The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

by Tomas Tranströmer, Robin Fulton (Translator)

In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world

as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.



Translated into fifty languages, the poetry of Tomas Transtromer has had a profound influence around the world, an influence that has steadily grown and has now attained a prominence comparable to that of Pablo Neruda's during his lifetime. But if Neruda is blazing fire, Transtromer is expanding ice. The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems gathers all the poems Tomas Transtromer has published, from his distinctive first collection in 1954, 17 Poems, through his epic poem Baltics ("my most consistent attempt to write music"), and The Sad Gondola, published six years after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1990 ("I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case."), to his most recent slim book, The Great Enigma, published in Sweden in 2004. Also included is his prose-memoir Memories Look at Me, containing keys into his intensely spiritual, metaphysical poetry (like the brief passage of insect collecting on Runmaro Island when he was a teenager). Firmly rooted in the natural world, his work falls between dream and dream; it probes "the great unsolved love" with the opening up, through subtle modulations, of "concrete words."

Genres: Poetry, Nobel Prize, Sweden, Literature, Scandinavian Literature, Swedish Literature, Fiction

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 17, 2006

About the author

His poetry, building on Modernism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, contains powerful imagery concerned with issues of fragmentation and isolation. “He has perfected a particular kind of epiphanic lyric, often in quatrains, in which nature is the active, energizing subject, and the self (if the self is present at all) is the object,” notes critic Katie Peterson in the Boston Review.

Critic and poet Tom Sleigh observed, in his Interview with a Ghost (2006), that “Tranströmer’s poems imagine the spaces that the deep then inhabits, like ground water gushing up into a newly dug well.”

His honors include the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrarch Prize in Germany, the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum,the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and especially the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature. His work has been translated into more than 50 languages.

Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990, and after a six-year silence published his collection Sorgegondolen (Grief Gondola) (1996). Prior to his stroke, he worked as a psychologist, focusing on the juvenile prison population as well as the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives in Sweden.

On Thursday, 6th of October 2011 he was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality".

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1969, as a teen who was now face to face with the Full trauma of facing adulthood, I sought refuge from some very human, concrete demons in the Royally Awful Hospital.

I had assumed their doctors would shelter me.

I was wrong.

But let Transtromer tell it:

STANZA TO THOREAU

Yet one more abandoned the heavy city's
ring of greedy stones. And the water, salt and crystal
closes over the heads of all who truly seek refuge.

Transtromer says so much with so little, in a direct gaze of savage intensity. His bleak Nordic outlook is one with the savage intensity brought into play that year within my soul.

For the doctors not only sheltered me - they countered my fire of paranoia with another fire which they had deliberately set:

The fire of acute anxiety.
***

I was an awfully antsy young man, therefore, when I met my soon-to-be French-Canadian wife - a late Christmas surprise - during the last week of December 1977. We have been inseparable for 46 years now.

She taught me not to fear reality, as reality, being founded on neurotypical logic, had nothing in common with the neurodivergent dream of love we have always inhabited. Two different worlds.

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
Around the centre of the Silent Word.

Now, at age 74, a full forty-five years since my bleak release - when I was "frizzled, bald, lobotomised" - the two opposing fires are finally out. Doubtless my wife's warm magic played a central part in that peace.

The two fires are mutually neutralized: and that is the ultimate goal of psychiatry.
***

I once again have found Paradise Regained in my heart, as I write this, and I am no longer a Stranger in that Paradise.

A condition of complete simplicity
Costing not less than everything!

That hospital was indeed royally awful:

But it told it like it is.

Because I now see the difference between psychiatric necessary losses and the freedom of neurodivergent Grace, I am released from every accidental neurotypical shackle -

The ugly Either/Or of the world -

And I am finally free.

Music's voiceless half is here...
An underground summer for each of us.
There at the crossroads a shadow breaks free and runs off to where the Bach trumpet points.
Sudden confidence, by grace.
To leave behind one's self-disguise here on this shore where the wave breaks and slides away,
breaks and slides away.

[s.penkevich · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poetry, from the whole of Transtromer's career, more than justifies the stamp of "Nobel Prize Winner" that is printed on the cover. Shamefully, I had never heard of this Swedish born poet until the week before he won the prize. I had read an article that highlighted him as a frontrunner for the prize this year and I began to seek out his poetry. It took a bit of patience, and I urge anyone to first flip around in the book for awhile until they find the right poem that speaks to them, but once I caught the cadence of his thoughts (it was the poem A Winter Night for me), the gates opened and I was ushered into Transtromer's beautiful, and sometimes sad, vision of life. I have been bursting with nothing but praise for him ever since. His prose is very lucid and ethereal, creating a seemingly weightless reality that hovers just above and beyond our own. It called to mind a quote from the Polish author, Bruno Schulz. Schulz, in the introduction of his "The Streets Of Crocodiles", says there are images that "...are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization." Transtromer builds up just these sorts of images that dwell in the peripherals of existence as he speaks of death, islands, shadows, trains, memories and the absurdity of our position in life.

"I am transparent/and writing becomes visible/inside me" he writes in the poem "Further In". Much of his poetry comes from life experiences, which pass through him ("I am the turnstile" - The Outpost) and out through his pen into insightful observations on the human condition. His shorter poems often times give the reader cryptic metaphors or a simple weightless image to ponder, such as the "bridge builds itself/slowly/straight out in space" (Snow Is Falling), but it is in the longer poems where Transtromer works his real magic. In poems such as The Gallery, Night Duty or Traffic, to name a few, Transtromer weaves a variety of metaphors and images into one powerful theme. He also spends much time detailing the seasons, from lush green summers to cold, dead winters. There is a moment where he describes spring as the trees turning back to face him as he and the earth run towards each other. There is so much joy and love for the world and existence to be found within his words. In later poems, specifically poems written after his stroke, death becomes a prevalent theme as he shows us all existing within its inevitable shadow.

Give Transtromer a try. If you are patient it will really pay off and you will never view the world around you the same again. He gives us, as he puts it in a haiku:
Thoughts standing still, like
the colored mosaic stones in
the palace courtyard.

[Atri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sudden confidence, by grace.
To leave behind
one's self-disguise here on this shore
where the wave breaks and slides
away, breaks

and slides away.

***

He knew the journey had lasted long
and his watch showed years, not hours.

***

My wristwatch
gleams obstinately with time's
imprisoned insect.

The quiet in the crowded
compartment is dense.
In the darkness the meadows
stream past.

***

...their most secret thoughts meet
as when
two colors meet and flow into each
other
on the wet paper of a schoolboy's
painting.

