#robin fulton

We stepped in. A single vast hall, silent and empty, where the surface of the floor lay like an abandoned skating rink. All doors shut. The air grey.

Paintings on the walls. We saw pictures throng lifelessly: shields, scale- pans, fishes, struggling figures in a deaf-and-dumb world on the other side.

A sculpture was set out in the void: in the middle of the hall alone a horse stood but at first when we were absorbed by all the emptiness we did not notice him.

Fainter than the breathing in a shell sounds and voices from the town circling in this desolate space murmuring and seeking power.

Also something else. Something darkly set itself at our senses’ five thresholds without stepping over them. Sand ran in every silent glass.

It was time to move. We walked over to the horse. He was gigantic, dark as iron. An image of power itself abandoned when the princes left.

I I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn’t write swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship and drifted away at last through the night sky.

II The letter is now at the censor’s. He lights his lamp. In the glare my words fly up like monkeys on a grille, rattle it, stop, and bare their teeth.

III Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten and can at last sleep, become trilobites.

Tomas Tranströmer (Aprl 15, 1931 - 2015) was a Swedish poet and Nobel Laureate. He has been translated into 60+ languages.

Here is a sample where Tranströmer borrows Keats’ nightingale and transplants it to a nature reserve in Sweden:

The Nightingale in Badelunda

In the underground station. A crowding among placards in a staring dead light.

The train arrived and collected faces and portfolios.

Darkness next. We sat in the carriages like statues, hauled through the caverns. Restraint, dreams, restraint.

In stations under sea level they sold the news of the dark. People in motion sadly silently under the clock dials.

The train carried outer garments and souls.

Glances in all directions on the journey through the mountain. Still no change.

But nearer the surface a murmuring of bees began—freedom. We stepped out of the earth.

The land beat its wings once and became still under us, widespread and green.

Ears of corn blew in over the platforms.

Terminus—I followed on, further.

How many were with me? Four, five, hardly more.