Thomas Tronstrom and Monica
First Movement: Lively Allegro
Let's start at the beginning. Thomas Tronstrom was born in Stockholm in 1931 to a mother who was an elementary school teacher and a journalist father. After his parents divorced, he lived with his mother and maternal grandparents. From an early age, Thomas showed an artistic sensitivity and uneasiness, and being separated from his mother on the street was enough to cause him to have the "horror of death", and being treated as a child by adults also made him feel that his dignity was violated. Fortunately, his closest elders gave him an almost doting tolerance, and they treated this precocious child with the attitude of an adult, allowing him to grow like a small tree without restraint.
Thomas Jr. likes to collect insects and often roams the countryside with his nets. He seemed to have an innate sensitivity to the beauty of nature, and the wilderness and forests of Sweden gave him the first inspiration. Even with his sideburns, Tronström remembers picking mushrooms in the woods of Smoland with his mother as a child: "That's when I started collecting archives about the sky and the woodland. These archives gradually accumulated in his memory, forming a huge archive and re-emerging in his later poems.
As he grew older, Thomas gradually discovered another world beyond reality. He began to read a great deal of literature, philosophy and history. Although all of his later works belonged to the Modernists, his reading tastes tended to be classical; At the age of fifteen he began to study Latin, studying the classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome. Horace was particularly intoxicated by the poetry of the ancient Roman master who discovered innocence and sophistication beyond time.
That same winter, Thomas experienced his first purgatory in his life, anxiety disorder. The first symptoms came in late autumn, when he felt extreme fear after watching a movie about the mental state of an alcoholic and began to convulse; After the convulsions subside, fear remains tightly wrapped around them
Him. Every night after that, he was "locked up in a black searchlight that did not emit light", controlled by inexplicable terror. He couldn't sleep, read all night under the lamp, but couldn't see anything; As soon as you close your eyes, distorted faces and bodies appear in your mind. Medicine and religion could not help him, and throughout the long winter he wrestled with fear alone until dawn drove away the darkness. He worries that he will fall into madness, or that he will already be crazy.
By the following spring, his symptoms gradually subsided, and he finally left completely on a "pale spring night". Looking back on this paragraph after many years
When explaining the experience, Tron Strom wrote: "I have discovered a kind of demonic power. Or rather, it was the power of the devil that discovered me. It was also during this period that he began to write poetry. We have no way of knowing whether poetry is an exorcism ritual or a manifestation of demonic power; What is certain is that eight years later he published his first collection of poems, Seventeen Poems, which shook the Swedish poetry scene at that time.
Kitajima said of Tronström's debut novel: "Most poets have matured through the grinding of time, and Thomas has shown astonishing maturity from the beginning. It can even be said that Thomas's writing is not a question of progress or not—he has reached its peak as soon as he appears, and his later writing is nothing more than an extension of the rich range of themes. ”
The opening work of the Seventeen Poems, the Overture, is clear and sharp, like an early morning horn piercing the night. In this poem we read Thomas's childhood wandering and juvenile reflections, and see him finally break through the darkness of chaos and leap into the bright world of his youth.
overture
Awakening is the parachute jump out of a dream
Get rid of the suffocating vortex
The rover lands toward the green zone in the morning
Everything burns. He perceived—flying with a lark
Posture – dense tree roots
The countless lights shook underground. But on the ground
Green – in a tropical style – standing
Raise your arms and listen
The rhythm of the invisible water pump. He fell into the summer, fell in
Blinding potholes in the summer, falling into
Shivering under the sun's fire
Checkerboard of wet green vasculatures. So stopped
This crosses the straight line of the moment, the wings spread
Rapids roost on the osprey
Bronze Age trumpet
An uneasy melody hangs over the abyss
In the morning light, consciousness grasps the world
It's like a hand grasping a stone as warm as the sun
The rover stands under the tree. while
Through the vortex of death
Could there be a huge light spreading above his head?
(Seventeen Poems, 1954)
Second Movement: A slow plate like a song
Many literary masters have engaged in professions far removed from literature. Kafka worked in insurance companies all his life, T.S. Eliot worked as a bank clerk, Coetze wrote computer programs, and Nabokov taught English, French, tennis and even boxing during his early exile; Trånström was a psychiatrist.
