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Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015) | |
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Swedish poet, psychologist, and translator, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011. Thomas Tranströmer occupied an influential position in Swedish literature from the 1950s. In the English-speaking world he is perhaps the best-known modern Scandinavian poet. Typical for Tranströmer's work is surrealistic imagery – a stamp is seen as a magic carpet, the shadows of the trees are black numbers, and a crowd of people makes a rough-surfaced mirror. Often called a poet's poet, his translators include such names as J. Bernlef, Caj Westerberg, Robert Bly, Bei Dao, Joseph Brodsky, and Czeslaw Milosz. Jag kör ner händerna i mina haydnfickor Och stenarna rullar tvärs igenom Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm, the son Gösta
Tranströmer, a journalist, and Helmy (née Westberg), an elementary
school teacher, the daughter of a ferryman. After his parents
divorced Tranströmer saw his father rarely, usually on the Christmas Eve. Tranströmer learned to write at the age of five. He lived with his mother in an apartment house on Folkungagatan 57 in the Södermalm district. While
she was at work at the at the Hedvig Eleonora school, he was taken care
of by a domestic helper named Anna-Lisa. "Till hennes talanger hörde
att hon ritade mycket bra. Hon var specialist på Disneys figurer. Själv
ritade jag nästan oavbrutet under dessa år i slutet av 30-talet." (Minnena ser mig by Tomas Tranströmer, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1993. p. 12) During WW II, Tranströmer spent many summers on the island of Runmarö. Sweden was neutral in the war, but Tranströmer once recalled in an interview being "the most militant supporter of the allies." ('An Interview with Tomas Tranströmer' by Tam Lin Neville and Linda Horvath, Painted Bride Quarterly, Double Issue 40/41, 1990, p. 33) Later in his poetry collection Östersjöar (1974, Baltic) and in the memoir Minnena ser mig (Memories Look at Me) Tranströmer returned to the landscape of the archipelago. At
school, Tranströmer was a good student.
With an old typewriter, which he got as a Christmas gift, he thought of
writing a work that would be even larger than Alfred Brehm's Djurens liv (1920-31; 15 vols.). Before becoming
interested in music and
painting, Tranströmer was fascinated by archaeology and natural
sciences and he also dreamed of living the life of an explorer. His
heroes were Livingston and Stanley. The National Museum presented in
2013 a collection of insects which Tranströmer had collected in his
childhood. In his honour on the occasion of his 80th birthday, a rare
beetle discovered in Gotland was named after him. In 1951 Tranströmer visited Iceland together with a friend from school. With the money he had earned from his first collection of poems, he went to Greece and Turkey. While studying at the Södra Latin School, Tranströmer started to read and write poetry. Some of these early pieces were composed in iambic and Alcaic meter. In 1956 he received a degree in psychology from the University of Stockholm. He then worked for the Psychotechnological Institute at the university, and in 1960 he was employed as a psychologist at Roxtuna, an institution for juvenile offenders. From the mid-1960s Tranströmer divided his time between his writing and the daily duties of his job. In 1965 he moved with his wife Monica and children to Västerås, a city about sixty miles west of Stockholm. From 1980 he was a psychologist for Arbetsmarknadsinstitutet, a labor organization institute. He helped persons with pyschological problems develop work abilities and counselled parole offenders and those in drug rehabilitation. Tranströmer made his debut as a poet at the age of
twenty-three with 17 dikter (1954). It included poems written
in blank verse. While writing this collection, Tranströmer listened to
Sibelius. All the poems echo subconscious images from the music. The
poem 'C-dur' from Den
halvfärdiga himlen (1962, The Half-Finished Heaven) was inspited by Sibelius's third
symphony: "En musik gjorde sig lös / och gick i yrande snö / med långa
steg. / Allting på vandring mot ton C." (Dikter och prosa 1954-2004 by Tomas Tranströmer, p. 111) With his Finnish translator Caj
Westerberg he has also visited the composer's home, Ainola. Later Tranströmer experimented with metre, although he used free verse in most of his work. Hemligheter på vägen (1958, Secrets on the Way) and Klangar och spår (1966, Resonances and Tracks) took up themes from Tranströmer's travels in different parts of the world – the Balkans, Spain, Africa, and the United States. The latter work also included a portrait of the composer Edward Grieg. In 'Izmir klockan tre' (from Hemligheter på vägen) a beggar carries another without legs on his back, and in 'Oklahoma' (from Klanger och spår) the passing cars in dark, with their lights on, turn into flying saucers. 'A Man from Benin' referred to an art work which Tranströmer saw at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna. Tranströmer's poems are often built around his own experience,
around a single, deceptively plain image that opens doors to
psychological insights and metaphysical interpretations. Mörkseende
(1970, Night Vision) explored the poet's personal life, and the conflict
between technology and nature. Stigar (1973, Paths) consisted of
Tranströmer's own poems and translations of poems by Robert Bly and by
János Pilinszky. Bly and Robin Fulton have translated much of
Tranströmer's work into English. In 2001 the publishing company
Bonniers celebrated the poet's 70-year birthday with Air mail,
a selection of correspondence between these two writers from 1964 to
1990. Tranströmer welcomed Bly to Roxtuna in a letter dated 27-5-64,
saying: "I can pick you up at the station. So you'll be able to
