The first collection of the translations Robert Bly has been producing for more than forty years, introducing world poets to American readers for the first time. Robert Bly has always been amazingly prescient in his choice of poets to translate. The poetry he selected supplied qualities that seemed lacking from the literary culture of this country. For the first time, Robert Bly's brilliant translations, from several languages, have been gathered in one book. Here, in The Winged Energy of Delight, the poems of twenty-two poets, some renowned, others lesser known, are brought together. At a time when editors and readers knew only Eliot and Pound, Robert Bly introduced the earthy wildness of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo and the sober grief of Trakl, as well as the elegance of Jimenez and Transtromer. He also published high-spirited versions of Kabir, Rumi, and Mirabai, which had considerable influence on the wider culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Bly's clear translations of Rilke attracted many new readers to the poet, and his versions of Machado have become models of silenceand depth. He continues to bring fresh and amazing poets into English, most recently Rolf Jacobsen, Miguel Hernandez, Francis Ponge, and the nineteenth-century Indian poet Ghalib. As Kenneth Rexroth has said, RobertBly "is one of the leaders of a poetic revival that hasreturned American literature to the world community."

Robert Bly is the author of the bestseller Iron John, as well as The Maiden King and The Sibling Society. He is the editor of The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies, and The Thousands, and the author of many books of poems, most recently The Night Abraham Called to the Stars. His awards include two Guggenheims and the National Book Award. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

SOME WORDS ABOUT THIS BOOK	vii
Tomas Transtromer	1	(20)
Mirabai	21	(16)
Kabir	37	(20)
Antonio Machado	57	(24)
Juan Ramón Jiménez	81	(18)
Francis Ponge	99	(12)
Pablo Neruda	111	(26)
Georg Trakl	137	(18)
Rainer Maria Rilke	155	(24)
Basho	179	(10)
Rolf Jacobsen	189	(18)
Gunnar Ekelöf	207	(12)
Issa	219	(10)
Federico Garcia Lorca	229	(28)
Olav H. Hauge	257	(16)
Harry Martinson	273	(18)
César Vallejo	291	(20)
Miguel Hernandez	311	(20)
Rumi	331	(18)
Horace	349	(12)
Ghalib	361	(16)
Hafez	377	(22)
PERMISSIONS	399	(4)
INDEX	403

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The Winged Energy of Delight
Selected Translations

Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer comes from a long line of ship pilots whoworked in and around the Stockholm Archipelago. He is at home onislands. His face is thin and angular, and the swift, spare face remindsone of Hans Christian Andersen's or the younger Kierkegaard's. He hasa strange genius for the image -- images come up almost effortlessly. Theimages flow upward like water rising in some lonely place, in theswamps, or deep fir woods.

Swedish poetry tends to be very rational, and therefore open tofads. Tranströmer, simply by publishing his books, leads a movementof poetry in the opposite direction, toward a poetry of silence anddepths.

One of the most beautiful qualities in his poems is the space we feelin them. I think one reason for that is that the four or five main imagesthat appear in each of his poems come from widely separated sourcesin the psyche. His poems are a sort of railway station where trains thathave come enormous distances stand briefly in the same building. Onetrain may have some Russian snow still lying on the undercarriage,and another may have Mediterranean flowers still fresh in the compartments,and Ruhr soot on the roofs.

The poems are mysterious because of the distance the images havecome to get there. Mallarmé believed there should be mystery inpoetry, and urged poets to get it by removing the links that tie thepoem to its occasion in the real world. Tranströmer keeps the link tothe worldly occasion, and yet the poems have a mystery and surprisethat never fade, even on many readings.

Rilke taught that poets should be "bees of the invisible." Makinghoney for the invisible suggests that the poet remain close to earthlyhistory, but move as well toward the spiritual and the invisible.Tranströmer suspects that as an artist he is merely a way for "theMemory" to get out into the world. Even at seventeen he was awarethat the dead "wanted to have their portrait painted." Somehow thatcannot be done without making peace with rhetoric. He wants to tellof spiritual matters, but he doesn't want to be a preacher. If rhetoriccould kill Christianity in Sweden, maybe it could kill poetry as well. In"From an African Diary," he describes climbing on a canoe hollowedfrom a log:

The canoe is incredibly wobbly, even when you sit on your heels.A balancing act. If you have the heart on the left side you haveto lean a bit to the right, nothing in the pockets, no big armmovements, please, all rhetoric has to be left behind. Precisely:rhetoric is impossible here. The canoe glides out over the water.

In "The Scattered Congregation," Tranströmer remarks:

Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his wayto the Address. Who's got the Address?Don't know. But that's where we're going.

Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm on April 15, 1931.His father and mother divorced when he was three; he and his motherlived after that in an apartment in the working-class district ofStockholm. He describes the apartment in the poem called "TheBookcase."

The early fifties were a rather formal time, both here and inSweden, and Tranströmer began by writing concentrated, highly formalpoems, some in iambs and some in the Alcaic meter. His firstbook, 17 Poems, published in 1954, glowed with strange baroque elements, and contained only a few poems, but people noticed the powerof the book immediately.

For several years, he worked as a psychologist in a boys' prison inLinkõping, and then in 1965, he moved with his wife, Monica, andhis two daughters Paula and Emma to Västeras, a town about fortymiles west of Stockholm. He continued to work as a psychologist, thistime for a labor organization funded by the State. He helped juveniledelinquents to reenter society and persons with physical disabilities tochoose a career, and he counseled parole offenders and those in drugrehabilitation.

Tomas Tranströmer's poems are so luminous that genuine poetrycan travel to another language and thrive. His poems have been translatedinto dozens of European and Asian languages; at this moment,something like thirty-eight.

The praise for his poems has steadily grown both in Europe and inthe United States. He has received most of the important poetryprizes in Europe, including the Petrarch Prize in Germany, theBonnier Award for Poetry, the Pilot Prize in 1988, the NordicCouncil Prize in 1990, the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize in 1991,and the Horst Bieneck Prize in 1992.

The town of Västeras recently had a formal farewell celebration inthe old castle for Tomas and Monica, who were moving toStockholm. A choir sang to him, and presents were piled up five feethigh around his chair.

Today, the couple live in an apartment in Stockholm overlookingthe harbor, near the old neighborhood where Tomas lived as a boy.

Track

2 A.M.: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far-off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon.

As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember that he was there
when he returns again to his room.

Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm,
feeble and cold on the horizon.

The train is entirely motionless.
2 o'clock: strong moonlight, few stars.

Excerpted from The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations by Robert Bly
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