Perhaps due to the impact of his anxiety experience, Thomas chose Stockholm University to major in psychology after graduating from high school, minoring in literature and religion. After six years of study, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and then went on to work at a juvenile correctional institution near the city of Lin Xueping. In Kitajima's romantic imagination, this profession suits a poet because "poetry is like a juvenile delinquent". But the reality is far less romantic. Thomas confronted a restless and rude collective, and in order to earn their respect he had to go against his own nature and put on a mask of sternness. But his acting skills were not as brilliant as he expected. More than thirty years later, Tronström, who had long since become a famous poet, happened to meet a prisoner of that year and asked him what he thought of him at that time. He thought that the other party would answer "strictly" or "tough", but the unexpected answer was "absent-minded". Tron Strom wrote this sentence in Golden-wing:
Those who have nowhere to go but their own heads
Those who are never absent-minded
Those who never open the wrong door and catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar face
Stay away from them!
He himself clearly does not belong to "those people". His soul was too loud to be dull in a mediocre life. We can say that Freud was a psychologist who loved literature, while Trånstrom did the opposite: he was essentially a poet, and his background in psychology added a footnote to his poetry.
Neil Asterley, editor of the famous British poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books, points out the connection between Tronström's work and his profession: "He has been a psychiatrist for most of his life, and his work has a powerful psychological insight into human nature. Tronström left juvenile correctional centers in 1966, but psychotherapy remained his "main business" until 1990.
At the age of 26, Tronström met the most important woman of his life: Monica Brad. At the time, she was only 18 years old. The two were introduced to each other by acquaintances, but did not immediately develop a deep relationship. The following year, he and she were reunited by chance on the streets of Stockholm, and this time as if some kind of chance had been triggered, they quickly fell in love and married in the same year. Monica couldn't write poetry, but that didn't stop her from being Thomas's only companion in life. The relationship between Sartre and Beauvoir, Heidegger and Arendt is more of an intellectual affection, while the love between Thomas and Monica comes from the resonance of the soul. This love is so strong and powerful enough to provide shelter for two nameless people in this noisy world, so that they will not be engulfed by the ubiquitous loneliness.
couple
They turn off the lights. White lampshade
Shines a little before dissolving
Like a pill in a dark glass. Then float up
The walls of the hostel enter the darkness of the sky
The movement of love subsided. They go to sleep
But their most secret thoughts
Like a little boy on wet drawing paper
The two colors meet and permeate together
Darkness, silence. The city is at night
Approach. With a window that goes out. Houses come on
One by one, they stood in the squeeze of waiting
A bunch of expressionless people
(Unfinished Sky, 1962)
Third movement: small steps
Trånström was never a prolific poet. He often wrote a poem that took years, and every word was tempered.
Until it becomes pure steel. He produced a collection of poems every four years, no more than twenty poems, but it must be a major event in the Swedish poetry scene.
In the mid-1960s, almost the entire world fell into political madness. Tronström was silent about the vigorous social democratic movement, and the fashionable "revolution" could not be found in his poetry. Peers accused him of being a "bourgeois", "conservative" and "export poet", but they could not prevent his work from being translated into more and more words and spreading around the world. Many Eastern European poets who were banned for political reasons found their voices in Tronström's poetry, and some have since befriended him. In those days, he wrote "To the Friend Behind the Line."
1
The letter to you is so brief. And I can't write it
It's like an ancient spaceship expanding, expanding,
Finally disappear through the night sky.
2
At the moment the letter was in the hands of the Prosecutor. He turned on the light.
Under the lights, my words jumped like monkeys to the railing,
Shake your body and stand quietly, teeth bared!
Please recall the meaning in the sentence. We will meet in two hundred years.
At that time, the megaphone on the wall of the hotel had been forgotten,
We were finally able to sleep peacefully and become fossils.
(The Path, 1973)
The lifespan of those "megaphones" was shorter than he had predicted. Just twenty years later, the illusion of revolution was shattered, and the times turned to pay homage to Trånstrom. He became a recognized master of modernism in Europe, and honors poured in. In the spring of 1985, Tronstrom visited Beijing and met his first Chinese translator, Kitajima. The 36-year-old Chinese poet took the 54-year-old Swedish poet to climb the Great Wall: "Thomas was happy that day, his face rosy, the sun turning in his deep wrinkles. He touched the inscriptions on the battlements where so-and-so had visited, and was amazed at the strong desire of the people to be remembered. I asked him to turn his head and swing the shutter. In that instant, he crossed his hands and smiled, and the wind lifted his blond hair that was beginning to fade. ”
That was the heyday of Tronström's life and career.
