Face to Face
by Tomas Tranströmer
(versions by Robin Robertson from The Deleted World, Enitharmon)

In February life stood still.
The birds refused to fly and the soul
grated against the landscape as a boat
chafes against the jetty where it’s moored.

The trees were turned away. The snow’s depth
measured by the stubble poking through.
The footprints grew old out on the ice-crust.
Under tarpaulin, language was being broken down.

Suddenly, something approaches the window.
I stop working and look up.
The colours blaze. Everything turns around.
The earth and I spring at each other.

To Friends Behind a Border

I
I wrote to you so cautiously. But what I couldn’t say
filled and grew like a hot-air balloon
and finally floated away through the night sky.

II
Now my letter is with the censor. He lights his lamp.
In its glare my words leap like monkeys at the wire mesh,
clattering it, stopping to bare their teeth.

III
Read between the lines. We will meet in two hundred years
when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten
– when they can sleep at last, become ammonites.

In February life often seems to stand still; we’re waiting for the explosion of spring that is working away beneath the Earth’s crust, out of sight until it’s ready. Our poet is in a far colder place than we are (although I can’t promise that it won’t snow before this is published).

We respond to warmth and beauty, so, in an environment that is covered by snow week after interminable week, our souls would indeed grate against the frozen landscape as we wait for winter to pass. The analogy of a boat chafing against the jetty reminds us how vulnerable our spirits are, being connected to – and affected by – our physical comfort and visual surroundings.

When the trees are “turned away” it is as if they have no expression of life in them, I think of them as having their backs turned against us. When language is being broken down under a tarpaulin I imagine that there are people under there – perhaps it is a tarpaulin that acts as a roof for the place where the poet is working?

The breaking down of language could mean that the content is being deconstructed as if there is an argument, or the words are being made small and brittle by the freezing temperatures, or it might describe the way that people cease to communicate as they grit their teeth and wait for spring. But I think it is the poet, working away with words, dissecting and manipulating them to suit his purpose.

“The colours blaze”, he tells us, when something has approached the window and “Everything turns around”, as opposed to being turned away like the trees with their backs to us; everything is suddenly opposite to the way it was. It was dead and expressionless before, but now “everything” is facing the poet, full of life and expression. When he says “The earth and I spring at each other” it is as if we are witnessing two animals leaping to attack, or embrace, or simply meet in wonder. The word “spring” is both the movement described, and the season that has just exploded into being. At last.

The second poem describes the feeling of frustration at censorship. At a time when our personal details are being lost en masse by the very government agencies that should protect our information; when the criminal appears to have more human rights than the victim; when the number of people entering the country may well force us to turn Britain into one large city – where the congestion charge is applied from Land’s End to John o’Groats – and political correctness discourages us from complaining for fear of castigation, I try to console myself that there have always been countries that are worse off (although this is an undesirable means of consolation). To my knowledge our letters are not yet censored . . .

Huge thoughts that the poet would like to convey in a letter to a friend – which are prohibited – float off like a hot-air balloon. His pent-up fury at knowing that his words will be subject to scrutiny and deletion, no matter how carefully he chose them, is expressed in the way he likens them to caged monkeys with bared teeth, craving freedom. Disempowered, much as we might feel to be.

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