To me, poetry is a concise form of high level human expression in which image, rhythm, and other properties of oral and written language (sound, alliteration, rhetoric, etc.) are selectively used to describe reality at both conscious and subconscious levels. I find Tomas Tranströmer's poetry uniquely special, for one may continue to find new surprising values after many readings.
In Rober Bly's words,Tomas Tranströmer has a strange genius for the image; images rise seemingly without effort on his part. The wide space we feel in his poems perhaps occurs because the four or five main images in each poem 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....
In Tranströmer's poems, the link to the worldly occasion is stubbornly kept, and yet the mystery and surprise never fade, even on many readings.
....
Tranströmer's poems are a luminous example of the ability of good poetry in one culture to travel to another culture and arrive. As Tranströmer said in a letter to the Hungarian poets, published in the magazine Uj Iras in 1977, "Poetry has an advantage from the start....Poetry requires no heavy, vulnerable apparatus that has to be lugged around...."
Following are some of Tomas's poems :
At Funchal
(Island of Madeira)
On the beach there's a seafood place, simple, a shack thrown up by survivors of the shipwreck. Many turn back at the door, but not the sea winds. A shadow stands deep inside his smoke hut frying two fish according to an old recipe from Atlantis, tiny garlic explosions, oil running over sliced tomatoes, every morsel says that the ocean wishes us well, a humming from the deep places.
She and I look into each other. It's like climbing the wild-flowered mountain slopes without feeling the least bit tired. We've sided with the animals, they welcome us, we don't age. But we have experienced so much together over the years, including those times when we weren't so good (as when we stood in line to give blood to the healthy giant --he said he wanted a transfusion), incidents which should have separated us as if they hadn't united us, and incidents which we've totally forgotten --though they haven't forgotten us! They've turned to stones, dark and light, stones in a scattered mosaic. And now it happens: the pieces move toward each other, the mosaic appears and is whole. It waits for us. It glows down from the hotel-room wall, some figure violent and tender. Perhaps a face, we can't take it all in as we pull off our clothes.
After dusk we go out. The dark powerful paw of the cape lies thrown out into the sea. We walk in swirls of human beings, we are cuffed around kindly, among soft tyrannies, everyone chatters excitedly in the foreign tongue. "No man is an island." We gain strength from them, but also from ourselves. From what is inside that the other person can't see. That which can only meet itself. The innermost paradox, the underground garage flowers, the vent toward the good dark. A drink that bubbles in an empty glass. An amplifier that magnifies silence. A path that grows over after every step. A book that can only be read in the dark.
(p. 64)
Kyrie
At times my life suddenly opens its eyes in the dark.
A feeling of masses of people pushing blindly
through the street, excitedly, toward some miracle,
while I remain here and no one sees me.
It is like the child who falls asleep in terror
listening to the heavy thumps of his heart.
For a long, long time till morning puts his light in the locks
and the doors of darkness open.
(p. 7)
Tomas Transtromer loves music, and plays the piano brilliantly. Even after he suffered from a stroke in 1990, which left the right side of his body partially paralyzed and his speech impaired, he continues to play the piano with his left hand. Composers in Sweden have sent him piano works which they have written for his left hand. This suggests how much affection there is for Tomas and his poetry.
We can hear music in his poetry.
Allergo
After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydenflag. The signal is:
"We do not surrender. But want peace."
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.
(p.12)
Lamento
He put the pen down.
It lies there without moving.
It lies there without moving in empty space.
So much that can neither be wrtten nor kept inside!
His body is stiffened by something happening far away
though the curious overnight bag beats like a heart.
Outside , the late spring.
From the foliage a whistling --people or birds?
And the cherry trees in bloom pat the heavy trucks on the way home.
Weeks go by.
Slowly night comes.
Moths settle down on the pane:
small pale telegrams from the world.
In Robin Fulton's words, Tomas Tranströmer's modest body of works has generated enormous interest. For over half a century...his poems have attracted special attention in his native Sweden, and in the course of the last three decades, they have caught the interest of an extraordinary range of readers throughout the world. The first two volumes of his bibliography, taking up to 1999, amount to almost eight hundred pages and list translations into fifty languages. (p. xiii)
17 Poems (1954) written in his late teens announced the presence of a distinct poetic personality....The very first poem, "Prelude," reveals a quality characteristic of all his writings: the very sharply realized visual sense of his poems. The images leap out from the pages, so the first-time reader or listener has the immediate feeling of being given something very tangible. "Prelude" also points forward thematically. It describes the process of waking up, not in the usual terms of rising to the surface, but in terms of falling... into a vivid teeming world. And this fascination with the borders between sleep and waking, with the strange areas of access between an everyday world we seem to know and another world we can't know in the same way but whose presence is undeniable --such a fascination has over the decades been one of Tranströmer's predominant themes....certain aspects of the relations between waking and dreaming states....
(p. xiv)
...there is a profoundly religious aspect to his poems....The following is a characteristic response to the comment that reviewers sometimes refer to him as a mystic and sometimes as a religious poet:
...you could at least say that I response to reality in such a way that I look on existence as a great mystery and that at times, at certain moments, this mystery carries a strong charge, so that it does have a religious character, and it is often in such a context that I write. So these poems are all the time pointing toward a greater context, one that is incomprehensible to our normal everyday reason. Although it begins in something very concrete.
Interview with Gunnar Harding, 1973
(p. xiv-xv)
Specifically or overtly religious allusions in the early poetry soon disappear from succeeding work. This has been interpreted as a process of secularization....
Sources:
Tomas Tranströmer. The Great Enigma --New Collected Poems (New York, NY: New Directions Books, 2006). Translated by Robin Fulton.
The Great Enigma --New Collected Poems gathers all the poems Tomas Tranströmer has ever published. All twelve of his poetry books are collected here.
Robin Fulton is a Scottish poet and long-time resident of Norway. He has been translating Tranströmer for over thirty-five years. He has published several prize-winning books of translation, as well as books of his own poetry and essays.
Tomas Tranströmer.The Half-Finished Heaven. Chosen and translated by Robert Bly. (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2001).
Robert Bly is a poet, essayist, cultural critic and translator. He won the 1968 National book Award in Poetry. His recent collections are Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems, and The Night Abraham Called to the Stars. He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomas_Transtromer