***

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

***

Two truths draw nearer each other.
One moves from inside,
one moves from outside
and where they meet
we have a chance to see ourselves.

***

The clear sky has leaned against the wall.
It's like a prayer to the emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers,
"I am not empty, I am open."

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tomas Transtromer is the kind of poet I ought to love. For one thing, he has a gift for coming up with extended metaphors that ring entirely true and yet are so deliciously fresh that you can almost smell them:

“At road’s end I see power
and it’s like an onion
with overlapping faces
coming loose one by one..."

Transtromer's gift for conjuring outlandish-yet-precise metaphors reminded me of Yehuda Amichai, long one of my favorite poets. It also reminded me of Aristotle, who, in his Poetics, praised such inspired metaphor-making as "the greatest gift by far [that a poet can have], the one thing that cannot be learnt from others."

Why, then, did I not love this book as much as I loved, say, my treasured tome of Yehuda Amichai poems? I think it had something to do with the voice in Transtromer's poems. This voice was always the same voice, the voice of a European man who might well be Transtromer himself, the voice of a mild-mannered person who is always standing as if at a window and calmly observing things (nature, society, etc.) from the outside, from a distance. (Railroads and postal mail are frequently recurring motifs in Transtromer's poems, symbols of the large distances between human beings that make Transtromer's emotional distance from his subjects all the more conspicuous.) I was not at all surprised to learn that Transtromer at one time worked as a clinical psychologist, as people who work in the clinical professions are specially trained to manifest this kind of equanimity, impersonality, and emotional detachment in their dealings with others. It's a feature that some clinician-writers succeed in transcending in their writing, but which many unfortunately do not. Transtromer does sometimes transcend it, and when he does, his poems are magnificent, as in the case of the refreshingly fury-laced poem "Schubertiana":

"Annie said, 'This music is so heroic,' and she's right.
But those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly despise themselves for not being murderers,
don't recognize themselves here,
and the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can be bought, don't recognize themselves here.
Not their music."

How I enjoyed seeing the fire break through the ice in this poem! Even when such marvelous duende is absent, though, there is much in Transtromer's poems to catch one's interest, from an intellectual standpoint. This poet is the product of many far-flung influences, and it tickled me to watch him pay homage to such unexpected intellectual forebears as Thoreau and Whitman, the latter of whom he evokes in the poem "Traffic":

"downward, to the openings, to the deep tubes
where the algae grow like the beards of the dead"

Another poet whom I was surprised to see Transtromer show an affinity for was Paul Celan, whose ghost seemed to hover over Transtromer's poem "Night Duty":

“The language marches in step with the executioners.
Therefore we must get a new language.”

Overall, I am glad I read this collection. Poems like "Allegro," "Slow Music," and "The Gallery" will be treats to return to in years to come.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many poems to pick from here, I just went for these three. Difficult to get into this collection at first, but on reading some of the poems again, they did slowly work their way into me on a deeper level.

THE HALF-FINISHED HEAVEN

Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

MORNING BIRDS

I waken the car
whose windscreen is coated with pollen.
I put on my sunglasses.
The birdsong darkens.

Meanwhile another man buys a paper
at the railway station
close to a large goods wagon
which is all red with rust
and stands flickering in the sun.

No blank space anywhere here.

Straight through the spring warmth a cold corridor
where someone comes running
and tells how up at head office
they slandered him.

Through a back door in the landscape
comes the magpie
black and white.
And the blackbird darting to and fro
till everything becomes a charcoal drawing,
except the white clothes on the washing-line:
a palestrina chorus.

No blank space anywhere here.

Fantastic to feel how my poem grows
while I myself shrink.
It grows, it takes my place.
It pushes me aside.
It throws me out of the nest.
The poem is ready.

SIX WINTERS

In the black hotel a child is asleep.
And outside: the winter night
where the wide-eyed dice roll.

An élite of the dead became stone
in Katarina Churchyard
where the wind shakes in its armour from Svalbard.

One wartime winter when I lay sick
a huge icicle grew outside the window.
Neighbour and harpoon, unexplained memory.

Ice hangs down from the roof edge.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract cattle, udders of glass.

On a side-track, an empty railway-carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journeys in its claws.

Tonight snow-haze, moonlight. The moonlight jellyfish itself
is floating before us. Our smiles
on the way home. Bewitched avenue.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Comet's Tail

How can you write about a poet without quoting? And if he has already achieved such extreme compression of ideas as 2011 Nobelist Tomas Tranströmer has, what can more words add? So I will try to use his own words as much as possible, starting with a complete poem, "Eagle Rock," from his last published collection (The Great Enigma, 2004):

Behind the vivarium glass
the reptiles
unmoving.

A woman hangs up washing
in the silence.
Death is becalmed.

In the depths of the ground
my soul glides
silent as a comet.

How unexpected is that word "comet," a moving body of light in the heavens, challenging the below-ground dark of death! This from a man in his seventies, robbed of the power of speech by a stroke some dozen years before. The brief poems from this last period have not been published in English before this volume, which shows the poet's development from young adulthood to old age. The image of the comet returns again in the book's final section, a prose memoir from 1993 describing his childhood and adolescence, thus bringing the life-cycle full circle:

My life. Thinking these words, I see before me a streak of light… a comet.

After talking about youth—the bright dense head of the comet—he goes on:

Further back, the comet thins out—that's the longer part, the tail. It becomes more and more sparse, but also broader. I am now far out in the comet's tail, I am sixty as I write this.

The image of racing time returns, as most of his images do, in another poem, "A Page of the Nightbook" (1996):

A period of time
a few minutes long
fifty-eight years wide.

And again in the prose-poem "Answers to Letters" (1983):

Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years could pass in a moment.

In his memoir, Tranströmer tells of sitting in Latin class while the students read out verses of Horace one by one then attempted their own halting translations.

This alternation between the trivial and decrepit on the one hand and the buoyant and sublime on the other taught me a lot. It had to do with the conditions of poetry and of life. That through form something could be raised to another level. The caterpillar feet were gone, the wings unfolded.

This says a lot for the poet's love of brevity, but it reminds us that the butterfly was once an earthbound caterpillar too. Tranströmer's poems may be surreal at times, but the secrets they hold are by no means arcane; they are as universal as they are personal. His butterfly is no exotic species:

I love that cabbage-white as though it were a fluttering corner of truth itself. (Streets in Shanghai, 1986)

The process of translation, which was Tranströmer's first inspiration, poses a special challenge to his translators, but Scottish poet Robin Fulton has been working with him for thirty-five years; his versions have the immediacy of English originals.

