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Jesper Svenbro

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Three-toed Gull, Sighted Near the Lighthouse of Kullen

I was familiar with the sense of soaring from the music
of Lars-Erik Larsson: he must have seen
the same water surfaces as I, been filled by the same light
along the same curving coastline,
and felt the slowly rising movement of the summer
in an outer world which already was an inner one:
it was as if one stood and looked northwest
where the northern Sound has imperceptibly become the Kattegat
on a day when all the sea is placid and the sky light-blue
and a hazy fog seals the horizon –
the blank shining ground-swell
with a single floating tuft of seaweed
or a bit of plank which heaves, heaves
slowly mirroring itself, while the sea’s
cool and intensely shining mist
rises up in microscopic crystals of salt –
soaring in the air where the Sound opens out
on an unfathomable beyond and a single three-toed gull
which, battered from some afterworld of flight,
comes in view as flying’s sole survivor
gliding inland towards the lighthouse at Kullaberg –
Winddriventhing at rest in the bluest of hazes
or perhaps an optical illusion in the prisms of the lighthouse
open toward monotony of air –
all alone on a summer’s day,
which sees the loss of the horizon,
takes a giddy gyroscopic turn and topples over in memory
without a sense of anything but height and depth
as if shutting its eyes to the infinite
with wings spread wide, rising and sinking and soaring
seems to free itself at last
from the immense and sparkling blue.




Jesper Svenbro is one of the leading Swedish poets of his generation. He was born in 1944 in the small town of Landskrona in southern Sweden, a region which has remained important to him despite a long residence abroad. An internationally renowned classical scholar, Svenbro has had his most important works (chiefly written in French) translated into English. Phrasikleia, An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece was published by Cornell University Press and The Craft of Zeus, in collaboration with John Scheid, by Harvard. He has published nine volumes of poetry in Sweden. The poems here are part of a selection of poems to appear in English translation from Northwestern University Press. Svenbro lives in Paris where he holds a post at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique.
John Matthias is an American poet, critic and translator. He has published nine volumes of poetry in the US including Swimming at Midnight: Selected Shorter Poems, Beltane at Aphelion: Collected Longer Poems and, most recently, Pages: New Poems and Cuttings. He co-edited and co-translated with Göran Printz-Påhlson the Anvil Press anthology Contemporary Swedish Poetry. Matthias teaches at the University of Notre Dame and is poetry editor of Notre Dame Review.
Lars-Håkan Svensson has translated poetry and prose from Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Danish and English. His translations from English include books by John Matthias, Paul Muldoon and Les Murray. He has recently published a selection of the correspondence between Tomas Tranströmer and Robert Bly, translating Bly’s letters into Swedish as well as those written in English by Tranströmer. Svensson teaches at the University of Lund.
Göran Printz-Påhlson is a well-known poet, critic and translator. He collaborated with John Matthias on the Anvil Press anthology Contemporary Swedish Poetry. Bonniers has published his Collected Poems and a recent volume of essays. Having taught at Cambridge for many years, he now lives in Malmo. Svenbro’s 1979 volume, Sarimner, was dedicated to Printz-Påhlson.


from Three-Toed Gull: Selected Poems by Jesper Svenbro. Translated by John Matthias and Lars-Hakan Svensson. Evanston: Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press, 2003.

http://nupress.northwestern.edu

 

Translated by John Matthias, Lars-Hakan Svensson

Page(s) 172-173

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