Author: Paul Britten Austin
Author: Paul Britten Austin
Other books by Britten Austin on Bellman:
This beautiful, fascinating, astonishing book is something of a secret, as is its remarkable subject, Bellman (and its erudite but modest english author, Britten Austin himself).
Bellman's songs are known to everyone in Sweden, but (since they are in Swedish) almost completely unknown outside that country. Bellman's talent — a unique mix of songwriting, lyric poetry, humour, performance, urban pastoral, and bacchanalian dissipation — has been compared to Mozart, Hogarth, even Shakespeare. But of course all geniuses are different, and there will never be another Bellman. One thing he was not: a simple drunkard; or he would never have managed the rate and quality of work that he did.
Seglen fladdra, skutan går,
Jerker tar sin lyra,
lyran brummar, böljan slår,
allt med våld och yra;
skutan knarkar, bräcklig, gles,
vimplens fläkt i toppen ses.
Tuppen gol så sträv och hes.
Nu slog klockan fyra.
One might roughly render this as:
The sails flutter, the skiff moves,
Jack takes his lyre,
the lyre growls, the waves slap,
all with violence and dizziness;
the skiff creaks, fragile, sparse,
the sails' breath is seen at the masthead.
The cock crows so shrill and hoarse.
Now the clock strikes four.
Here is how Britten Austin describes the scene:
Fredman's Epistle No. 48 describes the poet's and his companions' return by boat from a night out among the islands of the Mälaren, 'a summer's morning, 1769'. No one who has ever risen on an early Swedish summer morning to see the sun shining from a clear sky on the placid water and has heard or read this song, with its breezy familiar air, can ever forget it. Each of its twenty-one eight-line verses is, itself, a finely-etched picture. Together, they build up to an incomparable panorama of that eighteenth-century Stockholm which meets us in Elias Martin's canvasses. As the first verse ruffles the 'fallen sails' and 'Kerstin, apple of the skipper's eye' comes out of her cabin, the old vessel with its creaking and 'sparse' timbers, gets under way. Soon the countryside is gliding by. The skipper, his pipe alight and full of self-importance, is at the helm,
Under bushy eyebrows spry
peering upwards at the sky.
The sails flutter. The wherry plunges onwards through the waves. One of the party takes out his hurdy-gurdy. The 'lyre' thrums, the waves jostle, 'allt med våld och yra.' On the shore the cock crows 'shrill and hoarse' and the clock in a church tower strikes four. Other boats are converging on the town. Movitz [a recurring character, based on a real person] hails them with a blast on his horn, asking them where they are from. In another, Marjo, the peasant girl, with her cargo of birch-sprigs, milk and lambs, is on her way to the customs jetty, a tub of butter on her knees, and baskets of cherries in the bow. The other boat is sailing in from Drottningholm, 'with vegetables, celery, milk and apples clear.' Ulla Winblad [the archetypal pretty Swedish 'nymph'], naturally, is one of the gay party.
Before our eyes, the poet and his modern translator and admirer bring to life a romantic but precise portrait of Swedish pastoral life. It is incomparably beautiful, light, merry and wistful all at once.
Among many other small miracles, Britten Austin has managed the prodigy of translating 18th century Swedish verse into intelligible, beautiful echoes of the original. Of course poetry is as close to untranslatable as anything can be: it depends, especially when it is so steeped in the culture of a vanished epoch, on a sympathetic and detailed understanding of the times. It is said that he used to sit on the train from Hayward's Heath to London, searching for a workable translation of a hendecasyllable, while others around him puzzled over crosswords.
A book cannot give one the music of Bellman's songs, but fortunately there are many good recordings of these, sympathetically sung by a range of performers. These notably include the extraordinary Cornelis Vreeswijk, himself something of a Bellmanesque lover of the good life, and despite his birth in Holland became almost more Swedish than the Swedes themselves. Perhaps it was the Bellman effect.
The book is beautifully, even lavishly produced, with creamy boards and paper, beautiful full-page black-and-white and colour plates, snippets of music, and a fascinating history of Bellmann's life and times. Somehow Britten Austin makes it all seem totally relevant; certainly it is full of colour and movement.
This is a life-enhancing, joyous look at a riotous, crazy, wonderful, cultivated, spiritual, drunken world; of court life; of grace-and-favour, of poverty, of hardship, of beauty, of love, of sex, of drinking, and of course of song and dance and a celebration of life. There's nothing else remotely like it.
See also: A Short Biography of Bellman
Sweden.se: An official biography, translated by Britten Austin
© Ian Alexander 2005