Paul Tenngart (University of Lund)
At the end of his life, Swedish poet Petter Bergman (1934-1986) remembered how sad he had been as a teenager when he realized that he would never become a good pianist. This insight changed the young Bergman’s life plans. Instead of a musician, he became a poet (cf. Rying 1986: 118). The story of the teenager’s impossible dream looks like a summary in the presence of death, according to which Bergman’s poetry as a whole stems from a failure.
Quite a few poems seem to confirm this view. Music is an important motif in Petter Bergman’s poetry. Composers and specific musical works, from the classical tradition as well as from the tradition of jazz and blues, are frequently mentioned. Significantly, Bergman’s first collection of poems in 1956 was called Ord till musiken (‘words for music’) and his selected poems from 1975 were titled Utsatt i musiken (app. ‘exposed in music). Bergman’s musical motifs have almost always a positive significance. Music stands for freedom, and it is often given utopian dimensions.
Bergman’s poetic references to written words are quite a different matter. Words are unstable, unreliable, and destructive. Several poems make a direct contrast between music and verbal signs. In “Music for a While”, for example, the two categories ‘classicism’ and ‘romanticism’ are described as inadequate. In the second part of the poem, it is made clear that these categories refer to two literary positions (1976). They are both contrasted to music:
I stället återskapar man det som det är: en redan formad värld, en analys där formerna blir formler i en dialog mellan uttryckssättet och språkets kod. Var livet värt att leva? Sådan metafysik 5 medför man I graven. Resten är musik: kontrapunkt och välljud utan illusion. Detta var livet. Detta var hur livet dog. (Instead you recreate what is already there: a pre-shaped world, an analysis making formulas out of forms in a dialogue between expression and code. Was life worth living? Such metaphysics 5 is never solved. The rest is music: counterpoint and euphony without illusion. This was life. This was how life died.) (Author's translation)
I stället återskapar man det som det är: en redan formad värld, en analys där formerna blir formler i en dialog
mellan uttryckssättet och språkets kod. Var livet värt att leva? Sådan metafysik 5 medför man I graven. Resten är musik:
kontrapunkt och välljud utan illusion. Detta var livet. Detta var hur livet dog.
(Instead you recreate what is already there: a pre-shaped world, an analysis making formulas out of forms
in a dialogue between expression and code. Was life worth living? Such metaphysics 5 is never solved. The rest is music:
counterpoint and euphony without illusion. This was life. This was how life died.) (Author's translation)
Existential questions only exist verbally. Since they cannot be answered, these questions are empty and unnecessary. Why waste your time with impossible verbal problems when there is music? Music is real, direct and free from illusions. In music, there is no dream of existential meaning. Music is what it is. And so is life. The poem ends with two solitary lines that respectively describe music and, on the other hand, life and death. This ending underlines the similarity between the power of music and the core of human existence.
The phrase “The rest is music” (l. 6) alludes to Paul Verlaine’s “Art poétique”, in which music and literature are contrasted according to the same set of values. For Verlaine the poet should write poetry as a composer creates music. All the rest – “tout le reste” – is “littérature” (Verlaine 1905: 73). Verlaine uses “musique” and “littérature” metaphorically. The first category does not only contain music in the ordinary sense of the word, but also musical poetry. The latter category, “littérature”, does not contain Verlaine’s literary ideal. Is it the same in Bergman’s poetry? Is music something more than pitches and rhythm? Does the motif of verbal inadequacy only refer to a certain kind of language – the logical, rational, representative?
No, Bergman’s poetry does not express the same view on music and literature as Verlaine’s. First of all: Bergman’s references to music are often very direct and concrete. It is difficult to interpret his references to specific composers and specific musical works as metaphors, representing something other than musical phenomena. Secondly: Bergman seldom abandons the traditional effects of verbal art. He does not often write what Steven Paul Scher calls “word music” – acoustic imitations of musical effects (Scher 1968: 3-5). His use of “semantic musicality” – my own term for the poet’s ability to abandon the representational side of language in an attempt to produce the same emotional and cognitive effects as music (Tenngart 2002: 152) – is also very sparse. In an interview, Bergman says that he does not think that “man kan skriva musik, som Verlaine ville” (‘one can write music, as Verlaine wanted to do’) (qtd. Rying 1986: 116; my translation). Thirdly: Bergman’s rhetoric in the poem “Music for a While” differs from Verlaine’s in “Art poétique”. For Verlaine, unmusical poetry is the undesired and absent “reste”. For Bergman, the desired music is the absent “rest” – it is not there, it exists beyond the poet’s medium.
