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Tomas Tranströmer for the Nobel Prize · 7 December 2004
A literary education is good for nothing if not the gradual and painstaking accumulation of a mental library of wonderful lines. For years, I’ve returned again and again to the highest traffic area of my inner stacks, the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer. I know it only in translation from the Swedish, first from Robert Bly’s collection, Friends, You Drank Some Darkness, and later from the 1987 selected poems edited by Robert Hass. But even second-hand, no other poetry I know contains such exquisite compression and vivid cinematography.
In a mere two lines, Tranströmer taught me how to read and gave a clear picture of how to write: “the writer is halfway into his image, there / he travels, at the same time eagle and mole” (“The Journey’s Formuae”, from Secrets on the Way, 1958). And in poem after poem, his distilled imagistic montages do more than films can—they are precise dosages of complex experience that one can swallow easily, but that can take days or weeks to clear out of the system. Take the specific gravity and poise of this: “Black coffee at sidewalk cafés / with chairs and tables like gaudy insects. // It is a precious sip we intercept / filled with the same strength as Yes and No” (“Espresso,” from The Half-Finished Heaven, 1962). Or this: “The string quartet is playing. I walk home through the humid woods with the ground springing under me, / huddled like one unborn, fall asleep, roll weightlessly into the future, know suddenly that the plants have thoughts” (“Shubertiana,” from Truth-Barriers, 1978).
Certainly, Tranströmer’s compression is hard won. He is famously unprolific—each of his thin volumes has taken years to emerge—and in 1990 he suffered a stroke that for several years robbed him of speech. But at this writing he is still writing, and returning to his work again—inspired by a move to a landscape of forests and cross-country ski enthusiasts—I am alternately filled with longing and maddened by the deceptive ease of his intimate voice. For longer than I care to admit, I struggled to write like him—to induce a slip of imagery like coloured water, which would compose in the mind all the delicate transparencies of a state of being somewhere between waking and sleep. I have since relinquished that ambition. And of course Tranströmer, bless ‘im, has already described that particular artistic disillusionment with his customary economy:
An artist said: Before, I was a planet
with its own thick atmosphere.
The rays from outside were broken up into rainbows,
continuous thunderstorms raged within, within.
Now I’m burned out and dry and open.
I don’t have the energy of a child now.
I have a hot side and a cold side.
No rainbows.
—From “The Gallery” in Truth-Barriers
Robert Bly, ed. Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets, Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelöf, and Tomas Tranströmer. New York: HarperCollins, 1975.
Robert Hass, ed. Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems 1954-1986. New York: The Ecco Press, 1987.
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