Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hastar.
Schoolfield, George C.
Tua Forsstrom. Stockholm. Bonniers. 1997. 49 pages. 167 kr. ISBN 91-0-056462-1.
In order to understand this ninth collection by the most valid of
Swedish Finland's lyricists of the middle generation, one must see
the film Stalker (1979), written and directed by Andrey Tarkovsky. The
book is prefaced by a Swedish translation (by Per Arne Bodin) of a poem,
"Now the Summer Has Gone," by Tarkovsky's father, Arseny
Tarkovsky (b. 1907), which, in the film, is recited by
"Stalker" himself after he has guided "Professor"
and "Writer" into the mysterious "Zone," created by
a meteor strike. (In the screenplay, the poem is said to be the work of
the brother, a suicide, of still another traveler to the Zone, named
"Porcupine.") The textes de liaison of the collection itself
are taken variously from the statements of Stalker's wife, after
her husband has returned from his exhausting adventure, or from a
Swedish translation of Tarkovsky's book Den forseglade tiden. Three
of Forsstrom's poems are feigned letters to "Andrey
Arsenyevits" - the first of these also contains a substantial
definition of the "Zone" from the filmscript - and his spirit
is surely evident elsewhere.
Like her Finnish colleague Mirkka Rekola, Forsstrom has been
captivated by the evocative, eerie, and constantly dripping world of
Tarkovsky's motion picture. Another of her book's epistolary poems is addressed to a "Sextus Propertius" and has as its
epigraph a Swedish translation of the opening distich of Elegies 4:7,
the elegy in which a dream or nightmare of the late Cynthia appears to
the poet: "Sunt aliquid Manes: letum non omnia finit, / luridaque
evictos effugit umbra rogos." The myth of the loyal Procris
(Ovid's "fida conjunx"), unintentionally slain by her
husband Cephalus, also turns up in two poems, but other losses are also
at hand and need no explanation: the fate of the space dog Laika
("The dogs in your films remind me of Laika"), the black
kitten that has run away, the failing summer.
Forsstrom's lyric is not really learned; the allusions are used
easily and naturally to enhance the air of sadness or estrangement which
hangs over the whole, a genuinely and affectingly elegiac work, couched
in a conversational yet somehow always noble diction. (What a worthy and
rewarding object of translation it would be, like her 1992 collection,
Parkerna [see WLT 68:1, p. 150].) One would like to pose a raft of
questions to the poet (discreetly skirting possible autobiographical
content in, for example, the paired poems, "I knew a man" and
"I knew another man"), but many poems require no elucidation:
e.g., "The Angels in Karis," "Amber," and the
concluding title poem "After Having Spent a Night Among
Horses."
Honors have come to Tua Forsstrom lately, including the Tollander
Prize from the Swedish Literary Society. in Finland and the great prize
of the Nordic Council. Does Tarkovsky know what a tribute he has been
paid? In all likelihood he does not. But loss is the essence of the
elegy.
George C. Schoolfield Yale University
