Some Tomas Tranströmer Links

By now I'm sure everyone must know that Tomas Tranströmer is the newest Nobel laureate in literature. We actually published one of his poems back in TWO LINES 14 in Robert Hass' sterling translation, and you can read it right now online. It's here; and don't miss Hass' introduction to the poem, where he discusses how he managed the translation despite not speaking Swedish.

So one of the interests of "Song" is that it gives us a glimpse of the very young Tranströmer's sources in Swedish romantic poetry and in the Swedish landscape, particularly the Baltic of the Swedish archipelago to which his imagination has returned for grounding, lightly but over and over, in the course of his work. "Song" begins, I found as the Swedish got Englished for me, with a swarm of gulls, and with one of Tranströmer's characteristically acute, specific, and strange images—the grey of their wings has the color and look of "the ragged sailcloth of dead ships"—but it moves very quickly to an apparition front Baltic mythology. Vainamoinen, the hero of the Finnish epic cycle, the Kalevala, comes striding across the waves, and an antagonist, who is identified only as "the Other," rises to meet him. What suggests the later Tranströmer in all this is the way that the drama is played out inside an observer's imagination: "a man at the center of his fortune's wheel." And the fascination of the later part of the poem is the way that story plays out in the poet-dreamer with a "Slumberer inside" him.

In other news, the Literary Saloon has an excellent roundup, and The New York Times' ArtsBeat has uncovered a video (below) of Tranströmer reading and discussing the poem “Schubertiana.”