Nordic noir: fiction, reality and Tomas Tranströmer

I watched the new Nordic noir, The Bridge, at the weekend.  So far, it doesn’t appeal as much as others of its genre.  The characters aren’t compelling - they all felt so real in The Killing, and in Borgen.  I more or less accepted this new lot while they were on screen, but there’s no sense yet of a life beyond that.  Part of me believes (and believed from the first ever episode) that Sarah Lund is still out there, in another very desirable jumper, having awkward insights into the latest crime and being miserable but persistent.. 

As for Kurt Wallander, I met him last week.  He lit a cigarette almost in my face, so I gave him a dirty look.  No, I’m sane, it happened like this!  Poet in the City put on an event at the British Library to celebrate Tomas Tranströmer, Nobel Prize laureate of 2011.  It was rather grand - co-organised by the Swedish Embassy, with speeches and classical musicians. Diplomatic occasions tend to be cringe-making, but this one was also enjoyable because TT was there, beaming in response to the outbursts of spontaneous applause and standing ovations, and we heard lots of his poems in both Swedish and English, some interestingly set to music.  The Swedish reader turned out to be… Wallander, aka Krister Henriksson. 

When I arrived at the British Library conference centre, my way in was blocked by a man standing in the door lighting a cigarette - the cigarette was outside but he was mostly still inside.  Ah, a Swede, I thought, from his face and his suit, which was stylish in a very unEnglish way.  Knows the rules but doesn’t like them.. very pleased with himself.. looks familiar.    When I said Excuse me (with dirty look) he stood aside very politely, though possibly with a trace of irony...  And soon there he was on stage, reading well enough to break down the prejudice of those of us who think that actors are apt to act poetry, read it too poetically.  I love the Swedish å, similar to ‘awe’ but fuller, deep-throated.    

It was a big shame that Robin Fulton, translator into English of Tranströmer and others, wasn’t there to speak as advertised.  His Bloodaxe Tranströmer, New Collected Poems, has been updated since my version, with some new poems from the mid-2000’s.  In compensation for Fulton’s absence, MPT editor David Constantine talked about truth and poetry, and how poetry challenges our habits of thought and of words.  I picked up a copy of the new MPT afterwards, because it had so much interesting stuff I couldn’t resist, including a very good translation by Ingar Palmlund of Tranströmer’s poem ‘Allegro’.  I’d love to quote all of it but had better not; and won’t quote the amazing last two couplets without the rest of the poem, so here are the second and third.  The speaker is playing Haydn ‘after a dark day’:

The keys are willing.  Mild hammers strike. 

The tone is green, lively and still.

The tone says that freedom exists

and that someone does not pay the emperor tribute.

In his talk, Constantine used two of the very best Tranströmer quotes, so the best of the best.  One from ‘Night Duty’:

The language marches in step with the executioners.

Therefore we must get a new language.

and ‘About History’:

Go like a bloodhound where the truth has trampled.

(Does Wallander ever quote Tranströmer? He should.)  And then there’s the line before that one:

Every problem cries in its own language.

The Debris Field

Three screens in a row, same film running on each, a wide black-and-white seascape.  A seagull flies from left to right, dark against the light reflected off the water.  It flies across all three screens at once.  The only other movement is the crawl of the waves, until a much more distant bird flies across from the right.  Music: haunting, elegiac, a bit chilling.  The sort of strings where you can sense the gut vibrating. 

A Titanic made of ice, melting.  (Or rather three: the three simultaneous screens.)  The four backwards-slanting funnels melt first, into little peaks.  The ship slips about as it sinks into its own puddle.  It could be any size - full-scale, blockbuster film model-in-a-pool, cocktail ice-in-a-glass.

Rivets: one cause of the ship’s undoing.  The boss’s obituary for a Belfast riveter who died during construction, a useful man. 

A silver teaspoon (or rather three) falls, further than any teaspoon would normally fall.  Much later, it falls again. 

The Titanic looms in from the left, a vast black bulk, maybe just departing. 

The sea keeps coming back, in widescreen and in close-up bubbles and wave-patterns, on the surface and down below.  Sea as sea, sea as abstract.  Music intertwines with the three speaking voices, and does all the things sea music should do - surge, fade, resurge.  Every now and then there’s a sinister sound too, as if of mechanical disfunction, something that’s got stuck. 

A child recalls how her father gave her a kiss as he lifted her into the lifeboat.  She uses the language of first or second class, not steerage. 

Voices describe the impact, each differently.  A slight jar.  Like calico tearing.  A grinding sound.

Beforehand, the sailors could smell ice nearby. 

At the beginning we are counted down into the debris field, into the deep, one to ten.  

At the end a white phrase is flashed up on the three black screens, over and over again, each time in a different language.  Each time in a different place on the screen, like white horses appearing here and there on a calm sea.  What was the phrase?  White… unforgiving (?)… of the sea.  It’s gone, but the feeling remains. 