Bergman’s poetic appreciation of music is far from unique. He follows a long tradition in the history of Western poetry. But to celebrate music and criticise poetry in poetry has its logical problems. If verbal art and music are totally different kinds of expression, it must be impossible to represent the qualities of music in a poem. If anything, such an attempt would be destructive and degrading. Still, Bergman does not give up. In poem after poem he tries to verbally describe the power of music. This zeal should be taken seriously. It indicates that the poet’s evaluation of the abilities of verbal art is not as pessimistic as many of his poems seem to suggest.
There is a significant difference between what a poem says about verbal art and what it says about another medium. The intermediality in Bergman’s musical poems is indirect – only the medium of words is directly present in the work of art; the music described is not there (cf. Wolf 1999: 41). While the poetological poem is always self-reflexive, the indirectly intermedial work of art has an immanent distance towards its object. Metapoetry and indirect intermediality are fundamentally different.
For sure, Bergman’s poetic praxis shows that poetry often works quite well. A good example of the strength of verbal art is to be found in the collection Årstiderna (‘The Seasons’) from 1979. In the poem “Lester Left Town”, Bergman creates several aesthetic effects that a composer could never produce:
Först det runda föremålet med sin rökslinga. Sedan kameran som ändrar riktningen och ansiktet under halmhatten. 5 Tenorsaxofonen snett: musiken diagonal som alltid. Och som aldrig nu, bara remsor av en gammal film. Tröttheten och ansiktsfårorna, 10 händerna som skakar. Snart skall han dö. men ännu lever han, ännu viskar han i saxofonen: ”Don’t ever give up”. Och tolv takter tonas in. 15 Och räkna åren, räkna tonerna! Så många år och så få toner, de höga, spända tonerna som säger oss att vi är medvetna om allt som sker och att allt som händer kan ges uttryck, 20 formuleras och kameran närmar sig. Tagning! Och saxofonen snedställd där han sitter, för han orkar inte stå längre. 25 ”Don’t give up, don’t ever “ Triangeln kring en halmhatt, och rytmsektionen vaknar ur en drömlös sömn. Där sitter han, äntligen hemma hos sig och sitt, 30 de ljusa, raka tonerna i bluesens schema. Döden, som drabbar honom inom tio dagar, Berör honom inte, betyder ingenting. Varför skulle den det? ”Don’t ever give up” och han lifter 35 instrumentet och han blåser sina långa, raka toner rätt in i döden och långt bortom den. (First the round thing with its line of smoke. Then the camera changing direction and the face under the straw hat. 5 The tenor saxophone obliquely: the music diagonal as always. And never as now, only strips of an old film. The weariness and the facial creases, 10 the shaking hands. Soon he will die, but still he is alive, still he whispers in the saxophone: “Don’t ever give up”. And twelve bars appear. 15 And count the years, count the notes! So many years and so few notes, the high, stretched notes that tell us that we are aware of everything and that everything that happens can be expressed, 20 be formulated and the camera comes closer. Action! And the saxophone oblique where he sits, because he cannot stand anymore. 25 “Don’t give up, don’t ever ” The triangle around a straw hat, and the rhythm section awake from a dreamless sleep. There he sits, home at last, 30 the light, straight notes in the scheme of the blues. Death, which strikes him within ten days, does not bother him, does not matter. Why would it? “Don’t ever give up” and he lifts up 35 his instrument and blows his long, straight notes right into death and far beyond it.) (Author's translation)
Först det runda föremålet med sin rökslinga. Sedan kameran som ändrar riktningen och ansiktet under halmhatten. 5 Tenorsaxofonen snett: musiken diagonal som alltid.
