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News that the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature had been awarded to
the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer was greeted with widespread
approval by poets and poetry readers the world over. The author of
fifteen collections of poems, Transtromer had in fact been
nominated for the prize every year since 1993, a sign of his huge
standing and importance in world poetry, undiminished in recent
years despite a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed
and unable to speak. The Nobel citation praised Transtromer's poems
of "condensed, translucent images" which give us "fresh access to
reality," and that startling originality is everywhere to be seen
in the poems gathered here, first published as two separate volumes
by the Dedalus Press, The Wild Marketplace (1985) and For the
Living and the Dead (1994), both translated by John F. Deane, the
latter in collaboration with the poet himself.
Tomas Transtroemer (1931-2015) was Sweden's most important poet of
the past fifty years. This book contains all the poems he
published, including those from the Bloodaxe Collected Poems of
1987, as well as three later collections, For Living and Dead
(1989), The Sad Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004), and a
prose memoir. A further revised edition was published in 2011. In
Sweden he has been called a 'buzzard poet' because his haunting,
visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic
dimension, but brings every detail of the natural world into sharp
focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between
sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states.
Transtroeomer was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent
many long summers on the island of Runmaroe in the nearby
archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws
on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later
poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his
broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural
sciences. Many of his poems use compressed description and
concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for
psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as
a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or
forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control. Robin
Fulton worked with Tomas Transtroemer on each of his collections as
they were published over many years, which involved detailed
exchanges between translator and poet on the meaning and music of
numerous poems. There have been several translations as well as
some books of so-called "versions" of Transtromer's poetry
published in English, but Fulton's is the most authoritative and
comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.
One day in spring 1964, the young American poet Robert Bly left his
rural farmhouse and drove 150 miles to the University of Minnesota
library in Minneapolis to obtain the latest book by the young
Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. When Bly returned home that evening
with a copy of Transtromer's The Half-Finished Heaven, he found a
letter waiting for him from its author. With this remarkable
coincidence as its beginning, what followed was a vibrant
correspondence between two poets who would become essential
contributors to global literature. Airmail collects more than 290
letters, written from 1964 until 1990, when Transtromer suffered a
stroke that has left him partially paralysed and diminished his
capacity to write. Across their correspondence, the two poets are
profoundly engaged with each other and with the larger world: the
Vietnam War, European and American elections, and the struggles of
affording a life as a writer. Airmail also offers remarkable
insights into the processes of translating literature from one
language into another. As Bly began to render Transtromer's poetry
into English and Transtromer began to translate Bly's poetry into
Swedish, their collaboration soon turned into a friendship that has
lasted fifty years. Insightful, brilliant, and often funny, Airmail
provides a rare portrait of two artists who have become integral to
each other's particular genius. Based on the original Swedish
edition published in 2001, this publication marks the first time
letters by Transtromer and Bly have been made available in Britain.
Robert Bly's translations of Tomas Transtromer appear in The
Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Transtromer,
published by Graywolf Press. Transtromer's complete poetry is
available in English in Robin Fulton's translation, New Collected
Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books (and by New Directions in the US
under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems).
Tomas Transtromer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2011.
He was then the first Swedish writer to become a laureate for
almost forty years. This anthology takes an intercontinental
perspective on the poetry of Transtromer. It raises the question of
how his poetry is actually perceived in continents predominated by
other literary preferences. It also gives insight to the literal
appearance of his poetry in essentially different languages.
Transtromer International features a seminar of world poets,
placing his poetry in context by relating to their countries of
origin: Columbia, Iran and Bangladesh. Angela Garcia, Azita
Ghahreman, Anisur Rahman and Kristian Carlsson-i.e. the main
seminar committee-also present one poem each inspired by
Transtromer. And a select working group has translated sample poems
of Transtromer into several world languages, printed alongside the
Swedish originals. Most translations are done exclusively for this
anthology, and in addition to some new English versions, there are
poems in Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, Japanese, Romani, Russian, North
Sami, Somali and Spanish.
Tomas Transtromer's poems are thick with the feel of life lived
in a specific place: the dark, overpowering Swedish winters, the
long thaws and brief paradisal summers in the Stockholm
archipelago. He conveys a sense of what it is like to be a private
citizen in the second half of the twentieth century.
An International Poetry Forum Selection, translated from the
Swedish by May Swenson with Leif Sjoeberg. Tomas Transtroemer 2011
Nobel Laureate in Literature "Tomas Transtroemer, who is today one
of Sweden's most distinguished poets . . . can compare Lake Malar
at dawn with a blue lamp, the islands creeping over the grass like
nocturnal butterflies."-New York Times
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