Those are some of the things my memory has salvaged from The Debris Field, 45 minutes on the sinking of the Titanic with text by poets Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe, music by Oliver Barrett and film by Jack Wake-Walker.  There's a one-minute demo video here.  I tried to upload it, but aborted after a 15-minute wait - internet connection so slow I'm not sure I can post at all...

What would the voyagers have made of us, rows of people crowding an upstairs room at the BFI on Saturday evening, 100 years (less a few hours) after the iceberg struck? wondering what we were about to experience, with three blank computer screens in front of us.  And what would they have made of the debris field that’s accumulated in those 100 years, the history, the myth, the changing perspectives? 

The Debris Field film shows us all this, aslant.  It somehow makes its way through the Titanic ice-field, avoiding cliché.  Of course in 45 minutes there were a few bits that I felt worked less well, but my immersion was so deep they didn’t matter.  Maybe the key to the success of this collaboration is that its creators have trusted the audience to make sense of it ourselves.  We all have our own version of the legend - the things that went wrong, the class-based chances of survival, the opulence and poverty co-existing on board, the hubris of unsinkability.  The aftermath, the films, the discovery of the wreck.  We can all make our own connections.

For example, it would be easy to turn The Debris Field into a commentary on modern times - everyone gets sunk, and then the rich escape.  Instead we get a very brief reference to all this, a Titanic disaster-description mingled with a news report on crash economics. 

The text combines words of the three poets with quotes from the Titanic archive (so to speak) and from sea poetry of the past.  There was that wonderful bit of The Ancient Mariner when the ship sets sail and the crew see their familiar landmarks drop below the horizon.  Milton’s Lycidas was there, and Brecht, whom I missed, and I’m sure others I missed too.  Oh, and Cabaret.  The poets read live, though some of us didn’t realise this at first.   Their voices and the film, also a collage, blended into a whole with the music. 

I watched The Debris Field uncritically, in the sense that I didn’t think about how the collaboration worked. Afterwards, my expert neighbours were debating whether the text came first or afterwards.  That they couldn’t agree is surely a good sign.  In fact, according to Chris McCabe, the three poets wrote their text, and then gave the script to composer and film-maker to work in parallel.  There was a month at the end to adjust image, words and music all together.  The Poetry School blog has a good account by each of the three poets.

I’m sorry I haven’t done the poets’ words justice with any quotes.  I must have had a notebook on me, but I didn’t want to write anything down, it would have broken the immersion spell.  One of the good things about this event was the mixing-up of poetry with other worlds.  I didn’t know many people there.  The old friend I went with is a theoretical physicist, who enjoyed it as much as anyone. 

I hope it gets shown again soon.  I’d like to go again - it would be different the second time, new things would emerge from the debris field. 

PS: the white phrase on the black screens was:

       The white extent of the eternal sea

Patience Agbabi at Poetry on the Water

Poetry on the Water, Greenwich Yacht Club, Friday 4 May, 7pm.  Patience Agbabi our star guest. One of London’s best-kept-secret venues - the river on all four sides.  Sit with a drink, see the evening darken and the occasional barge pass. 

 

I’m slim as a silver stiletto, lit

by a fat, waxing moon and a seance

of candles dipped in oil of frankincense.

That’s the beginning of ‘Transformatrix’, last poem in Agbabi’s eponymous collection.  A dangerous sex session with the Muse, a sonnet as sharp on stage as on the page.  Almost a manifesto. Agbabi is a rarity - a poet and sonnet obsessive who is also a performer. I don’t just mean she reads well, she’s a professional. She blends traditional forms and subjects with new ones, from rap to… the problem page (her last book, Bloodshot Monochrome, has a set of prose sonnets: distressed famous sonnet-writers each get 8 lines to ask for 6-line advice from an agony aunt). The result is poems that are funny and/or fierce, zinging with energy. 

In Greenwich Agbabi will read, at least in part, from The Canterbury Tales Revisited, her new project:

Roger on the mike

host, take a hike

bards, on yer bike…

Her agent says: “Roger of Ware meets the Reveller; The Wife of Bafa meets husband number five; the contract killer meets his match. This is contemporary Chaucer: gritty, funny, upbeat, below-the-belt. But who tells the best tale? You decide…”

The Wife of Bath has already appeared in Transformatrix as Mrs Alice Ebi Bafa, a Nigerian trader:

My father had four wives

so I’ve had five husbands.

I cast a spell with my gap-toothed smile

and my bottom power. 

Three were good and two were bad.

Agbabi has written a bit about the Canterbury Tales project on her blog.  I think the Greenwich event may be the first time she’s trying the new tales out on an audience.  That will add to the excitement…  What’s more, my poachers’/poets’ diary says there will be “a fat, waxing moon” on 4 May - only two days short of full.  So come to Greenwich Yacht Club, watch the sun set behind the river and the moon rise, and enjoy Patience Agbabi’s seance. 

Transformatrix and Bloodshot Monochrome are published by Canongate.  There’s a good Agbabi interview (with Roddy Lumsden) at booksfromscotland.