Death of Tomas Tranströmer
 

I'm very sad to report that I just heard over the Swedish radio that Tomas Tranströmer has died.

We've lost another genius of poetry.

Sad news.

Susan

One of the absolute greats of all poetry. Ever. The only good news is that he wrote a lot. I keep "The Great Enigma" near me at all times.

Charlotte

Tranströmer in his best dark suit
 

I bought the Bloodaxe Collected poems (trans. Robin Fulton) years ago. I’ve often gone to it, looking for that particular way he has of describing…of being in… darkness. I imagine him always on the move, driving, snow falling, headlights sweeping the road ahead. Forests, lakes, islands, isolated villages, farmhouses and motels seem to be all of Sweden. I still think of his surname as signifying someone travelling “through storms”, “through trauma”,some kind of strange astronomer and transformer…

This is Tranströmer interviewed by Gunnar Harding in 1973, being asked about how his writing related to his work as a psychologist:

“I believe there is a very close connection, though it can’t be seen. Everything one writes is an expression of a gathered experience. And the problems one meets in the world at large are present to a very great extent in what I write, though it doesn’t always show directly. But it’s close to hand, all the time. That’s what makes me feel under such a pressure when I write. What I put down on paper must be able to exist together with that, the total and rather dark picture of the world. And that’s true even when I’m writing about something which doesn’t seem to touch that total picture.”

When describing his poem The Outpost Tranströmer writes: “but then gradually the poem came to deal with how I find myself in an absurd situation in life generally, as I often do. Life puts us in certain absurd situations and it’s impossible to escape. And that’s where the poem becomes very serious, in the fifth verse, which ends: “I am the place/ where creation is working itself out.” And that’s a kind of religious idea which recurs here and there in my poems of late, that I see a kind of meaning in being present, in using reality, in experiencing it, in making something of it. And I have an inkling that I’m doing this as some sort of task of commission. It recurs further on in the book at the beginning of December Evening 1972-

Here I come, the invisible man, perhaps employed
by a Great Memory to live right now…

It’s a purely personal experience really, that I fulfil some function here, in the service of something else. This sounds pretentious and because of that tone in such circumstances (the circumstance described in The Outlook) often becomes a little frivolous.”

Just a fragment from The Outpost:

“Out there in the cold I begin to fly
like a shaman, I fly to her body
with its white marks from her bikini-
we were out in the sun. The moss was warm.

I flit over warm moments
but can’t stop for long.
They’re whistling me back through space-
I crawl out from the stones. Here and now.

Mission: to be where I am.
Even in that ridiculous, deadly serious
role-I am the place
where creation is working itself out.”

Trans. Robin Fulton.

I agree with Charlotte, he was a great poet, who translates well into English, I think, though I'm sure subtle textures are lost. Well worth searching out or reading again.

Thank you both for commenting.

The media has been giving us many programs of his poetry and past interviews. And of course discussions with all of the cultural elite discussing him and his work..

Re Steve's comment about translation. In an interview yesterday, he said that the experience of having his poems translated had the effect that he came to write with translation in mind.

I know him best through the translations of Wright and Bly. I've long admired his work, even though I can only read him 'through a glass darkly.'