Fulton also contributes a most helpful introduction. He half-advises the reader to start at the end, so I did. I thumb back like snapshots in an album. A music-lover consoled by lugubrious Liszt who in his younger days had thrilled to Haydn. A traveler in the cities of many continents, who ends as he had begun, among the heaths, forests, and coastline of his native land. A successful lover walking down the street when

All the question marks began singing of God's being.
(C Major, 1962).

A young poet arriving on the literary scene like a commando:

Waking up is a parachute descent from dreams

This is the opening line of "Prelude" (1954), the first poem in the collection. But what strikes me most in this retrospective glance is the elegiac nature of so much of Tranströmer's poetry, as though half his life has been spent preparing to write that final full stop. There is the foreboding of his magnificent poem, "Alone" (1966), an account of a near-death experience on an icy road. The trains that cross his landscapes stop without reason, and only sometimes continue on. But nothing expresses it as beautifully or simply as the second of his two "Black Postcards" (1983), in which you almost hear the voice of Emily Dickinson:

In the middle of life it happens that death comes
to take man's measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is sewn on the quiet.

Unlike many Nobel laureates, Tomas Tranströmer is not a political writer performing on the world stage. He is a private man, a rare one who shares his privacy, and eminently worth reading.

[PGR Nair · Rating 5 out of 5]

TOMAS TRANSTROMER TASTES TRIUMPH WITH NOBEL PRIZE

PGR Nair

The poet Tomas Transtromer has finally tasted triumph by winning the Nobel Prize for literature for 2011. The Swedish Academy praised Mr. Tranströmer, saying that “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” This is absolutely true of his serene poetry.

The 80-year-old Tomas Transtromer is one of the greatest Scandinavian poets and has had a profound influence in the literary world as Sweden’s most important poet since World War II, an influence that has steadily grown and has now attained a prominence comparable to that of Pablo Neruda's during his lifetime. But if Neruda is blazing fire, Transtromer is expanding ice. His newly collected poems, "The Great Enigma", wonderfully translated by Robin Fulton endorses his brilliant oeuvre.

His poetry thoughtfully explores the unconscious and challenges the reader’s conception of the world. He is also known for his subtle, multi-faceted poetry that typically explores man’s relationship with nature, and reveals mystical insights into the human mind, a result of his training in psychology.

Of his spare and incisive work produced over nearly 30 years, Transtromer has confessed, ''My poems are meeting places.'' The metaphor is singularly apt for his divided career, his dominant concerns, his wide-ranging subject matter and, not least, for his claim on a growing audience. Transtromer displays enormous economy of words and expressions in his poems that gives his poetry a rare density. Equally notable is his marvellous ability to coin metaphors, not in a mechanical sense, but because they open up a world by itself. His metaphors give new meanings to things, situations, emotions or people. Just consider the very first poem that appears in the book mentioned above. The title of the poem is "Prelude". It describes the process of just getting up from bed in the morning as a parachute jump.

"Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams.
Free of the suffocating turbulence the traveler
sinks toward the green zone of morning. "
(Translated by Robin Fulton)

Tomas Tranströmer comes from a long line of ship pilots who worked in and around the Stockholm Archipelago. He was born in Stockholm on April 15, 1931. His father and mother divorced when he was three; he and his mother lived after that in an apartment in the working-class district of Stockholm. He describes that apartment and the shifting of a bookcase into his room and filling of books that he had inherited in his poem titled “The Bookcase.”

" It was fetched from the dead woman's apartment. It stood empty for a few days , empty until I filled it with books, all the bound ones. In doing so , I let in the netherworld. Something rose from the underneath, slowly and inexorably like a massive column of mercury. Your head couldn't turn away."

One of the most beautiful qualities in his poems is the space we feel in them. One reason for that is that the four or five main images that appear in each of his poems come from widely separated sources in the psyche. His poems are a sort of railway station where trains that have come enormous distances stand briefly in the same building. One train may have some Russian snow still lying on the undercarriage, and another may have Mediterranean flowers still fresh in the compartments.

''A man feels the world through his work like a glove,'' Mr. Transtromer has written. The child of a broken home, the poet became a psychologist, first doing therapy and rehabilitation for six years at the Roxtuna Prison for Boys. Later he and his family moved to Vasteras where he worked with a state labor organization, counselling juvenile delinquents, treating the physically handicapped, drug addicts and parole offenders. rehabilitation.
(Translated by Robin Fulton)

Tomas Tranströmer’s poems are so luminous that it elevates you into a sombre mood of meditation about life. He has a strange genius for the image—images come up almost effortlessly. These images have a resonance with the outer and inner depths of nature and shows the psyche of a poet vulnerable to the shocks of our world. In a poem called ''Night Duty'' he conceives himself in the figure of a ballast stone in the deepest hold of a ship. The poem begins as below:

''Tonight I am down among the ballast
I am one of those silent weights
that prevent the ship from overturning!'
Obscure faces in the darkness like 'stones.
They can hiss: "Don't touch me." ''
(Translated by Robin Fulton)

His powerful imageries are often concerned with issues of fragmentation and isolation. Forest is a recurring image in many of his poems. Being in the forest seems to connote a sort of existential abandonment — perhaps a necessary precondition to authentic discovery or salvation. The poem “The Clearing” begins:

"Deep in the forest there’s an unexpected clearing that can be
reached only by someone who has lost his way.


The clearing is enclosed in a forest that is choking itself. Black
trunks with the ashy beard stubble of lichen. The trees
are tangled tightly together and are dead right up to the tops,
where a few solitary green twigs touch the light. Beneath them:
shadow brooding on shadow, and the swamp growing."
(Translated by Robin Fulton)




The exotic provenance of images in his poems is balanced by the stones, forests, villages and cities of his native Sweden, the chief metaphors of his meditations on existence. One obsessively recurring image complex : the car, the driver, the mass migration of traffic. The motif of driving somewhere, anywhere, becomes an effective symbol for contemporary man, encased in his technology, separated from the earth, prone to sudden accident, moving in the blind flow of traffic like ''a sluggish dragon'' over asphalt where ''seeds try to grow.'' His marvelous poem "Alone" is an example of it. May be his life as a psychologist explains his fascination with things that might have arisen only from dreams, from the archetypal forms that lie deep, deep within us all. Consider the following passage
"It's spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline."
Swedish poetry tends to be very rational, and therefore open to fads. Tranströmer, simply by publishing his books, led a movement of poetry in the opposite direction, toward a poetry of silence and depths. Read the poem " April and Silence" and note the striking third stanza.



