In 1974, on the 200th anniversary of the Royal Swedish Academy, two Swedish authors shared the Nobel Prize for Literature: Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson. Both belonged to a large group of prominent writers who emerged during the 1920s and 1930s from rural, proletarian origins to dominate Swedish literary life for the next half century. Most had very little formal education—they were a generation of autodidacts. Harry Martinson (1904 – 1978), in particular, had no formal schooling beyond his thirteenth year, but possessed an insatiable appetite for reading, a very good memory, an acute, observant eye and a vivid imagination. He also had a spellbinding voice.
Almost all of Martinson’s early writings grew out of his personal experiences as a child and young man. Because of this strong autobiographical emphasis, a few words about his early life are in order. In 1910, when Martinson was six years old, the family fell apart. His father died of tuberculosis and his mother—overwhelmed by debt and personal difficulties—fled to America, abandoning her seven children. Soon after, they were scattered as foster children on various farms in the local area, being moved around on an annual basis. For the young boy, much of the next decade was characterized by scant letters from his mother, endless work, often loveless homes and a lingering sense of rootlessness. As he says in the poem “Listeners,” “I froze at my childhood’s hearth.” But there were also wonderful places where his young mind could find refuge. He loved school and he loved to read. He always knew the answers to the teacher’s questions. Nature fascinated him, as did geography and astronomy.
At age 16, Martinson became a sailor. It was a dream he had nurtured for many years. The main reason for this was to find passage to the United States. In 1922 he finally made it to New York where he tried to contact his mother, who lived in Portland, Oregon. The attempt failed. Disheartened, he ended up spending the next five years as a vagabond in Sweden and South America, and as a sailor on the world’s oceans. In 1927, following a case of malaria and early signs of tuberculosis, he left the sea permanently and returned to Sweden. Homeless, destitute and ill, he turned to poetry, writing down his experiences and memories, and trying to sell them to newspapers and magazines. It was a difficult time. But in that same year, at the office of a radical newspaper in Gothenburg, he was introduced to Helga Johansson, a recently widowed leftist feminist. She was fourteen years his senior, the mother of three grown sons. Helga also nurtured the dream of becoming a writer. She invited him to come and stay for a while on her small farm outside Stockholm. He accepted the invitation.
It was on this farm that Martinson launched his writing career. His first book, a volume of poems entitled Spökskepp [Phantom Ships], was published in 1929. Shortly after its publication he married Helga, who took the pen name Moa Martinson. It marked the beginning of an incredibly productive period for both of them. During the following decade Harry Martinson wrote prose, poetry, essays and drama. He wrote for the press. He painted. He appeared on the radio. He developed friendships with many contemporary authors and painters. Soon, he was something of a celebrity. At the outbreak of World War II, when his marriage to Moa came to an abrupt end, Martinson had published two more books of poetry, two prose volumes depicting his experiences as a vagabond and sailor, two autobiographical novels describing his childhood and youth, as well as three books of nature essays.
The five major themes in Martinson’s oeuvre—memories from his childhood, his life as a sailor, his experiences as a vagabond, his keen observations of nature and a fascination with astronomy and space—can be found throughout the poems as well. Many of the poems in this collection deal with his experience as a sailor. They convey a wide emotional spectrum—energy, curiosity, flights of fancy, humor, sadness, longing and rootlessness. There is an appealing, positive tone in many of these poems and a freshness in the language. Among other things, one notices an innovative use of compounds and striking visual imagery that reflects his interest in painting. These poems somehow also convey the feeling that being a sailor holds the essence of a life lived fully and freely. Some of the poems hold a metaphorical dimension. “Have You Ever Seen a Coal Tramp …” is as much a 1927 Martinson self-portrait—leaving the ocean behind for good—as it is a description of a storm-damaged “tramp,” one of those cargo vessels without a fixed schedule.
Closely related to his life as a sailor is his life as a vagabond, and in both instances one quickly becomes aware of a deep sense of rootlessness at the core of Martinson’s identity. It was a feeling that apparently coalesced early in his psyche, and was reinforced yet again with his failed attempt to reunite with his mother. After seven years as a sailor and tramp, it was there to stay. Occasionally he explores its dark side. A poem such as “Prison” makes clear that rootlessness could come dangerously close to hopelessness. But much more often, Martinson transforms this feeling into a philosophy of life, an outlook he refers to as being a “world nomad.” The fact that he uses “nomad” twice for a book title —a dozen years apart—for two very different collections of his poetry, points to its centrality and lasting significance in his thinking.
Many of these poems also roam the world of childhood memories. Harry Martinson loved children, their spirit, potential, creativity, playfulness and innocence. Childish becomes a synonym for possible. In this group of poems there are glimpses of play mates, such as “Anni” with the glittering eyes, with whom he gets in trouble for just being a child. There are recollections of stern and loveless foster parents, of storytelling around the hearth in the old days before electricity, and of the loving images of women farm hands working long, hard days on farms and crofts. Women, it should be noted, play significant roles in Martinson’s work and often come to symbolize different aspects of his lost mother.
From a very early age, Martinson was fascinated with the natural world and throughout his work it constantly serves as a refuge from the world of harsh realities. Over time, Martinson acquired a deep and wide knowledge of flora and fauna and became one of the early proponents of an “ecological” point of view. In his poetry, the explorations of the natural world usually begin with small things, with a beetle or a bird call, rarely with the grandiose or overtly magnificent. In a few poems we catch a glimpse of his early fascination with space, a life-long interest that would eventually lead to the creation of his famous epic poem about the space ship Aniara.
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It is from the river of poems from the late 1920s through World War II that these translations have been selected. Reading through Martinson’s collected poems, whenever I found one that spoke to me, I paused and asked myself two questions: Had it ever been translated into English? If not, I considered it available. Would an American reader without detailed knowledge of early 20th century Swedish culture, geography, and history be able to appreciate the poem without notes or commentary? If the answer was yes, I translated it.
Lars Nordström
Beavercreek 2008