Och som aldrig nu, bara remsor av en gammal film. Tröttheten och ansiktsfårorna, 10 händerna som skakar. Snart skall han dö. men ännu lever han, ännu viskar han i saxofonen: ”Don’t ever give up”. Och tolv takter tonas in. 15
Och räkna åren, räkna tonerna! Så många år och så få toner, de höga, spända tonerna som säger oss att vi är medvetna om allt som sker och att allt som händer kan ges uttryck, 20 formuleras och kameran närmar sig. Tagning! Och saxofonen snedställd där han sitter, för han orkar inte stå längre. 25 ”Don’t give up, don’t ever “
Triangeln kring en halmhatt, och rytmsektionen vaknar ur en drömlös sömn. Där sitter han, äntligen hemma hos sig och sitt, 30 de ljusa, raka tonerna i bluesens schema.
Döden, som drabbar honom inom tio dagar, Berör honom inte, betyder ingenting. Varför skulle den det? ”Don’t ever give up” och han lifter 35 instrumentet och han blåser sina långa, raka toner rätt in i döden och långt bortom den.
(First the round thing with its line of smoke. Then the camera changing direction and the face under the straw hat. 5 The tenor saxophone obliquely: the music diagonal as always.
And never as now, only strips of an old film. The weariness and the facial creases, 10 the shaking hands. Soon he will die, but still he is alive, still he whispers in the saxophone: “Don’t ever give up”. And twelve bars appear. 15
And count the years, count the notes! So many years and so few notes, the high, stretched notes that tell us that we are aware of everything and that everything that happens can be expressed, 20 be formulated and the camera comes closer. Action! And the saxophone oblique where he sits, because he cannot stand anymore. 25 “Don’t give up, don’t ever ”
The triangle around a straw hat, and the rhythm section awake from a dreamless sleep. There he sits, home at last, 30 the light, straight notes in the scheme of the blues.
Death, which strikes him within ten days, does not bother him, does not matter. Why would it? “Don’t ever give up” and he lifts up 35 his instrument and blows his long, straight notes right into death and far beyond it.) (Author's translation)
According to Bo Everling, the poem’s “strips of an old film” (l. 9) refer to two different films: Gjon Milis’ Jammin’ the Blues from 1944, in which Lester Young wears a “porkpie hat”, and a CBS programme from 1957, in which a weak Young performs with Billie Holiday (cf. Everling 1993: 256).
Images from these films are directly described in the poem. The poem thus contains an ekphrasis. In the first stanza, there is a semantic focusing (cf. Lund 1992: 35) on Young’s hat, face, and saxophone. In the second stanza, the poem focuses on the face and the hands, and in the third stanza the focus is on the oblique saxophone and Young’s sitting position on the stage. In the fourth stanza, the perspective is widened when the whole group of musicians is described as a triangle around the saxophonist’s straw hat. From stanza to stanza, the poem is performing a kind of verbal zooming out: from the details on and around Lester Young’s face and body, the description is widened into encompassing the whole figure of the saxophonist and then, finally, the whole stage.
The ekphrasis also contains significant semantic expansions (cf. ibid.), in which Bergman abandons the direct description of the films’ images and widens the text chronologically and psychologically. The images from the two films do not in themselves communicate the fact that Young will be dead within ten days. Here, the poem produces two layers of time in a way that is difficult to bring about with visual means. The information of Young being “home at last” on the stage is both a chronological and a psychological expansion. The word “äntligen” (‘at last’) (l. 30) brings Young’s past into the present situation. The description of the musician’s state of mind goes beyond the visual surface into Young’s psyche.
Intertwined with this ekphrasis, the poem contains what Werner Wolf calls an “imaginary content analogy” between verbal text and music – an attempt to verbally represent how a musical work sounds like (Wolf 1999: 63, 70). This happens most obviously in the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas where the notes are described as high, stretched, light, straight, and long. These adjectives are cases of semantic focusing. When Lester Young whispers “’Don’t ever give up’” (l. 14) in the saxophone, however, we have a case of semantic expansion. Here, the poem expresses what notes and rhythm cannot express. The imaginary quotation in English of Young’s voice in the instrument – which re-appears twice later in the poem – is a semantic equivalent to the emotional pathos of the notes. A similar expansion is to be found at the very end of the poem, where Young is said to blow his notes “right into death and far beyond it” (l. 37). It is difficult to imagine a more expansive description of what the saxophone sounds like. In a few words, the notes are sent away on an infinite journey.
