Dag Hammarskjöld, Swedish diplomat, 1905-1961, at the time of his death Secretary-General of the UN. Very well known in that rôle; what is much less well known is that he kept a journal, which he added to throughout his life, called Vägmärken. The word means "road signs" but the English title is Markings. This he began in early adulthood without any intention to publish. Later, it seems that he was writing for an audience and happy for it to be published posthumously.
Pervading the entire book, indeed all of Hammarskjöld 's thinking, lie the words: Snart stundar natten (Soon the night hours) which was the first line of a hymn taught to him by his mother. As soon as I read this, I was reminded of two lines by the Roman poet Catullus: nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux/nox est perpetua una dormienda. (For us, when once brief light has set, night is one continuous sleeping.) Thus the Roman imperative Carpe diem! (Seize the day!) From a young age I had been aware that we could die at any time and you might believe, as did Hammarskjöld, in an afterlife but the Romans gave themselves no such comfort. Whatever one's belief in a form of post mortem survival, the point of both the hymn and Catullus' lines were: "Take care, life is short and death can come much sooner than you might think".
I encountered Vägmärken back in 1964. It was sitting in the new acquisitions rack at the State Library of Victoria. Today, it's not in print outside the US, where it's available on pulp-quality paper and set in a type that's anything but clear. I was all of 17. On the blurb of the Faber original were the words "spiritual odyssey" which nearly made me put it back. I'm so glad I decided to read it. I've studied this book all my adult life. I've learned to trust the man, so while spiritualism is mostly opaque to me I trust Hammarskjöld when he says it's there and in later life those verses I found impenetrable have come to be, if not transparent, at least to have meaning within the bounds of my possibility.
Vägmärken is largely aphoristic but contains many poems in the form of the haiku. For those of you not familiar with this style, it must contain three lines in which the number of syllables is optional but the total must be exactly seventeen. Reading through the book, it's possible to see how Hammarskjöld grew proficient at this discipline as years passed. In the Swedish original the haikus were perfect and Faber was fortunate to engage the poet WH Auden to polish the English translation until it was as close a reflection as possible. (Doing this introduced Auden to the technique and he wrote many poems in this style for the rest of his life.)
"My home drove me
Into the wilderness.
Few look for me. Few hear me.
Denied the Sought-After,
He longed to deserve
To be the Sought-After.
A box on the ear taught the boy
That Father's name
Was odious to them.
He fell when he tried to vault.
They all had their laugh
At such a sissy.
His moral lecture
Blazed with hate.
What could have driven a child that far?
They laid the blame on him.
He didn't know what it was,
But he confessed it.
He wasn't wanted.
When, nonetheless, he came,
He could only watch them play.
School was over. The yard was empty.
The ones he sought
Had found new friends."
However, he used other styles also, as well as prose. One example is:
"Thus It Was
I am being driven forward
Into an unknown land.
The pass grows steeper,
The air colder and sharper.
A wind from my unknown goal
Stirs the strings
Of expectation.
Still the question:
Shall I ever get there?
There, where life resounds,
A clear, pure note
In the silence.
*
Tomorrow we shall meet,
Death and I-
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake"
Hammarskjöld wrote just one rhymed poem which I quote in the original because, of course, it doesn't rhyme in English.
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Vägen, du skall följa den
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The road, you shall follow it.
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Here are some quotes:
"Beauty, a note that set the heartstrings quivering as it flew by; the shimmer of the blood beneath a skin translucent in the sunlight."
"Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step: only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road." (It took me years to be able to do it.)
"Life yields only to the conqueror. Never accept what can be gained by giving in. You will be living off stolen goods, and your muscles will atrophy."
"Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was."
"What is one to do on a bleak day but drift for a while through
the streets - drift with the stream?
Slow and grey - he searches every face. But the people aimlessly streaming along
the grey ditches of the streets are all like himself - atoms in whom the radioactivity
is extinct, and force has tied its endless chain around nothing."
"It makes one's heart ache when one sees that a man has staked his soul upon some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately obvious to everyone but himself. But isn't this, after all, merely a matter of degree? Isn't the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self-delusion is necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of the result? That we all-every one of us-take ourselves seriously is not merely ridiculous."
"When the gun went off, he fell on his side beneath the maple trees. The air is motionless in the moist dusk of the late July day, a dusk intensified by the heavy shadows of the leaves. His head rests in profile, the features finely chiselled but still immature - white against the grey of the sand, with a small wound in the temple. In this dead light, only the dark blood slowly welling from the nostrils has any colour.
Why? - Above the spreading pool of blood no questions reach the land you have sought. And no words can any longer call you back. - That eternal Beyond- where you are separated from us by a death chosen long before the bullet hit the temple."
"Sailing with the paravanes of a disingenuous affability always in position, he imagined that, in spite of his lack of skill as a navigator, he was safe from the danger of mines."
There are so many more but my favourite is: "'Not to encumber the earth'. No pathetic "Excelsior!" but just this: not to encumber the earth."
Vianden, Luxemburg,
Mörfelden, Germany
May 2008