April and Silence
(Translated by Robin Fulton)

Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.

The only things that shines
is yellow flower.

I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black box.

The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker's.


Tranströmer was able to tackle the ‘big’ subjects without seeming in the least bit pretentious or foolish. I was bit shocked to read his description of how grief displaces our everyday sense of reality in ‘After Someone’s Death’. It is a poem of three stanzas of four lines each. As in many of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems, this one begins with the appearance of a story, but by the end, the series of disconnected images do not seem to add up to a coherent narrative. It is the speaker’s visual (rather than organic) ordering of things that holds the poem’s various images together. The title suggests the discontinuity between life and death; it is the time after someone’s death that the poem considers.


After Someone’s Death

(Translated by Robin Fulton)

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long pale glimmering comet’s tail.
It contains us. It blurs TV images.
It deposits itself as cold drops on the aerials.

You can still shuffle along on skis in the winter sun
among groves where last year’s leaves still hang.
They are like pages torn from old telephone directories–
the names are eaten up by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear your heart throbbing.
But often the shadow feels more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.


Transtromer has traveled extensively, and much of the pleasure of his art is in the wit and accuracy of his imagination as it expands our awareness and renews the familiar. In a smoky hut in Madeira, two fish are frying with ''tiny garlic explosions.'' New York City seen at night from a distant prospect is like ''a spiral galaxy seen from the side,'' the dozing bodies in its subway cars becoming ''catacombs in motion.'' (Ref to the poem `Schubertina given at the end`). Sometimes these deft formulations go beyond pungent perception to express an aesthetic credo, a moral stance, as in a prose-poem titled ''Upright,'' which captures the condition of living ''free but wary'' in the memory of a visit to the Sara tribe in Africa. In ''From an African Diary'', he describes climbing on a canoe hallowed from a log:

''The canoe is incredibly wobbly , even when you sit on your heels. A balancing act. If the heart lies on the left side you must incline your head a little to the right, nothing in the pockets, no large gestures, all rhetoric must be left behind. Just this: rhetoric is impossible here. The canoe glides out over the water.''


Penetrating insights about the mystery of existence are abundant in his poems and it has led to Tranströmer being described as a visionary poet, and certainly a sense of the numinous, of moments of spiritual epiphany, informs his poetry. His poetry is full of stolen moments when he seems to have caught himself off-guard: "I pause with my hand on the door handle, take the pulse of the house", or "I stand under the starry sky / and feel the world creep / in and out of my coat / as in an ant-hill".
Finally, I present below one of the great poems of Transtromer. It is titled, ` Schubertiana’`. His brilliant artistry in combining visuals to create a sense of cosmic wonder, of communion across time and space is magnificent in this poem.

Here’s how he describes what happens as he listens to the Schubert String Quintet: ‘I curl up like an embryo, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future/suddenly feel that the plants have thoughts’. The importance of music, in this view, is not just that it transcends our daily lives, but that it connects different aspects of existence. Moreover music wakens us to ways of being human that elude the grasp of our worse instincts. The great composer Franz Schubert’s String Quintet may indeed be ‘heroic’ but
…those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly
despise themselves for not being murderers,
don’t recognise themselves here,
and the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can
be bought, don’t recognise themselves here.

Read the poem in its entirety as below

Schubertiana
Translated by Robin Fulton


1

In the evening darkness in a place outside New York, a viewpoint point where
one single glance will encompass the homes of eight million
people.
The giant city over there is a long shimmering drift, a spiral galaxy seen
from the side.
Within the galaxy coffee-cups are pushed across the counter, the shop
windows beg from passers-by, a flurry of shoes leave no prints.
The climbing fire escapes, the lift doors glide shut, behind police -
locked doors a perpetual seethe of voices.
Slouched bodies doze in subway cars, the hurtling catacombs.
I know too – without statistics – that right now Schubert is being played
in some room over there and that for someone the notes are
more real than anything else.

2

The endless expanses of the human brain are crumpled to the size of a fist.
In April the swallow returns to last year’s nest under the guttering of this
very barn in this very parish.
She flies from Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two
continents, makes for precisely this vanishing dot in the land-
mass.
And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary
chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,
is a stout young gentleman from Vienna known to his friends as `The
Mushroom," who slept with his glasses on
and stood at his writing desk punctually of a morning.
And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in motion.

3

The string quintet is playing. I walk home through warm forests with the
ground springy under me,
curl up like an embryo, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future, suddenly
feel that the plants have thoughts.

4

So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day without
Sinking through the earth!
Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the village.
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding, trust that
the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden axe-blow
from within won’t come.
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the three
hundred times life-size bee swarm of steel.
But none of that is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else. And they keep us com-
pany part of the way .
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers –
trustingly – follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the
darkness.

5

We squeeze together at the piano and play with four hands in F minor,
two coachmen on the same coach, it looks a little ridiculous.
The hands seem to be moving resonant weights to and fro, as if we were
tampering with the counterweights
in an effort to disturb the great scale arm’s terrible balance: joy and
suffering weighing exactly the same.
Annie said, `This music is so heroic,’ and she’s right.
But those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly
despise themselves for not being murderers,
don’t recognize themselves here,
and the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can be
bought, don’t recognize themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody that remains itself in all its transfor-
mations, sometimes glittering and pliant, sometimes rugged
and strong, snail-track and steel wire.
The perpetual humming that follows us -- now –
up
the depths.




By bestowing Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy has finally recognized the world's most translated poet, a poet who truly grapples with the agony of modern man and daringly defines our inner world. The turbulent silence of Transtromer has triumphed finally.



Ref: The Great Enigma: new and collected poems translated by Robin Fulton

The Winged Energy of Delight-poems from Europe, Asia and the Americas translated by Robert Bly

[Petya Kokudeva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Чела съм части от тази книга на английски, сега, за радост, поживях в нея и на български. По какво долових, че ме е доближила съвсем и съм я заобичала дори повече, отколкото предполагам.

Първо. Не мога да чета, без да подчертавам. Не знам защо, все едно не чета органично и нямам контакт, ако не пиша, подчертавам и рисувам на места. НО ТАЗИ КНИГА аз направо я илюстрирах - сега гледам, какво ли няма - човечета с щръкнали коси (тях ги ползвам като NB), детелини, вълни, пр. Явно толкова ме е придърпал текстът в себе си, че не съм усетила как го продължавам по свой си, наивен начин.