In December 1990, at the age of 59, Thomas suffered a sudden stroke and has since lost his ability to speak. His mind was clear, but he could only move his lips and tongue to say the sentence he wanted to say, and could only spit out fragmented syllables. At the same time, the right hand on which he was writing also lost consciousness. The road to the outside world is cut off, and the poet is trapped in a closed world. The horror that had occurred at the age of fifteen once again seized Thomas, and he could not even cry out for help: the disease had turned him into a weak baby.
Like being a child
Like being a child, a huge humiliation
Like a sack wrapped around the head
The eye holes of the bag shine with sunlight
You hear the hum of the cherry tree
But to no avail, that great humiliation
Wrap your head, chest, knees
Your body is occasionally active
But it is not rejoicing in spring
Flash the hat, just let it cover your face
And look out from the inside
The ripples in the bay are silently crowded
Green leaves darken the earth
(Gondola of Sorrow, 1996)
This time, it was Monica who dispersed his night. She quit her job as a nurse and took care of him with all her patience and energy, listening to his baby-like chatter Thomas Tronstrom. In the summer of 1991, Kitajima visited Thomas and witnessed the exchange between husband and wife: "I saw Monica close to Thomas, and his eyes were on his face, reading his heart. She often guessed wrong, too, and Thomas gestured to help her. For example, guessing the time to five years, the fingers increase to the right, the left decreases, subtle like tuning. With Monica's help, Thomas even picked up the pen again. He wrote scrawled words with his left hand, she transcribed them for him, and he made changes based on her typescript, one after another, like playing tennis.
Seven years later, Kitajima visited Stockholm again, and Thomas's gaze had regained its pre-stroke composure. He chatted with Kitajima about the weather, the music, the poetry... Monica is his voice, and the two have already reached a real heart-to-heart connection. Thomas showed Kitajima his new book: he had published two books of poetry since that terrible winter, and was accumulating a third. He wrote slower, less, but more beautifully than ever.
Fourth Movement: The Solemn Row Board
Since 1993, the name of Thomas Tronström has appeared on the shortlist of each Nobel Prize in Literature, but the Swedish Academy of Literature has repeatedly bestowed the laurels on writers from the Americas, Africa or Asia. In addition to the artistic considerations, there are also political factors here: since the joint award of two Swedish writers (Evont Johnson and Harry Martinson) in 1974 caused an uproar, the Nobel Jury has consciously or unconsciously avoided its own countrymen. Many people complained about Tronström, and Walcott, the 1992 Nobel Laureate, publicly stated: "The Swedish Academy should not hesitate to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Tronström, even though he is Swedish." ”
However, the poet himself does not seem to care. He still writes poetry at a slow but determined pace, while his words become more and more condensed, revealing an oriental Zen meaning.
Haiku
One
Power leads
Stretched in the north of the music
That cold kingdom
**
White sun
To the Blue Hill of Death
Run alone
**
Must and graceful grass wire
Living together
And the laughter of the cellar
**
The sun is low
Our shadow is a giant. all
Soon it was a shadow
(Gondola of Sorrow, 1996)
In 2011, Thomas was eighty years old. The annual Nobel Prize quiz game was in full swing, and a bookmaker offered him odds of 7 to 1, which made him laugh. Every year at this time he sat excitedly in front of the TV with his wife, Monica, to watch the hilarity, but this time they got "inside information" ahead of time—five minutes before the final results were announced, Peter Henlund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy of Letters, called them.
Just an hour later, a large number of reporters gathered outside the doors of Mr. and Mrs. Trântström's apartment. Thomas put a sweater over his homely striped shirt and walked out of the house with Monica's support, and the crowd erupted in cheers. Faced with countless long and short shots and expectant gazes, Thomas revealed a clumsy smile and muttered vaguely: "Ja, Ja (very good, very good)..."
Yes, everything was fine.
Source: The Economic Observer - Book Review Supplement