the sky itself, the earth, man, a star, and finally "God" once more, creation at last accomplished. Although in summary this may sound abstract and dreamy, the lyrics are simple and beautiful. "Number Five," for example, seems to incorporate the faintest echo of The Song of Songs:

I am the sky. I enfold all things in my blue cloak,
Which I have received from my beloved.

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He also gave me wonderful jewels, a diadem of stars to wear around my head.
He must love me very much.
I love him too,
Though I have never seen him.
It is said that one cannot see him,
But why should one? One does not have to see one's beloved.
He is with me at night when his diadem glitters around my neck.

What we have, in the end, is a poetic testament by one who rebelled against orthodoxy but was impelled by his nostalgia and his sense of deprivation to evolve a personal substitute for what he had lost through his rebellion. One thinks of G.K. Chesterton's remark about Thomas Hardy, that "he was anthropomorphic through sheer atheism." Lagerkvist's atheism was by no means so "sheer" as Hardy's. His reluctance to believe and his longing toward belief led him to turn, like so many before him, to the world of phenomena, as if he might find there an anchor for his thought, a plateau on which his moral being could take a stand.

Carlos Baker
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey