Do statesmen of today, or yesterday, cultivate their soul and heart, enter ever more deeply into a spiritual tradition, grapple with its restrictions and demands, write serious poetry? Some would sneer at the idea, but then a meeting with the legacy of Dag Hammarskjöld might change their minds. In this year, the centenary of his birth, several studies of his ethics and spiritual progress have been published in Sweden, his native country. More interest than ever has been paid to his descriptions of spiritual progress. Less has been said about his poetry, so Falkman’s study opens up a new vista.
Now, what kind of person was Hammarskjöld? What is his relevance today? What was his moral and emotional background? Briefly: A man of utmost integrity, from a country striving for hard-maintained peace, with a genuine belief in human rights.
A man of passionate ethics, with an ingrained respect for the spoken and written word, its unadulterated truth.
A man and a country affirming their sense of human values in the exposure [their exposure?? meaning unclear as is] to mountains and the sea.
As a writer, he never adhered to any group. Led by his own sensibility and vast literary education, he expressed his own thoughts, reactions, concerns in the manner of his personal choice.
When lightning struck
the ironmasters stepped down
from their portraits’ shadowland
In this haiku (translated by Kaj Falkman, as are the others here) we find a highly charged moment coupled with a strong sense of history, the burst of nature set against the passage of time, also the past which in a sense is made present by art.
Hammarskjöld was a public official in Sweden who became an international statesman. As the Secretary General of the United Nations in the 1950s, he upheld the interests of less-powerful countries in various international conflicts. After his violent death in an air crash in the Congo crisis of 1961, another side of his personality was revealed.
His diary of spiritual growth, Vägmärken, was published posthumously in 1963. It was also translated into English. The first version, called Markings, is not altogether reliable; it was penned by W.H. Auden, the poet, who did not know any Swedish and occasionally changed the text to reflect Auden’s own problems and predilections. Later another translation into English was published as Waymarks (the title is a quotation from the prophet Jeremiah).
In Sweden the publication of Hammarskjöld’s diary was met with bewildered curiosity. The critics did not know how to cope with his deep commitment to religious values, his repeated quotations of the great Christian mystics, his ever stronger experience of a divine calling. Small wonder that his poetry, a considerable part of these personal texts, was more or less neglected in discussions. He had never shown his notes or his verse to anybody.
A large part of this poetry is very short, written in a form then new to Swedish literature: three lines comprising a total of seventeen syllables, with dates from August 4, 1959, to November 1, 1959. Hammarskjöld himself did not use the term haiku. In Swedish discussions on haiku, his poems are seldom mentioned. When the first anthology of Swedish haiku was published in 2000, the copyright holders did not allow their inclusion.
Hammarskjöld was, however, well acquainted with haiku, at a time when most Swedes were not. Henderson’s excellent book An Introduction to Haiku, 1958, was even found on his bedside table after his death.
To Hammarskjöld, the limitations and the possibilities of this briefest of all poetical forms were a stimulus, unconnected with the aesthetics of haiku developed elsewhere. He used them for an autobiography in four sections, presenting scenes from his childhood and youth, some of his impressions from travels outside the Western world, and finally reflections from his holiday home in the US. Many of them are abstract expressions, while others present a vividly experienced scene. This combination of the concrete and the abstract when writing haiku is found quite often in Sweden (purists try to discourage it).
Kai Falkman, the author of this study, is a Swedish diplomat, serving twice in Japan where he developed a deep interest in haiku, both Japanese and Western. Today, he is the chairman of the Swedish Haiku Society. Besides being deeply committed to haiku, he has studied and edited Hammarskjöld’s writings extensively.
Falkman realized that readers need some help to focus in the face of a very long set of haiku. It is all too easy to overlook important ideas and expressions, just being carried away by the flow of words (or only skimming the text). Many ideas or allusions will escape the attention or the understanding of the reader. Thus he wisely decided to present a commented selection. Some 50 haiku out of the total number of 110 have been chosen. Each is presented with a short page or two of comments, much of this biographical. There are also presentations of the scene or the background. A generous selection of Hammarskjöld’s photographs serve as visual comments or associations, a kind of haiga.
