Harry Martinson – Poetry
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1974 was divided equally between Eyvind Johnson "for a narrative art, far-seeing in lands and ages, in the service of freedom" and Harry Martinson "for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos"
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NobelPrize.org
Harry Martinson

Poetry

English

Swedish

Have you seen a tramp collier …

Have you seen a tramp collier come out of a hurricane—

with broken booms, gunwales shot to pieces,

crumpled, gasping, come to grief—

and her captain gone all hoarse?

Snorting, she puts in at the sunlit wharf,

exhausted, licking her wounds

while the steam thins in her boilers.

By Harry Martinson

From Spökskepp, 1929

Translated by Stephen Klass

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson

From Listener

I was small in the listening days.

At late harvests toothless mouths told

of leprous marsh-spot in the seed and

the bitter bloom of ergot on the rye.

I grew cold at my childhood hearth

By Harry Martinson

From Nomad, 1931

Translated by Stephen Klass

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson

The Visions

With fright in their eyes

the soldiers of salvation beheld

from the helmeted observatory tower: the heavenly harps;

the swaying, titanic nebulae

and their chaotic strings of gaseous gold.

Far off in the boundless crystal of places beyond time

where thought in fright

can plunge everlastingly through millennia

stirred the gaslike golden bowers of the harps

effervescing in Sagittarius.

By Harry Martinson

From Natur, 1934

Translated by Stephen Klass

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson

Visit to the observatory

We viewed a nebula inside a tube.

To us a golden herd of mist it seemed.

In larger tubes it might have gleamed

as suns in thousands in their boundless space.

Our dizziness of mind imagined

that it rose, high up from war on earth,

from time and space—our life’s naivety—

to new dimensions in their majesty.

There no law rules of this life’s type.

There laws rule for the world where worlds abound.

There the suns roll out till they are ripe

and deep in the hearth of every sun resound.

Suns in plenitude are present there.

And there, to cosmic law, each sun pulsates

in larger suns’ unfathomable blaze.

And there all is brightness and the daylight of all days.

By Harry Martinson

From Passad, 1945

Translated by Stephen Klass

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson

From Li Kan speaks beneath the tree

Waves from all upheavals turn swiftly old

and paths from all upheavals soon become highroads.

What is left is a longing for something not

the wheel of appetites or revenges.

Man is best when he wishes good he cannot do

and stops breeding evil he finds easier to do.

He will still have a direction. It will have no end in view.

It is free from unsparing endeavor.

By Harry Martinson

From Passad, 1945

Translated by Stephen Klass

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson

Li Ti’s Advice

If you own two coppers, said Li-Ti on a journey,

buy one loaf of bread and one blossom.

The bread is there to fill you

The blossom you buy is to tell you

that life is worth the living.

By Harry Martinson

From Gräsen i Thule, 1958

Translated by Stephen Klass

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson

The electrons

With their round dance the electrons spin

chrysalises of that which abides,

the inmost cocoons

which do not open of their own accord

but are of that which abides.

There it is not a matter of hatching out.

There it is a matter of tending and protecting

the metamorphoses of the inmost

deeper-down swaying,

the innermost playing of women in dance.

By Harry Martinson

From Dikter om ljus och mörker, 1971

Translated by Stephen Klass

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson

The inner light

In the inmost of the smallest of all spaces

runs a mute and constant play of color, inaccessible to eyes.

It is the light shut in that once in the moment of creation

was born inward and abode there, going on,

once it had broken up into the smallest of spectra

in keeping with prismatic law

at frequencies that by the sighted would be called colors

if they encountered eyes able to see.

It moved in periods

unimaginably small for time and space

but still with time and space enough for the least of the small.

In fact it found it had ample room and time.

It moved in cycles of nanoseconds and microspaces

from white light and the colors of the spectrum and back to white light.

A kind of breathing for light.

The photons breathed and pulsated with one another,

alternating signs and levels.

So the light kept going in spectral balance

from dense light to split

and back to dense light and split,

in spectral cycles infinitely repeated.

It was like a play of fans,

in keeping with the same law that holds for rainbows,

but with spread and folded fans

alternating with one another

in keeping with the law of light inscribed in them.

It was the light when it dances enclosed

when it is not traveling abroad and seen.

It belongs to the nature of light

that it can be shut in

and still not die out in its movement

that it preserves itself thus in the darkness

as thought, intent and aptitude,

that it remembers its changes

and performs its dance, its interplay.

With this art the light keeps together

the innumerable swarms of matter

and sings with light’s spectral wings

the endless song in honor of the fullness of the world.

By Harry Martinson

From Dikter om ljus och mörker, 1971

Translated by Stephen Klass

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson

The great trouble

Nature’s laws are already on the way

to stand us all against the wall.

That wall is law’s own nature.

It is missing an evangel.

That great trouble all of us must share.

Then it will be possible to bear.

The great trouble is to take great trouble.

That is what all of us must learn.

Amid all shoulds and should have beens

there is one must for all.

All must learn to take great trouble with the world.

Now that man has gotten power enough

to bring about the trouble of the world

the time is now

to heal the trouble of the world in time

before all nature has become

everybody’s troubled child.

This is called taking trouble in time.

True trouble

which sees in time to what it sees.

By Harry Martinson

From Dikter om ljus och mörker, 1971

Translated by Stephen Klass and Carolyn Skantz

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson

Along the paths of echo

Along the paths of echo backwards.

There the words lie in the chest of their old meanings.

But, sad, so foreign. What is it they are saying, those lips.

They speak of different connections and conditions.

As you listen to them speaking

they form a thing that is also changed by them

spell in a language even farther removed

in still another of the chests

inside the mount of the seven chests

thousands and thousands of years before Babylon.

By Harry Martinson

From the posthumous collection Längs ekots stigar, 1978

Translated by Stephen Klass and Carolyn Skantz

Published with the permission of Eva Martinson

Poems selected by Ulf Larsson, The Nobel Museum.