Eva Ström talks to Göran Sonnevi, winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2006.

Top of the time column

by Eva Ström

It is a glorious day in March when I catch the commuter train to Göran Sonnevi's home in Jakobsberg outside Stockholm. These are classic stamping grounds for Swedish poets -- Karl Vennberg's last poetry collection was entitled 'While waiting for the commuter train' -- but I whizz past Spånga, where he wrote it, on my way to see this year's winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize. In my bag, I carry Oceanen ('The Ocean'), Sonnevi's highly praised pale blue book of poetry, 418 pages of weighty verse. The collection integrates poetry dealing with contemporary politics and social criticism with intimate everyday scenes, while advanced natural science alternates with close reading of Hölderlin and Blake. There are poems involving religious mysticism, curious, exact studies of nature and memories both happy and anguished from childhood, of parents and friends. The dead assume their given place in this musical weave of words, and so do eroticism and sexuality. Astonishingly, this book accommodates all aspects of being a human being, right now, in our own age. Our conversation will revolve not only around this rich, overflowing and visionary collection of poetry, but also around the poet's early childhood and his path to poetry.

A word that often comes up in reviews of your book is 'autobiographical'. How do you feel about such a description?
"I probably wouldn't use that term spontaneously about it. But as you grow older it becomes natural to look back. A word that I would rather use as an association would be 'time column', since I am at the top of my own time column, so to speak. But the word has a wider meaning than that, of course: we can lower ourselves down into a bigger time column, which is evolution itself, and naturally, there is the time column of history. Once both your parents are dead there is no one left to ask. Writing becomes a search for lost time in the sense that Proust used it, in the time column of your own life, but also in those of history, of evolution."

What did your path to poetry look like? Was there an intellectual tradition in your home?
"Not as such. There weren't many books in my home. My father was the director of a small company that manufactured paper bags for various purposes. He had a one-year business college diploma. My maternal grandparents lived in the same house when I was a child. I recall a family Bible with illustrations by Doré and a big book on the history of the world that belonged to my grandfather, it had Columbus' three ships, the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. There were also lots of books by Jack London, though possibly no-one read those. There was certainly no resistance to books, but no particular interest either. However, it turned out later that my father had owned a copy of Anna Karenina when he was young, and to my great surprise my mother said that they used to read it together."

What about children's books?
"I was given lots of children's books. Collections of fairy tales, Pelle Svanslös (a very popular Swedish children's book about a cat without a tail), Astrid Lindgren's books about Pippi Longstocking, Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson. I also discovered the public library and read all sorts of things. And we had an illustrated edition of the tales of Hans Christian Andersen at home. I particularly remember the story 'The Wicked Prince', it had a gruesome illustration of the prince holding a bloodied sword and standing before a burned-out, blackened town."

Did you write anything as a child?
"No, my chief interest was chemistry. A friend who was a few years older had arranged a chemical laboratory for himself and I wanted to do something similar. I was 9 years old. I placed a pastry board on top of the toilet in the basement of our house and there I placed a spirit lamp, test tubes and other equipment. I bought chemicals at the pharmacy and then I started experimenting. My first instruction book was called 'A Book of experiments for boys'."

A literature researcher, Mona Sandqvist, has pointed to an alchemistical streak in your poetry. Did you have any interest in that direction?
"Certainly not, even if I was aware it existed. I was fascinated by the chemical processes, particularly in inorganic chemistry. When I grew older and started secondary school I borrowed a fairly advanced German textbook on the topic, Lehrbuch der anorganischen Chimie , which I studied with great interest. But sometimes disaster wasn't far away! On one occasion I burnt my hand when I was mixing an oxide with aluminium powder and I wasn't allowed to go swimming for that entire summer. From time to time, my parents worried about the risk of explosion, but they still let me carry on."

But how did poetry enter your life?
"I think you could say that it came through music. You see, there was a great interest in music in my family. My father played the violin -- he was self-taught -- and my maternal grandparents were also musical. My grandfather was a schoolteacher and organist. I was given piano lessons, but I stopped because I found them a chore. However, I continued to play by ear with great enthusiasm, to pick out tunes and to improvise. At school, I then became a member of a jazz band, where I played the piano. In this way, I became part of a gang with a wider range of artistic interests."

What about Swedish lessons in school? Did that yield any inspiration?
"I wasn't too keen on the poetry we were supposed to read. It was Tegnér's 'Svea' and The Tales of Ensign Stål by Runeberg, but also some Old Icelandic poetry and 'Ariel's Song' by Shakespeare, which I came across when we read The Tempest in our English lessons in the last year lower secondary school:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade...

I also wasn't very good at writing essays. But then, in upper secondary school, we got a new teacher called Asketun. I remember writing an essay about Fellini's film Le notti di Cabiria , which I had seen and which had made an enormous impression on me. And I wrote freely, elliptically, without complete sentences, under the influence of the musical approach that I used in the band. Imagine my surprise when I got a response! An A-."

There are many poets who play the piano: Claes Andersson, Ole Hessler...
"Absolutely. And so does Tobias Berggren. He was in the same gang as I was. At about the time I began to write, I also started to read poetry. Saint-John Perse's Jord, Vindar, Hav ('Earth, Winds, Oceans', a collection of poems translated into Swedish) made a great impression on me."

Did you enjoy school?
"Well, I didn't not enjoy it, but the important things in life went on outside school. I performed with our band, Hurdy-Gurdy as we called it, and my own playing was in the be bop style. One of our members played sopranino sax in a New Orleans style, another wanted to write dodecaphonic music in the manner of Schönberg. He was the one who introduced me to contemporary art music. It was also at this time, in the final year at school, that I began to read more and more poetry: Mannen utan väg ('The Man Without a Way') by Erik Lindegren, which made a forceful impression, Södergran, Diktonius, Ekelöf, Martinson. At this same time I had also started writing poetry, something which coincided with the band breaking up in my last year at school. You could say that the need for expression that had been released in music now came out in writing. I wrote more, and I also started showing things I'd written to my friends."

Mathematics is a recurring theme in your poetry.
"I don't see natural science and the arts as opposites in principle. After all, I took mathematics as my main subject in school. Man has five fingers on a hand but it's still the same hand. As I said, chemistry was a great interest in my early life, but that faded during my last years in upper secondary school. When it comes to mathematics, it taught me to think in structures, including rhythm, and a perception of beauty. Mathematics had the ability to describe how the flow of time was divided up into different proportions."

Have you found opportunities to continue to study mathematics?
"I have continued to read a bit on my own. While Tord Hall was still alive, I sometimes discussed mathematical questions with him, and he was always most amiable and said my musings had relevance..."

What was your essay topic in the upper secondary school leaving examination?
"I wrote about advertising, its aims and methods. The first sentence was: 'And advertising advances across the world like a giant all-encompassing slug, leaving behind a rainbow-shimmering, cold, tough slime.'"

Good Heavens! That is poetic! Does advertising merit such fine metaphor?
"Oh, there was more to follow! Gigantic advertising projected on the moon and so on!"

What about after upper secondary school, what did you study?

"I went to Lund and started to study the history of literature, philosophy, the history of art and the history of religion, and eventually, I got a degree. Before that, I had gone to a careers counsellor who had naturally suggested I should train as an engineer with Chalmers. I consider my studies a sort of delayed general education. I met many new people at my literature course, including Jan Håfström. I also met Jan Olov Ullén, Anna Rydstedt and Bengt-Åke Sandström. Bengt-Åke and I brought the students' literature club back to life and I published some poems in its calendar, Vox . At this time, I was also reviewing for Kvällsposten , and in 1959-60, I translated Pisa Cantos by Ezra Pound into Swedish for the Bo Cavefors publishing house together with Jan Olov Ullén. All that time I was also reading a great deal of poetry, including Mandelstam, Hölderlin and Paul Celan, whom I also translated."

Can Paul Celan be translated?

Nah sind wir, Herr,
nahe und greifbar.

Gegriffen schon, Herr,
ineinander verkrallt, als wär
der Leib eines jeden von uns
der Leib eines jeden von uns

Close are we, Lord
close and palpable.

Seized already, Lord,
closely clawed together, as if
the body of each of us
were your body, Lord

That's the answer, right there... Was the poetry published in Vox your debut?
"Yes, but I had also sent some poetry to a poetry competition in BLM and I won second prize, together with Björn Håkanson. So those were almost simultaneous. My debut in book form came a year later in 1961, a couple of months after I married Kerstin and we had moved to Borstahusen."

One thing that is striking to a reader of your poetry is that there is such continuity in it. Your poetry is so much itself through the decades. At times, I feel as if it is a single big organic molecule, where new substances are gradually added, like a single big poem.
"I can't say I've ever seen it quite like that myself, but there is certainly a unity. I think that is connected with the musical, 'singable' quality of poetry. Swedish metric poetry chiefly uses normal word stress. That can often make the rhythm of poetry too mechanical; I wanted to achieve something different, as in Classical Greek and Roman poetry, where the syllable length determines the metre. This allows for a more 'singable' quality, a more musical character. In the very early days I sometimes noted down the scansion as I wrote. But very soon, I internalized the rhythm of it and the attempt at song is fundamental to everything I write."

