Mannen med den blå gitarren by Wallace Stevens, and: Klippan och andra dikter by Wallace Stevens (review)

Having spent some time now with the two recent Swedish translations of "The Man with the Blue Guitar," I am at a loss about which to prefer: the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes. Although my allusion might seem labored, Stevens' opposition from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is in fact applicable to Olle Thörnvall's and Ingmar Simonsson's translations. The former is eminently attuned to the iambic pattern and sonic pitch of Stevens' poem, presenting an attempt to translate the lyrics while keeping the tune. By contrast, the latter, which is part of a larger collection of translated poems, cannot be strummed on Swedish guitars. Simonsson's version is an attempt to do justice, above all, to the semantic polysemy of the words.

Olle Thörnvall is known as a poet-translator and a rock lyricist. His translation of "The Man with the Blue Guitar" was published in 2008 as a slim volume by ellerströms (which prefers to dispense with capitals) in a series called "lilla serien" with a distinct focus on translations of modern and classical poetry. Ellerströms is a small press of long standing with some 200 titles in their backlist. One year later, Ingmar Simonsson, likewise a poet-translator, brought out a larger body of Stevens' poems under the title Klippan och andra dikter [The Rock and Other Poems]. Simonsson's translation of "The Man with the Blue Guitar" is part of a bilingual edition published by Themis, a tiny press with only some twenty publications. Clearly, both of Stevens' Swedish publishers appeal to a small market, their focus being on serious primary literature rather than on commercial viability.

By now, Stevens' poetry has been translated into Swedish some five times. The first translations were of individual poems and appeared already during the poet's lifetime, in the early 1950s. They were the work of Erik Lindegren, a modernist Swedish poet and later (between 1961 and 1968) a member of the Swedish Academy/Nobel Prize Committee. For the first book-length translation of Stevens' poems, we had to wait until 1957, when Folke Isaksson (again a well-known poet) brought out a gathering under the blanket title Dikter [Poems]. About a quarter-century later, in 1983, a second volume of translations came out, Och världen i stillhet: valda dikter [And the World Was Calm: Selected Poems] by Lars Nyström. And in 1998, Ulf Linde, another member of the Nobel Prize Committee, proposed an ambitious third volume, with abstract illustrations by Curt Asker, under the title Om att bara finnas [Of Mere Being]. Over the years, some of Stevens' poems have been translated more than once; there are, for instance, four Swedish versions of "The Snow Man." Stevens' "mind of winter" has surely acquired additional meanings when imagined in a Scandinavian context. It was sometimes interpreted as the soul and sometimes as the memory of winter. In Simonsson's new translation, it becomes "vintersinne": by the inclusion of the word "inne" (inside) within the word "sinne" (mind), the winter is placed in a double interior.

Although Stevens' poetry found its way into Swedish early, public acknowledgment has been slow. A remark by Ulf Linde points to the belatedness of Stevens' recognition in Sweden: in 1996, Linde called Stevens "one of the big misses of the Swedish Academy . . . and now it is of course too late" (WSJrnl 20.2: 252). One cannot help but think that Stevens might have been awarded the Nobel Prize had Linde or Lindegren been a member of the committee before his death. In spite of this big miss, previous translations of Stevens' poetry garnered some publicity and enthusiasm among Swedish poetry readers. Yet, as Simonsson recently pointed out, the enthusiasm did not last long: "Wallace Stevens is one of the greatest poets but...