In Translation

If you find them worth publishing, you have my permission to do so – as a sort of ‘White Book’ concerning my negotiations with myself – and with God.
(Dag Hammarskjöld, in a letter to Leif Belfrage)*

And so they sat together, the poet
without “a single word of Swedish” at hand,
and the translator, to find together –
to trace – the private markings of the public soul,
the one to give the language, the other the heart,
the rhythm, that “unexpressed dialogue”
without which language dies.

And what did they find, as
layers fell and layers grew?
A planned self-defence? The last
word to silence posthumous debate?
No, the heart’s x-ray more like it;
a confession; a line drawn around
the self’s ever-moving hand.

He knew no Swedish, but Auden at least
knew that movement well: the soul’s
duplex structure; the twin-tangle of light and dark
that makes the mess called Man.
The redemption too; he knew that as well.
The call, the answer: the Whitsunday “Yes”.
This too is in the soul’s true language,

spoken best in the gap between
thought and speech, seen best when glimpsed
eyes squinted open to light,
half-closed to self, half-
forgetting all we thought we knew.

In translation,
the soul is seen translating,
atom-swift. Catch it
as it propels to break new ground.

* Before his death, UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld left his journals to his friend and fellow diplomat Leif Belfrage. Poet W.H. Auden worked with Swedish writer and translator Leif Sjöberg to translate this diary into English. It was published under the English name “Markings”.