In the third stanza, there is a simultaneous semantic expansion of both the film images and the jazz music. The words Young is whispering in his saxophone are repeated, with a significant variation, but in this stanza they appear directly after the description of Young’s sitting on the chair. The exhortation not to give up refers to the music and its ability to protest against the harsh conditions of life, but also to the fact that Young continues to play while seated when he is too weak to stand up.
This ambiguity creates an effect that is similar to the effect of another intermedial device in Bergman’s poem: double intermediality. Several lines are representations of visual representations that are interpreted as representations of music. The most obvious example appears in the first stanza. The description of the hat, the face, and the saxophone leads to a formulation that gives the position of the saxophone a wider significance. The instrument is placed “obliquely: / the music diagonal as always” (ll. 6-7). These lines jump, almost unnoticeable, from one sense to another – from the visual impression of the saxophone to the sounds it is producing. The image of the oblique instrument is interpreted as a visual representation of musical qualities. The notion of a diagonal music falls into the poem’s description of music as a protest against the conditions of life. The diagonal is at odds with the straight-lined world.
The same effect is to be found in the last line of the second stanza: “And twelve bars appear.” (l. 15) The word “appear” is my bleak translation of the Swedish verb “tona in”. With this verb Bergman is making use of an ambiguity in everyday language. In the poem’s intermedial context it has visual as well as musical dimensions. It should be interpreted as an ambiguous phrase, signifying a musical emerging and a visual zooming in. Bergman’s line thus becomes a verbal description of how the film visually represents a musical phenomenon.
At the end of the fourth stanza, Young is “home at last” (l. 30), sitting on his chair on stage. From this representation of an image, the poem directly widens the definition of ‘home’. Home is not only a place on the stage, but also “the light, straight notes in the scheme of the blues” (l. 31). The film images of Young sitting on stage are interpreted as a representation of the music he is playing.
In the last lines of the poem, finally, Bergman yet again creates a double intermedial effect. Lester Young lifts up his instrument and “blows his long, straight / notes right into death and far beyond it” (ll. 36-37). The lifted saxophone marks the direction. With this gesture Young throws his music right into another dimension.
If we add the double semantic expansion in the last lines of the third stanza, a pattern emerges. Every stanza ends with an intimate coming together of three forms of art. And the five intermedial endings culminate in a dramatic crescendo when the words of the poem, the images of the films, and the music of Lester Young finally reach “right into death and far beyond it” (l. 37). The poem is not only a celebration of the art of music. It also celebrates the ability of film images to let music lovers experience this crescendo long after Young’s death. Furthermore, it celebrates – indirectly, with its very existence – poetry’s ability to create this complex intermedial expression.
The latter is to be found more directly in the third stanza. On the surface, these lines pay homage to Lester Young’s music, which “tell[s] us / that we are aware of everything / and that everything that happens can be expressed, / be formulated” (ll. 18-21). But the word “formulated” has a verbal denotation. And what is it that expresses everything that “can be expressed” here? Well, Petter Bergman’s poem. Only one medium is present in this work of art. The two others appear only indirectly within the realms of the present one. It is words that express, describe, and represent the visual and the musical. It is words that manage to expand the visual and the musical expressions in different directions – chronologically, psychologically, existentially. And it is verbal art that manages to create a double intermediality – that complex expression which, in the twinkling of an eye, reaches “everything that happens”.
Petter Bergman never became a great pianist. During his whole career he was dependent on words. Even if these words often criticize the ability of language, and even if they contain many longing glimpses towards the condition of music, it is quite clear that Bergman’s poetry also illustrates the strength of verbal art. It is a strength that has to do with flexibility and elasticity. The utopian freedom that Bergman recognizes in the expression of music is a freedom from semantics, from meaning and definitions. His poem “Lester Left Town” exemplifies another kind of creative freedom: the poet’s ability to encompass and combine three different sign systems in his own verbal web.
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