Falkman also draws due attention to the style. The language is usually clear, but an occasional phrase is a new coinage or unexpected, like "stenålderskvällen" (Stone Age evening) or "frostfjärilslek" (Winter moth’s play).
The critical reader may find some of these haiku trivial. After all, they reflect personal memories, never intended for outsiders. Yet there is an appeal to them that is increased by the lovingly respectful comments.
Others, dealing with his concept of his calling and the demands of sacrifice, would be bewildering on their own. They presuppose some acquaintance with a long and rich Christian tradition.
The most intriguing poems, however, are some of those inspired by travels around the world, in particular to the Himalayas. Comparing them [the poems??] to an article by Hammarskjöld in National Geographic [A little unclear. He's comparing the poems to an article??], the author [Falkman?] helps us to understand and appreciate them [the poems??], clearly visualizing their setting and their religious context.
Falkman’s style is usually clear-cut and easy to follow. In a few cases, however, the discussion brings up more complicated lines of thought. A phrase on "desolate spaces" is analyzed with references to the French diplomat and poet Saint-John Perse and his attitude toward exile. The reader might feel somewhat lost here. The Indian origin of the unicorn is another example of rather remote associations.
The haiku dealing with Hammarskjöld’s childhood and youth give glimpses of a life of strict discipline coupled with maternal tenderness, but most of all loneliness. His father, a most prominent politician, was heavily domineering.
More than the years separated them
on their evening round
in the deserted alley.
A serious and sensitive boy, he bitterly felt how his schoolmates disliked him. Superficial friendship left him unsatisfied, deep relations evaded him. Casual sex would have been severely repressed. Just once, sexual urge is set against this tradition of strict self-control, in the form of a landscape scene linked to a distant, less civilized past.
This stone age evening [Normally eras like the Stone Age should be capitalized, but not if it's lower case in the original poem]
the church spire on the plain
erect like a phallus.
Judging from this book, his most satisfactory friendship was with the prominent sculptress [preferable to use "sculptor" to avoid gender bias] Barbara Hepworth, who fully appreciated his ethics and saw them as a counterpart of her own aesthetics. Falkman describes their exchange of letters as a restrained passion. They were both highly private individuals, so we will never know any details.
In the choice of haiku, Falkman emphasizes those that deal with Hammarskjöld’s emotional responses; some of them may convey quite different meanings to a reader who will project his or her own experience into the text.
Many of those haiku that are omitted, some of them quite attractive, describe scenes of Swedish nature, with an emphasis on flowers and insects with telling names. In translation their charm would all too often evaporate. (Just one example: "Night-gleamer, brier-. [Is the punctuation after brier, with the hyphen and the period, correct?] The porcupine on guard around the sleeping castle." Well, how do you convey the firm association between the wild brier and the fairy tale princess whom the English call The Sleeping Beauty? In Swedish the brier is törnros, while the princess is Törnrosa. The castle is asleep because night has fallen, but almost any Swedish reader will also think of the enchanted castle completely overgrown by impenetrable thorns. Falkman discusses the verse in his book in Swedish but not in his manuscript translation into English.)
Hammarskjöld’ ethos pervades his writings as well as his actions. He sprung from a century-old tradition of duty conceived as the kernel of life, of service to your country as superseding all merely personal interests and desires. He also represented a religious experience that became ever more demanding, ever more fulfilling as it became integrated into his personality. Being elected to his exalted position for him implied a renunciation of personal will, a readiness to be a sacrifice to a higher purpose. This sense of being chosen to fulfill the divine will intensified his respect for the Eastern religions he met on his travels, Hinduism and Buddhism, hinted at in this scene from the foot of the Himalayas.