Второ. Имам си теория, че слабата от силната поезия можеш да я разпознаеш по "употребата на природата". В слабата поезия природните метафори са неописуема скука. В "Голямата загадка" присъствието ни природата е лунапарк за ума! Увлекателно, дълбинно, завойчесто, съвсем неочаквано се вдигат от обичайните природни дадености едни нови създания... ето, пример, два:

горе съзвездията тропат в своите ясли; като бледи рисове/вълните му напразно опитват да се вкопчат в камъните на брега; храстите рухват в нощта; мъртви сламки измерваха колко дълбок е снегът;

И трето. Книгите, с които наистина оставам свързана, не са онези, които са ме хвърлили във възхита, нито онези, които си спомням добре, нито пък тия, в които се откривам някак си. Важните книги са ми тези, дето след последната страница са ме накарали веднагически да стана и с ръце, ум и сетива да вложа енергия в нещо съзидателно - дали ще пиша, ще сея цветя или ще приготвя подарък за някого, няма значение. Важните книги те правят теб самия създател, вдъхновител, предай-нататък-чо, един вид:)

Такава е Голямата загадка:)

[A.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only regret after finishing this fascinating book of poetry is that I would have read the very last chapter, a prose memoir piece called "Memories of Me," prior to reading any of the poetry. I encourage new readers of this book to read the last chapter first. Transtromer's poetry is beautiful but abstruse, his images powerful but multi-layered. At times, I felt as if I were reading a poetic form of stream-of-consciousness, or a transcription from a hypnotic state of mind. In his memoir, Transtromer describes key events from his childhood - a keen interest in natural science,skeletons and entymology; a fantastical obsession with Africa; rage against Nazism; and an intense battle with anxiety he entitled "Exorcism." All of this is evident in his verse - where natural objects manifest against a Dali-like setting, where the line between the waking world and subconscious is invisible.

This translation varies from Robert Bly's, and some poems I like better in this book and others better in Bly's. As the collection progresses, death becomes a more prominent theme, but I really enjoyed "For the Living and the Dead" and "The Sad Gondola." But there are a number of lovely poems from his early collection, "The Half-Finished Heaven," including "From the Hilltop," "Espresso" (what's not to love in a poem about coffee?), "The Palace," "In the Nile Delta" and "The Half-Finished Heaven" - with its amazing line,

"The lake is a window into the earth."

And this imagery from the collection "Bells and Tracks":

"The newspaper, that big dirty butterfly," (from "Portrait with Commentary")

"It will be hot day out on the asphalt.
The traffic signs have drooping eyelids." (from "Crests")

"Out on the open ground not far from the buildings
an abandoned newspaper has lain for months, full of events.
It grows old through nights and days in rain and sun,
on the way to becoming a plant, a cabbage head, on the way to being
united with the earth.
Just as a memory is slowly transmuted into your own self."
(from "About History")

Finally, this one from the collection "Seeing in the Dark" which beautifully summarizes his poetic expression:
"Two truths draw nearer each other. One moves from inside, one moves
from outside
and where they meet we have a chance to see ourselves."
(From "Preludes")

And, reading "Prison," which is subtitled "Nine Haiku from Hallby Young Offenders' Prison," re-awakened my love for this poetic form.

[Ajay P. mangattu · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the wonderful books of poems I have read recently.

Not for speed reading. Wait for lonely nights. Patience will be answered.

It s complicated, dense with unmeasured depths. It s for wandering souls

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Out on doorstep. Morning is beating, beats on
ocean’s granite gateways and sun is sparkling
near the world. Half-smothered, the gods of summer
fumble in sea mist.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Baltics" is amazing, one of the best long poems I've read.
For me, the rest are hit and miss.

[Antonomasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many times, looking for some wild nature poetry that would say what I felt better than I could, plus something extra, I read bits of Ted Hughes. I was nearly always disappointed. What I was looking for, it turns out nearly four years after I first noted this book on Goodreads, was Tranströmer.
[BTW, I too find the name difficult to say on its own without inwardly singing the notes of the Transformers theme. But at least we've got that out of the way now.]
This Swedish Nobel Prize winner's poems, translated in this edition by Robin Fulton, have the sense of history and time I always sought, like a rural version of what the unjustly neglected U.A. Fanthorpe could evoke in towns and her occasional poems about the British countryside. A sense of the past ever-present in places, and of the simultaneous yet different experiences of people in separate places and times.
In the middle of work 
we start longing fiercely for wild greenery,
for the Wilderness itself, penetrated only
by the thin civilisation of the telephone
wires.
From Tranströmer's 'On the Outskirts of Work'

And he seems a more equable and self-aware soul than Plath's widower. For instance, I cannot imagine Hughes writing something with this openness and vulnerability:
I walk home
through warm forests with the ground
springy under me,
curl up like an embryo, fall asleep, roll
weightless into the future, suddenly feel
that the plants have thoughts.
From 'Schubertiana'

[N.B. I am not sure if all line spacing is correct in this review as I have pasted quotes from an ebook which didn't have space for longer lines, to a word document to here, in a hurry to grab them before the Scribd book expired - I'd had three weeks notice of that to read it, so not their fault - and my checking may not be perfect. I really don't like to mess up something so lovely. It's a poor excuse, but at least Tranströmer had some sympathy with procrastination and tiredness:
The unanswered letters pile up, like cirro-stratus clouds promising bad weather. They make the sunbeams lustreless. One day I  will answer. One day when I am dead and can at last concentrate.  Or at least so far away from here that I can find myself again.
From the prose poem 'Answers to Letters'
Or stating in the memoir chapters from 'Memories Look at Me' that he is Nowadays  well-known for deficient productivity.]

Perhaps the greater expanse and extreme of the Scandinavian wilderness simply carries more of a thrill as an idea than mere Yorkshire. More exotic, to use a word that never seems right juxtaposed with coldness.
(The real lynxes are in the north, with sharpened claws 
and dreaming eyes. In the north, where day
lives in a mine both day and night.
Where the sole survivor may sit
at the borealis stove and listen
to the music of those frozen to death.)
From 'Sailor's Yarn'.

In 'Song' I loved uncovering a reference to Väinämöinen, another of the several times I've bene glad to have read Finnish national epid The Kalevala in which he's one of the heroes, for itself and for background to Nordic lit.
We had prehistory in Britain too of course, but I love the way this puts it:
Up there lie piles of stones
from the iron age when this was a place
for tribal wars, a colder Congo
and the danger drove beasts and men together
to a murmuring refuge behind the walls,
behind thickets and stones on the hilltop.
A dark slope, someone moving
up clumsily with his shield on his back
– this he imagines while his car is standing...
But the thunder strikes out of the stillness!...
It rises, a bellowing from the hill.
A roar of mingled notes
A long-hoarse trumpet from the iron age.
Perhaps from inside himself.
From 'Downpour Over the Interior'
[Perhaps the Congo reference is something we're not strictly supposed to say now, but it certainly evokes the way ideas of prehistory developed in a Western childhood a few decades ago, and thus another stratum of past again.]

