Tobias Berggren (Sweden) 1940-2020

Tobias Berggren (Sweden)

1940-2020

Tobias Berggren was born into a Stockholm family in 1940, whose members had been prominent in Swedish politics. Berggren's grandfather, Ynge Larsson, had been Vice Mayor of Stockholm, and a member of parliament.

     Berggren worked as a critic for Bonniers Litterära Magasin (BLM) and the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, arguing against the demand in poetry for "simplicity" and "accessibility,"which he felt had watered down recent Swedish poetry. As Gunnar Harding and Anselm Hollo have written of him in their anthology Modern Swedish Poetry:

In Berggren's view, this trend [towards the simple] does not rep-

resent anything new, but is merely a relapse into a simplistic, pre-

modernistic consciousness. Since reality no longer is simple, it

cannot be the function of art to have people standing around

mouthing platitudes, even if that is what they do in "real life."

    Rooting his poetry in academic modernism, Berggren works to transform language: "The day follows upon night, the world, upon words."

     His first collection was Det nödvändiga är inte klart (The Necessary Is Not Clear) of 1969, and over the years since he has published ten further books of poetry, as well as essays and translations, focusing particularly on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Among his several awards are the Aftonbladet's Literary Prize (1973), the Bellman Prize (1983), and The Nios Prize (1990).

     Berggren died in 2020.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Det nödvändiga är inte klart (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1969); Den främmande tryggheten (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1971); Namn och grus (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1973); Resor i din tystnad : dikter 1972-75 (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1976); Gemensam vårdnad (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1977); Bergsmusik: rytmisk prosa, vers och vissioner (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1978); Threnos(Stockholm: Bonnier, 1981); 24 romantiska etyder (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1987); Rymden ikväll, all stjärnorna (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1991); Fält och legender (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1997); Intifada (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2008)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

selections in Gunnar Harding and Anselm Hollo, eds. Modern Swedish Poetry in Translation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979)

Poem about Time, by the Sea Lyrics

I

Underneath my shadow on the limestone rock

a two-thousand-year-old seal hunter is slowly

disappearing toward the routes of the slowly

I am his shadow

in the light of the blue-weed

And the light of the sea, of the water

which dazzlingly filters all connections, dissolves

earth's hard dependencies in pelagian fantasies

vegetating frequencies, the extended

dreaming Vagantenlieder of the school of herring

for the bones of the drowned

which spell the sign of Continuity

The light of the sea

Which projects my shadow towards the stars

What waves brought me here? That of the drowned?

The wave of the already drowned—reflecting the sign of Pisces— at least was visible, that wave

was for one and only one : 'she is me' and

he draws a deep breath : 'it was never her' and sinks

with the boat, is eaten

and annihilated : the atom furnaces

of Pisces

are opened in his brain,

eels, codspawn now

go touring in his ragged bony eyes—

You, in the sign of the Fisherman,

reflect

with algae in your heart, the wind in your summers,

here is one

who once was also five years old

and picked the pine-cones in the pine woods

who was only five years and the lowest in the pecking order

Now is eaten

a tenderly considered

human being

by currents and molluscs

Now Man is eaten

Now where she rests under the surface of photographs

by her face of the stone

which inexorably portrays

a fearful, a mortally fearful

species, unknown

heavily and dangerously unfamiliar...

The heavenly hens are guarding

II

The clock is ticking, the waves of the sea

and the rustling leaves of the trees

move in this life, where cries and songs

rock through my skull

Time is up, is the work done? never

did I think so little

could be accomplished in so long a time, the leaves

do more and devastate nothing

The clock is singing its absolute song to the trees rocking in wind from the works of man

Time is not like the clock

Time is uneven, and full of energy

it is dispersed around

people, we grope for light & day with doors & windows & fingers, but

we waste the world

in the alchemy of retention

In the alchemy of returning we devastate the world

For everything is movement and movement is change

and not the swallows, the electrons or the nimble grasses

not the disintegrating nations nor

the Medusa-like damp stain on the wall of the summer cottage

not the exploding stars nor you

are reality

outside the net of connections rocking

back and forth for cries and songs, time out here

exists in a dog's heart or in roots of the submarine mountains

or anywhere, and in myriads—but the stars

turn on their axes of human matter, and the seas

can do nothing without their coastal dwellers, and fishermen

nothing with their nets but make symbols, and the nets

of connections nothing

with the ticking scales of the clock

which are scattered

in the grass where the children play

The grass can split the atom furnace

but man can never begin again

III

The inventory of the coast...

Among the chattels also human bodies

This broken home—

You approached me on the beach, happy I was...

you left me : a beach

from which one is relentlessly taken, from which

my body disappears with the tide

O I have been waiting turned towards the sea

my face in the light, in the light of the horizon, and

my back in hell

Can you see my back in the dark?

Here it is, here in what is written,

here

In the place where I write down my memories of you

I looked on the limestone rock and found

the rusty iron nail

on which you cut yourself

Your blood was still there

A yellow lichen has grown from it