Sun-flickering
the flute notes reach the gods
in the cave of birth.
A key word to his life was integrity. This is reflected also in the haiku that has given the book its title.
When the gods play
they seek a string
untouched by men.
The book is written in Swedish, but Falkman has prepared a translation to English as well, sometimes adapting the text for the better understanding of a non-Swedish reader. Thus Peter Pan has been substituted for Putte i blåbärsskogen (Putte in the bilberry wood), a highly loved [much loved?? beloved??] illustrated children’s book in Sweden but not well known outside this country. Two haiku have been added and two subtracted from the selection in the Swedish edition.
Hammarskjöld was also a keen amateur photographer, highly [greatly??] appreciating the increase of observation that photography entailed. In this book, a selection of 38 of his black and white photos shows another side of his personality, his sense of nature, his deep respect for religion, his untiring attention to the visible world and the sense of an underlying deeper reality [His sense of nature, respect for religion, etc. are described here as being "another side of his personality," but from what we've been told so far, they seem to be more or less his whole personality].
He was a dedicated mountaineer, knowledgeable about fauna and flora, who described his experience both in prose and in these photos. These are landscapes that still represent something essential to Swedes: the city dwellers’ need of a complete contrast to the bustle of modern life in this stark scenery, a severe purity.
This is the landscape of a haiku like this one:
The northern warbler’s first trill.
Over pale ice fields
space is thawing.
The landscape is also the scene for abstract psychology.
Risk and purity –
in this struggle with the mountain
with myself as resistance.
A reader keen on haiku as the concrete scene, the image of the moment, may be somewhat bewildered by the many poems that deal with abstract ideas and concepts. So be it. Falkman gives us an unparalleled chance of meeting and strengthening our understanding of this compressed form of poetry as it has been used for his own purposes by a man to whom the written word was a moral summons.
Hammarskjöld thus used the haiku form as a long chain of images, scenes and thoughts from his life, an abbreviated biography. Thanks to Falkman’s guidance, one sees the deeply personal content of this poetical flow. Some obstacles are discreetly removed. Again we are reminded that haiku is not only a literary form but also an expression of the mind and, occasionally, its highest aspirations.
For those interested in learning more about Hammarskjöld, Falkman has edited a commented selection of his speeches, published by Atlantis. This has also been translated into English, To Speak for the World. He has also edited a book of essays on various aspects of Hammarskjöld’s diary, its spiritual progress and position in the great Christian tradition of teachers like Thomas à Kempis and Blaise Pascal. The Swedish title is Ringar efter orden, published by Ellerströms (the association being the rings in water when something has moved in it).
As for the future, are these haiku and this study likely to influence Swedish haiku writers? Probably not. The great influence today comes from various online publications and online discussion groups, mainly in English. Before this influence there were two main ideas about haiku in Sweden. One was fed by translations of classic Japanese haiku, mainly via English versions, with few or no comments. The other was a general definition of haiku as a syllable-counting verse: three lines of five, seven, five syllables. Nothing more. No mention of season word or cutting word, no interest in juxtaposition or even a single, concrete scene/image. Many of these so-called haiku, or haiku poems as they are often called, are aphorisms or metaphors in five-seven-five syllables. The contents are often highly abstract, or a mixture of concrete notice and abstract reflection. This holds true also about the only well-known haiku writer in Swedish, actually for decades our most highly acclaimed poet, Tomas Tranströmer, a master of the surprising association. Since a stroke some years ago he has favored this brief form, retaining his private idiom.
The Swedish haiku society, however, tries through its journal, discussion groups, short lectures, etc. to disseminate the ideal of a natural rhythm not bound up with syllables; of a concrete scene, often leading to some kind of transformation; and of simple, clear diction.
Thus, there are many aspects of haiku in Swedish to be discussed and developed. A String Untouched is a work of love and insight, making us read more closely and ponder more deeply.
An English publication of this richly rewarding text is highly desirable.
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