Some metaphors I loved follow. And strange lines I found lovely whilst not entirely understanding them.

Dozens of dialects of green. - in a summer garden, from The Open Window

The crickets are as strong as electric shavers.
From 'From an African Diary'

An old joke hung in there
as beautiful as a votive ship
From 'Hommages'

We stepped out of the earth.
The land beat its wings
once and became still
under us, widespread and green.
From 'The Journey'

Mörkerseende, the Swedish title of one collection, Seeing in the Dark, so evocative to the English ear, the shadow or ancestor of our own words, or a way a kid might stretch words around into funny shapes.

And I am driving past   
the locked-up white church – a wooden saint is standing in there
smiling, helpless, as if they had taken away his glasses.  
He is alone. Everything else is now, now, now.
From 'December Evening 1972'

Several from his longest poem 'Baltics', about different lives that have been lived around the Baltic Sea:
The great current that blows life into some flames and blows others out

Appreciating creatures I often find beautiful to look at, but which plenty don't:
- The strait has become eccentric – swarming with jellyfish  today for the first time in years, they pump themselves forward  calmly and patiently, they belong to the same lint: Aurelia, they drift like flowers after a sea-burial, [No, I've never been stung...]
-snail
almost motionless in the grass, the antennae are sucked in 
and rolled out, disturbances and hesitation… 
How like myself in my searching!
And the sound of crickets again:
where the crickets whirr their sewing-machines frantically 
and the Baltic is close 
and the lonely water-tap rises among the wild roses 
like the statue of a horseman.

the houses rise up  in the glare of my headlights – they’re awake, want to drink. 
From 'Nocturne'.

For a thousand years, in the earth deep
under traffic the unborn forest quietly waits.
From 'The Crossing-Place'.

My steps get longer. A footpath creeps towards  me. I am back in the communications network.  On the humming electricity-post a beetle is sitting in the sun.  Beneath the shining wing-covers its wings are folded up as ingeniously as a parachute packed by an expert.
From 'The Clearing' (prose poem)

The tug is freckled with rust. What’s it doing here so far inland?
From 'Sketch in October'. [Yes, so very strange when you occasionally see old boats like this.]

a biblical text which was never written: ‘Come unto me, for I am full of contradictions like you.’ 
From 'Below Zero'.

Death, the birthmark, was growing on all of us, quicker on  some, slower on others.
From 'The Black Mountains' 

A telephone call ran out in the night and glittered over the countryside and in the suburbs. 
From 'Homeward'

I feel wet and unwieldy, a butterfly just crept out  of its cocoon, the plastic bags in each hand hang like misshapen  wings.
From 'How the Late Autumn Novel Begins' (prose poem)

The flying-carpet of the stamp
From 'Air Mail'

My work-cottage is small.  The piano a tight fit
like the swallow under the eaves.
An Artist in the North

What  a strange and wonderful invention glass is – to be close yet untouched…
From 'Icelandic Hurricane'

I am charmed by the lines that anthropomise various inanimate objects - often, but not exclusively, vehicles.
In a rainstorm The car is almost blind.
The traffic signs have drooping eyelids.
The lupins are stretching up as if they wanted  to catch sight of the sea. 

There are so many lines I love in this collection, those in the long list above feel like almost arbitrary choices. But must stop somewhere.

His late poems, written after several years' recovery from a stroke, are frequently shorter, mostly prose poems and haiku, and a few others. A verse from the opening poem of this set:
The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker's.
From 'April and Silence'.
Unfortunately I am not the greatest fan of haiku, but liked a few of these later works, the gaze steady despite intimations of mortality.
From 'Snow is Falling':
The funerals keep coming
more and more of them
like the traffic signs
as we approach a city.
[I think a fair bit about approaching middle age; friends mention words like 'mid-life crisis' or 'menopause' as lurking over the horizon, when a blink ago we'd not long graduated - but this was a sudden blast of cold air from what it must be like closing in on 'elderly'.]
From 'The Cuckoo', another prose poem:
Summer is growing old and everything is flowing into a single melancholy murmur. Cuculus  canorus will return to the tropics. Its time in Sweden is over. Its  time here was not long! In fact the cuckoo is a citizen of Zaire… I  am no longer so fond of making journeys. But the journey visits  me. Now when I am more and more pushed into a corner, when  the annual growth-rings multiply, when I need reading-glasses. Always there is much more happening than we can bear. There is  nothing to be surprised at.


Tranströmer seems to be discussed most frequently as a quasi-spiritual, almost metaphysical poet, yet to me he is predominantly a poet of landscape, the elements and history.
(Perhaps nature poetry and writing is something we grow into; as a kid, at any rate, it seemed as if most people found it boring, and I didn't love it quite as much as I do now. It strikes me that it's fortunate to really like nature, because whilst you have senses and thought available to be aware of it, it's nearly always present close by in some form or other, whilst many other things in life are less reliable.)

In his work, Tranströmer was a psychologist, and it's the underlying self-awareness, other-awareness and humanity that must have suited him for that, which makes me feel like I am reading a character quite different from Ted Hughes, and one I like more. Only occasionally do lines read to me as if predominantly about psychology, and they are every bit as perceptive as his nature verse:

Trust, which has elsewhere been called the glue of Scandinavian society:
So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day  without sinking through the earth!  Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the  village. 
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding,  trust that the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden  axe-blow from within won’t come. 
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the  three hundred times life-size bee-swarm of steel.  …
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers – trustingly – follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the  darkness. 
...
But those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly despise themselves for not being murderers, 
don’t recognise themselves here,  and the many who buy and sell people and believe that every one can be bought, don’t recognise themselves here. 
From 'Schubertiana'.