Another thing that is fundamental and consistent throughout your poetry is political debate. How do you see your own political development? Are you the same as you were in the 1960s when you arrived in Lund, when you wrote your famous poem about Vietnam?
"I like to think that I'm still about the same, that fundamentally, my political views are still to the left, even if there may be some differences in certain concrete issues. I first started to take an interest in political and social issues in Landskrona and Lund; I read works such as L'Homme révolté by Camus and The Open Society and Its Enemies by Popper. They held some forceful criticism of Stalinism, of a totalitarian society, and you might say that I was thus firmly inoculated against all totalitarianism through them. The Soviet society was never an alternative. I recall discussing Pasternak's Nobel Prize as early as 1958 with some friends and defending him -- they were members of the Clarté movement, in favour of Soviet, and against the Prize, of course. Another important book was Religionen och rollerna ('Religion and roles') by Hjalmar Sundén, dealing with the totalitarian claims that can occur in religious movements."

Have you ever been a member of a movement or a party?
"No. I realized early on that in order to write, I needed complete freedom."

Your poem about a demonstration against the war in Iraq in Oceanen has attracted a lot of attention and has been compared with your prominent poem about Vietnam. There are strong anti-American sentiments today, too, just as during the Vietnam war. What is your view on that?
"These two situations cannot be compared. The Vietnam war was so much bigger, bloodier, more all-encompassing. It is true, as such, that there is an anti-American opinion again. But this is more complex; my resistance to any empire is the same. As I said, I was completely opposed to the Soviet model, but initially I had greater illusions about Vietnam and China. Something that still bothers me is that I didn't realize at an earlier stage where Vietnam and Cambodia were headed, that I didn't see clearly, in time, what the Pol Pot regime entailed."

Oceanen could be considered a memorial to the dead. To your father, your mother, to your friend Göran Tunström. There are also some similarities between you and Göran Tunström in that you both became fatherless at such an early age. Could one say that in the absence of an authoritative paternal presence, you had to describe all the world yourself, in order to understand it?
"I would hesitate to describe it that way. In Göran Tunström's case, a sort of intellectual dialogue had started on topics such as travel, religion, literature. The contact between me and my father was completely different. We did things together, went fishing; I often visited him at the factory with all its big machinery, big rotating cutters, the manufacture of canister bags, flat bags, i.e. bread bags, and the printing shop that was a tenant there. When my father died I was a child, I had no expression for grief, I was struck by a severe depression. It wasn't until 20 years after his death that I was able to weep at his grave. But going back to your question about autobiography, I have written about him earlier, for instance in Det omöjliga ('The impossible') in 1975:

I took my father's violin
from the cold
in the wardrobe in the unheated attic
opened the small
child-sized coffin of black-painted wood
The violin was all cold
I tightened the bow and tried
a note, it was
brittle and creaky

I don't know if I ever
heard you play
I see in my mind's eye that when you played
you smiled all the time "

We've discussed your political development, but there is also a religious problem field in your book, a proximity to something that could perhaps be called mysticism. How do you view your own religious development?
"I don't want to say anything more about this than what I've written in my book."

You describe a very dramatic event in Oceanen , when your house was struck by lightning while you were away on holiday, and that when you saw the blackened walls right by your bed, you fell mute and didn't speak for a whole day. Was that how your stammer started, with the shock of it?
"It was a shock of course. But where the stammer is concerned, it was all rather trite. It was nothing I ever thought about, even if I realize in hindsight that it began with the fire. One day at school they told me to go and see the speech therapist. I myself had neither noticed or suffered from my stammer. But the process that followed made me aware of my speech and I started thinking about something that happens quite automatically. Attention creates a vicious circle."

When you read your poetry you don't stammer, do you?
"No, and I have a theory of my own that the coordination of the musculature in the organs of speech is governed then from a completely different centre, a centre governing music and singing. I consider my poetry to be musically structured, composed. Poetry was like that in the early days, after all; consider the Classical Greek tradition."

Your poetry really is song! And all of Oceanen is also thoroughly musically composed in its entire structure. How did that happen?
"I complete the poems one by one, and once I have approved a poem I've added it to the others, in a time structure. I started on the collection sometime in 1999. The time structure can accommodate both new material and material that's been written much earlier."

Do you make a lot of changes when you create this bigger composition?
"No, I don't usually change anything. I generally only change factual errors in the poems. But what I might do is to shorten the text I've written."

Finally, 'The Ocean', what kind of image is that to you, this all-embracing, immeasurable, all-encompassing entity?
"I have long held it a certainty that I would one day write about this motif. I am not really willing to expand on all the things it might hold and contain."

And after that, we part after a long and winding conversation lasting many hours. Yet it feels like a mere ripple across the surface, the quiet ruffling of a breeze over the vast ocean that is Göran Sonnevi's book and his poetry.

Eva Ström is a writer and literary critic. She was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2003 for her poetry collection Revbensstäderna ('The Rib Cities'). Her latest book is called Rött vill till rött ('Red yearns for red'), 2004.

Translated by English Centre/ Monica Sonck