recognize me, I will be wearing a green tail-coat, a false beard, and s
straw had, and reading Nixon's autobiography. Or perhaps some simpler
arrangement could be found." Tranströmer once stated, that Baltics was his "most
consistent attempt to write music." (The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton, New York: New Directions, 2006, p. xvii) The landscape and its conflicting
elements, like the battle between the sea and and land, present
confronting forces in Tranströmer's poems – freedom and control of
speech, nature and human influence on it. Especially Tranströmer's poems about the Baltic archipelago in Östersjöar reflect political conditions of the area. In the 1970s the Baltic countries were still part of the Soviet Union, and when Tranströmer visited Latvia and Estonia in 1970, he felt himself like a person in an early Graham Greene story. 'To Friends Behind a Frontier' in Stigar referred to censorship in a totalitarian state: "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." (translated by Robin Fulton, in The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, 2006, p. 113) Movement and change is part of Tranströmer's poetic
landscape,
although his visions of "cosmic peace" have been criticized by radical
writers. In Sweden, the 1960s was a period of political commitment in
literature. Nevertheless, he remained austere and complicated and earned a reputation for being politically
apathetic. "I am very interested in the politics but more in a human
way than in an ideological way," he said. ('An Interview with Tomas Tranströmer,' p. 34) In 'Out in the Open' Tranströmer wrote: "The
people who run death's errands for him don't shy from daylight. / They rule
from glass offices. They mill about in the bright sun. / They lean
forward over a desk, and throw a look to the side." (Selected Poems 1954-1986 by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly and others, edited by Robert Hass, Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1987, p. 11) In 1990, at the age of 59, Tranströmer suffered from a
stroke, which affected his ability to talk, read, and move. He had
published in the previous year his tenth collection, För levande
och döda (For the Living and the Dead). Tranströmer did not regain
use of his right hand, but he could to write and play piano
with his left hand. His ability to speak was
limited to 20 words or fewer. After a silence as a writer, Tranströmer returned with Sorgegondolen (1996, Sorrow Gondola), which took its title from Franz Listz's two piano pieces. Listz composed them at the time when his son-on-law Richard Wagner died. The book sold 30 000 copies in Sweden. Tranströmer's musical interests were prominent in many collections – he was an accomplished amateur musician, playing piano and organ. In Sorgegondolen the poet acknowledged the limits of his expression, in which the words and all he wants to say 'glimmer just out of reach like a silver in a pawnshop,' ("Det enda jag vill säga / glimmar utom räckhåll / som silvret / hos pantlånaren.") Many of the haiku in Den stora gåtan (2004, The Great Enigma) dealt with the theme of death. "Death bends over me," he noted. Tranströmer's first remark on being informed of the Nobel
Prize was, "now the worst has happened." His other awards include the
Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1990, the Bonner Award
for Poetry, Germany's Petrarch Prize, Bellman Prize, The Swedish
Academy’s Nordic Prize, and August Prize. In 1997 the city of Västerås
established a special Tranströmer Prize. Tranströmer's work has been
translated into over sixty languages, including Dutch, Finnish,
Hungarian and English. His translator into Chinese, Bei Dao, took the title of his essay 'Blue
House' from Tranströmer's country home, where they listened together a
Bach piece played by Glenn Gold. Tomas Tranströmer died after a short illness
on 26 March, 2015, in Stockholm. For further reading: Pimeän kynnyksen yli: keskusteluja Tomas Tranströmerin kanssa by Heli Hulmi (2022); Tranströmer och det politiska, edited by Gustav Borsgård (2020); Avbildning av inre landskap i Tomas Tranströmers lyrik by Inger Bierschenk (2017); Topology of the Ingrained Quality in a Poem by Tomas Tranströmer by Inger Bierschenk (2017); The Works of Tomas Tranströmer: the Universality of Poetry by Lim Lee Ching (2017); Tranströmer Internationa: [an intercontinental perspective on the poetry of Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer], edited by Kristian Carlsson (2013); Mødesteder: om Tomas Tranströmers & Henrik Nordbrandts poesi by Louise Mønster (2013); Tomas Tranströmer: ett diktarporträtt by Staffan Bergsten (2011); 'Pohjalasti ja yölentäjä', ed. Caj Westerberg, Parnasso (2/2002); Tranströmerska insektsamlingen från Runmarö by Fredrik Sjöberg (2001; 2011); Stjärnhimlen genom avloppsgallret by Magnus Ringgren (2001); Tomas Tranströmer: en bibliografi, andra delen by Lennart Karlström (2001); Tomas Tranströmer: en bibliografi by Lennart Karlström (1990); 'An Interview with Tomas Tranströmer' by Tam Lin Neville and Linda Horvath, Painted Bride Quarterly, Double Issue 40/41 (1990); Den trösterika gåtan: tio essäer om Tomas Tranströmers lyrik by Staffan Bergsten (1989); Resans formler: en studie i Tomas Tranströmers poesi by Kjell Espmark (1983): 'Tranströmer, Tomas' by L.S. [Leif Sjöberg], in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, edited by Jean-Albert Bédé and William B. Edgerton (1980); Forays into Swedish Poetry by Lars Gustafsson, translated by Robert T. Rovinsky (1978) - Suom.: Tranströmerilta on Eeva-Liisa Manner julkaissut kokoelmassaan Kuolleet vedet (1997) kymmenen runon valikoiman. Brita Polttila on kääntänyt kokoelman Eläville ja kuolleille (1990). Kootut runot 1954-2000, suomentajana Caj Westerberg, ilmestyi 2001 Tammen kustantamana. Selected works:
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