Those who think they make the earth go round and those who  think they go round helplessly in earth’s grip. 
From 'Carillon'

The translator's introduction mentions that in his heyday, Tranströmer was sometimes criticised for not writing overly political verse. Yet that means his work has aged better than some which contained more specific references to events (not that there aren't a few). When he does get political, it's mostly in the form of universals, inspired by the Cold War and still relevant in many countries now, here from 'Baltics' with a benevolent awareness of what is now jargonised as 'privilege':
It’s about places where citizens are under control,
where their thoughts are made with emergency exits,
where a conversation between friends really becomes a test of  what friendship means.
And when you are with people you don’t know so well. Control.  A certain sincerity is in place
if only you don’t take your eyes off what’s drifting on the outskirts of the conversation:
something dark, a dark stain.
Something that can drift in  and destroy everything. Don’t take your eyes off it! 
What can we compare it to? A mine?
No, that would be too concrete. And almost too peaceful – for on our coast most of the stories about mines have a happy ending, the terror short lived.

To Friends behind a Frontier
1
I wrote so meagrely to you. But what I couldn’t write
swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship
and drifted away at last through the night sky. 
2
The letter is now at the censor’s. He lights his lamp.
In the glare my words fly up like monkeys on a grille,
rattle it, stop, and bare their teeth.
3 
Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years
when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten
and can at last sleep, become trilobites.
[The pessimism and optimism of 1973. Bless.]


How we express a strong sense of connection to a writer might depend - at least it does for me - on their age, or rather the image of them which makes the strongest impression. I have only ever been aware of Tranströmer as an old man, an old-looking old man with the wisdom of age. So rather than the idea of wanting to be friends, I found myself facing the mystery of why I feel so little bond with most people I'm related to, yet whilst reading this poet, someone with many shared interests and, in the memoir section 'Memories Look at Me', a number of funny little biographical details and ways of observing that struck a chord, I had that feeling one is supposed to have when discovering a long-lost relative.

[chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

He
sinks toward summer, is lowered
in its dazzling carter, down
through shafts of green damp ages
trembling under the sun's turbine. Then it's checked,
this straight-down journey through the moment, and the wings spread
to the osprey's repose above rushing waters.
-- "Prelude"

Autumn's headlong flight is his weightless mantle,
flapping till again from the frost and ashes
peaceful days have come in their flocks and bathe their
claws in the wellspring.
-- "Five Stanzas to Thoreau"

Out of the winter gloom
a tremolo rises
from hidden instruments. It is like standing
under summer's high lime tree with the din
of ten thousand
insect wings above your head.
-- "There Is Peace in the Surging Prow"

At the edge of the wood the air is warm.
Great spruce, turned away and dark
whose muzzle hidden in the earth's mold
drinks the shadow of a shower.
-- "Through the Wood"

In among the copses there was a murmuring of words in a new language:
the vowels were blue sky and the consonants were black twigs and the speech was soft over the snow.
But the jet plane curtsying in its skirts of noise
made the silence on earth even stronger.
-- "Noon Thaw"

It is still beautiful to feel your heart throbbing.
But often the shadow feels more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
-- "After Someone's Death"

A boy sprints with an invisible line slanting up in the sky
where his wild dream of the future flies like a kite bigger than the suburb.
Further north you can see from a summit the endless blue carpet of pine forest
where the cloud shadows
are standing still.
No, are flying.
-- "Open and Closed Spaces"

Around me the whole strength of the street swarms,
power that remembers nothing, wants nothing.
For a thousand years, in the earth deep
under traffic the unborn forest quietly waits.
-- "The Crossing-Place"

One day we shall loosen from everything.
We shall feel death's air under our wings
and become milder and wilder than we ever were.
-- "Leaflet"

A wind vast and slow
from the ocean's library.
Here's where I can rest.
-- "Haiku"

[Harman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seeing as this is poetry, I don't read straight through it as I would prose, so to be honest I haven't completely finished this book, but I've read enough of it in my opinion to have "read" it.
Tomas Transtroemer is phenomenal. Rarely have I found language so powerful and intimate that resonates as deeply within me as Transtroemer's work does. The Blue House on page 169 is probably my favorite poem, at least currently. I'm crazy about the line "I am grateful for this life! But still I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real."
Poetry and its impact on readers, I feel, depends largely on the similarity between the reader and the writer. I think that the reason that Transtroemer's work resonates with me more than others is because he and I are similar - due to our psychological makeup; certain images mean similar things to us. Therefore, the images that he often employs - namely nature, music and seasons - effect me as the reader in a way very similar to the way he meant them in the first place. However, the only reason I can know this is from having read his biography and knowing that he and I have very similar views, passions and stories - therefore, obviously, it makes sense that we both find poetic majesty in a forest or shoreline.
All this being said, Transtroemer may be one of my favorite poets of all time; I strongly encourage anyone to read this.

[Hushour Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was surprised at how little I liked these works. A prize-winning poet, with a nice, modernist pedigree to boot, and a Swede to boot! What wouldn't there be to love? Quite a bit, sadly. I came to Transtromer by random, having found a few nice poems online that were impressive and engaging. Writ large, though, I don't find his corpus as likeable. A lot of his imagery is banal and punctuated. The entire volume felt like something incredible was trying to struggle, punch its way to the surface, but never succeeding. Ah, well. Just not for me, I guess.

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considerably worse than I expected -- the haiku are bad (like, really bad), though there were enough quality poems in his other collections that I read through to the end. My general impression of Tranströmer is something like "Peter Handke trying to write Ungaretti poems" (??) and not quite succeeding.

[Simão Pedro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simplesmente fabuloso.

[Deniss · Rating 4 out of 5]

The forest is full of abandoned monsters which I love.

Creo que leí algo de Tranströmer cuando ganó el Nobel porque entonces trabajaba en una librería, pero no me acuerdo de casi nada de esa primera colección que se tradujo al español. En todo caso, qué bueno que volví a él y esta vez puse atención, hubiera sido muy triste perderme de estos poemas. Regularmente leo poesía tomándome mi tiempo, alternando con otros libros, pero con esta colección fue imposible parar, sentía que leía un diario y en otros momentos que escuchaba los pensamientos de alguien más, no como si me hablara en voz alta pero como si fuera un susurro dentro de mis oídos.

On my way home I see mushrooms
sprouting through the grass.
They are the fingers, stretching for
help, of someone
who has long been sobbing alone
down in the the darkness.

No creo que mis reseñas sean en realidad reseñas, pero me parecen aún menos cuando se trata de poesía. Casi nunca sé qué decir cuando algo me gusta (qué curioso que muy seguido tengamos más palabras para lo que odiamos y nos convirtamos en Marcel Marceau cuando algo nos toca el corazón). Supongo que el silencio también es una muestra de admiración.

I am carried in my shadow like a violin in its black case.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

i must go out - the greenery is dense
with memories

super mooie bundel

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel blessed to work next to a magnificent and cheap used book store that has treasures like this book available.

