Fredman's Epistles No. 81 - a translated poem

Today I have translated another poem... yes I have too much time on my hands.

An interesting thing about this poem is that even though it is 225 years old it has been on the top 10 in Sweden performed by punk-rock bands, seventies protest singers and many metal bands including doom metal, death metal and... well I don't know what this kind of metal is called:

The Swedish/Danish band Evil Masquerade

The song is written by the Swedish eighteen century poet C.M. Bellman. It is the most beautiful poetry and I am happy that I can understand it. The works of the old bard is a strange rococo mixture of drunkenness, irony, sex, and death, but with a charming humour and a heightened sense of beauty attached to it.

Fredman's Epistles No. 81

The scene in this song (the music is also written by the poet) is as follows: Fredman the anti-hero of the big song-collection called Fredmans Episteler (Fredman's Epistles) and his friend, the alcoholic veteran soldier Mowitz, is attending a funeral of a not so honourable lady. Her name is never mentioned, but her husband is called Löfgren and the poet gives him the title grälmaker - which means troublemaker and is applied as if it was a social acceptable rank.

Here is the poem in a ex-temporal translation (meaning that I have only translated the meaning of the words - not the meter or the rhymes). The poem was published in 1790.

For Scandinavians: here is the poem in Swedish.

          To troublemaker Löfberg in the Hospice by the Danto barrier,
          dictated at the Grave.

             Dedicated to Doctor Blad 1)

       Look how our shadows, look Movitz mon frere! 2)
       Join themselves into a darkness, 3)
       How gold and purple on that shovel
       Are exchanged for rags and gravel
       When Charon waves from his tumultuous river
       And after that trice the gravedigger himself
       Then you shall squeeze the grape no more.
       Therefore Movitz come help me raise
       A gravestone over our sister. 4)

       Oh, desirous and overshadowed hideaway 5)
       Under the sighing branches
       Where time and death, beauty and ugliness
       Into one substance is united
       Envy never find her way here
       And happiness with her light steps
       Never steps among graves.
       You – armed enemy, what about you?
       Here piously he breaks his arrows.

       The small bell chirps to the great bell’s groan
       Leafclad in the door stands the precentor
       And while the lads shout the prayer
       He blesses the place.
       On the way to the tomb-adorned temple 6)
       You step amid the yellowing leafs of roses
       between rotten planks and coffins
       through this walks the long and blackdressed line
       deep they bow in tears.

       Then she found peace, from fistfights and dance,
       Troublemaker Löfberg, your wife;
       There, on the grass, long-necked and thin
       You have to stare back.
       Today she left us at the Danto barrier 7)
       And with her all merry gathering;
       Who will now command the bottle.
       Thirsty was she, and I am dying of thirst.
       We are all thirsty.

Notes.

1. Doctor Blad (meaning leaf) was a friend of the poet, and worked as a doctor in the poor quarters of Stockholm.
2. Mon frere - my brother in French. In the eighteenth century the upper class used a lot of foreign languages in Scandinavia. The Danish playwright, rationalist and historian Ludvig Holberg who insisted on writing in Danish said it this way: You speak French to your wife, German to your servant, and Danish to your dog.
3. I am sure it means that the two men are standing at the open grave and their shadows are consumed by the darkness of the hole.
4. Not their real sister of course, but drinking-buddy-sister.
5. This verse is about how nice and peaceful the grave is.
6. Notice how the heathen word temple is used instead of church.
7. The Danto barrier was a toll barrier at a place where spirit was made. In the winter the spirit was brought over the ice to Stockholm and of course they had to pay toll.

It is a very peculiar poem, and I think it can be likened to Mozart and da Ponte's Don Giovanni where the solemn and moral baroque story - is not really that moralistic. When you have watched the opera you are truly in doubt if the composer and librettist have been telling you a moral story, or if they are sympathetic with their nihilistic and hedonist protagonist. The same is true in this poem. The vanitas theme of the baroque is mixed with hedonist and heathen language in a rough and ironic way, and the ending seems to be almost desperately hedonist.

Here are some of the other versions of the same song that was hit singles in the twentieth century Sweden. Try to check it out. Shows something about how strange a people the Swedes really are. Never go to war with these guys!

Imperiet

Marduk

Cornelis Vreeswijk

Candlemass

Fred Åkerström

Sven Bertil Taube