Fave book was probably The Sad Gondola.

Will have to read this collection again.

[Sorina Negrilă · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real."

[Julien Luebbers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, I do indeed read poe-ehms.

Really wonderful work, admittedly the first book of poetry Ive read cover to cover since high school. More to come?

[Pauline Schmidt-West · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...the margins rise at last
over their brims
and flood the text." - Tomas Transtromer

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Голямата загадка Тумас Транстрьомер

Още в началото на XX век големият норвежки писател Кнут Хамсун възкликва: „Научих толкова много от шведската поезия и най-вече от поетите й от новото поколение.” Тук е мястото да призная, че не съм задълбочен изследовател и познавач на шведската поезия, но мога да твърдя, че също съм научил много от поетите на тази държава, които съм чел в превод на английски. Такива като Хари Едмунд Мартинсон, Гунар Екельоф, Дан Андершон и Ялмар Гулберг.
Но има един шведски поет, който отдавна заема почетно място в библиотеката ми между големите имена на световната поезия. Този голям поет е Тумас Транстрьомер. Той ме накара да видя, че модерната поезия не е само американска, английска, руска или полска. Той ми показа, че от една студена държава могат да дойдат много топли думи. Думи, подредени чрез висшия пилотаж на великата поезия. Затова смея да твърдя, че сборникът с негови стихове „Голямата загадка”, който наскоро се появи на българския литературен пазар, е събитие с колосални размери. Събитие, чийто отзвук ще отеква за дълги години напред. Първо искам да отдам заслужена дан на хората, благодарение на които тази книга се превърна в реалност. Това е екипът от преводачи: на първо място съставителят на този сборник (ИК Жанет 45”) е изтъкнатата преводачка от скандинавски езици проф. д-р Вера Ганчева. Следват Живка Колева, Мария Змийчарова, Любомир Гиздов, Адриана Дерменджиева и Северин Василев. Те са виновниците сега да държим книгата на един от най-големите световни поети в ръце.
Но тук е мястото да призная, че тази книга не е лесна за четене. Трудна е, защото те издърпва навътре в себе си и пускане няма. Стихотворенията на Транстрьомер работят на много нива. Отначало повърхността им е спокойна, като огледалното излъчване на езерото Венерн, но цопнеш ли вътре, потъваш все по-надълбоко и по-надълбоко. Докато достигнеш онова място, до което малцина читатели са достигали. Това го могат само огромните поети. А Тумас Транстрьомер е един от техните флагмани.
Отново повтарям, че тази книга е трудна за четене. Защото е изпълнена с истинска поезия. Тя е сън, който те води в друг сън и накрая в трети сън, докато всичкото това съновидение не се разтвори пред теб в цялата си изящност. По този начин Транстрьомер ти дава възможност да халюцинирате заедно, да поскитате ръка за ръка из дебрите на непознатото мироздание, което той открива пред теб парче по парче, прашинка по прашинка. Това е едно пътуване из реалният свят на един мечтател, скитник, фантазьор, реалист и гадател.
Шведските и световните литературни критици се надпреварват в това да дават определения на поезията на Транстрьомер, (модернизъм, експресионизъм, сюрреализъм, мистицизъм и др.), но за мен това няма никакво значение. Аз не се интересувам от това какво мислят другите за него, а от това какво мисли той за мен, какво има да ми каже със стиховете си и къде би ме завел чрез тяхната подредба. Дори след награждаването му с Нобеловата награда за литература през 2011 г. множество литературни усти, най-вече от САЩ, се разтвориха, за да избълват редици от безсмислени думи: наградата му била незаслужена, понеже творчеството му е доста оскъдно. Оскъдно? Това, че Транстрьомер е изключително пестелив поет, пречи ли на неговата изящност, която хиляди днешни поети и писатели не могат да достигнат с цялото си обемисто творчество? Има една истина и тя е: великите поети не броят написаните думи накрая на деня. Те просто продължават вечната си игра със словото и времето. И музиката, в това число. Дори и без да сте чели нищо за жизнения път на този поет, можете сами да усетите музикалността на стихотворенията му. След разлистването на тази книга ще разберете кои са любимите му композитори и по какъв начин Транстрьомер следва тяхната повеля в това да се използва универсалният език на музиката и превъплъщаването му в поетичния канон. Музиката може да се чуе от всяка строфа, от всяко изречение.
Един от любимите ми писатели, който си отиде преди две години, а именно Кристофър Хътчинс, веднъж отговори по следния начин на журналистически въпрос: „Поезия ли? Обичам да чета поезия, но никога не бих могъл да я пиша, защото нищо не разбирам от музика.” Тумас Транстрьомер е един от най-инструменталните поети, които съм чел. „Голямата загадка” е доказателство за това. Доказателство, че в тези мрачни времена на словоблудство, графоманска логорея и изгубване в безпътицата на евтините литературни романчета, там някъде, в Швеция, има един творец, който мисли за света с приятни вибрации. Усетете ги.

Пейчо Кънев

http://www.kultura.bg/bg/print_articl...

[Mariam]

I can not comprehend how Is it possible not to get lost and how to find truth?
As you mentioned "truth is when outer and inner truth are getting closer to each other and when they cross each other you find the truth tou find yourself."
Is it possible? We still are searching for truth but when we reach our gates, find out that in front of this beautiful and grotesque gate we are standing alone.
Where are they?
They are standing in front of their gates of truth. it is an unfinished short story by Kafka but what i wanted to tell about Tomas Transtromer poetry, it is a fantastical realism for me.!
Thank you for making me happy

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really loved Transtromer's work. He's a Swedish poet whose work has been translated into over 50 languages. He's won the Nobel prize. His work is amazing- he's a plain language poet, who writes both about nature and the urban cityscape. His images were dark and haunting, but easy to understand.

Really loved this. I'm glad that I decided to explore Swedish writers as part of my research for my upcoming trip.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tranströmer has managed to capture all of my most private, profound thoughts, wrap them up in loving words, and send them back to me. The Blue House in particular has great significance for me: "It’s always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real."

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems should be experienced, not talked about. But I will say that these austere, quiet poems from the Nobel Prize winner bring a vision of a lonely soul communing with nature and trying to understand the vagaries of his fellow human beings. A haiku from the "Sad Gondola" series seems to sum up his world view:

Oak trees and the moon.
Light. Silent constellations.
And the cold ocean.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't actually "read" the whole book, but finished most of it and found it rather slow going. Although I appreciate Tranströmer, I find it often hard to connect. I'm sure the failure is all mine...