Tranströmer Translator Accused of Plagiarism
February 16, 2012
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Harvard Celebrates Tranströmer November 15
October 28, 2011 Leave a comment
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Tuesday, November 15
4-6 p.m. on
Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library
Harvard University
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Harvard’s Scandinavian Program congratulates Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer for winning the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature and invites the Harvard and surrounding communities to an evening celebrating his work. This event, “Celebrating this Year’s Nobel Prize in Literature: Tranströmer Across Languages,” will be held from 4-6 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 15 in the Woodberry Poetry Room of Lamont Library. Scandinavian Preceptor Ursula Lindqvist will read Tranströmer’s poems in the original Swedish; visiting scholar and poet Vasilis Papageorgiou of Linneaus University in Växjö, Sweden, will read from his translations of the poet’s work into Greek; award-winning translator and poet Rika Lesser of New York will read from her translations of Tranströmer’s work into English; and Professor Judith Ryan, an expert on the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, will read published German translations by Hans Grössel. This event is hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center’s Seminar on Modern Greek Literature and Culture and co-sponsored by the Center’s “Rethinking Translation” seminar, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Scandinavian Program. (Tranströmer read and spoke about his poetry during a visit to Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room in 1981; click on link to listen.)
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Poets Adonis and Tomas Tranströmer Tipped as Favorites for Nobel Literary Prize
October 5, 2011 Leave a comment
Poets Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said), Syria, and Tomas Tranströmer, Sweden
Poets lead running for Nobel Literature prize
By Simon Johnson
STOCKHOLM | Tue Oct 4, 2011 9:11pm EDT
(Reuters) – Two poets, one Swedish and the other Syrian, are leading the betting to win the 2011 Nobel Literature prize, a bookmaker said on Tuesday, though past prizes have often defied the predictions.
British betting firm Ladbrokes have the 81-year-old Syrian poet known as Adonis at odds of 4/1 and Swede Tomas Transtromer, 80, at 7/1 to win the 10 million crown ($1.5 million) prize, to be announced on October6. Japan’s Haruki Murakami was third at 8/1.
All three have been on the betting list of candidates before, but an award to Adonis, a champion of democracy and secular thought, would chime well with Arab Spring revolts in several Middle Eastern nations — though he has not been without his critics who view his support for the uprisings as too muted.
Apart from his political engagement, Khaled Mattawa, who has translated many of Adonis’ works into English, said the Syrian — named Ali Hamid Saeed at birth — deserved to be recognised for his artistry.
Read the full article at Reuters
A Swedish master of mysticism leaves the reader spellbound
July 7, 2011 Leave a comment
- Paul Batchelor
- guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 June 2011 23.55 BST
Illustration by Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.uk
New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton, Bloodaxe Books, 2011
Mystical poetry: the phrase conjures fridge-magnet platitudes and joss sticks. But the mysticism of Tomas Tranströmer is grounded firmly in close observation of both the natural world and human psychology (he has worked as a psychologist all his life). He does not present his poems as nuggets of wisdom to be pondered: instead, they tend to chart a progression from concrete reality to a heightened state of awareness, as in “Winter’s Gaze”:
I lean like a ladder and with my face
reach into the second floor of the cherry tree.
I’m inside the bell of colours, it chimes with sunlight.
I polish off the swarthy red berries faster than four magpies.
At once, after this joyously sunny opening, the tone darkens:
A sudden chill, from a great distance, meets me.
The moment blackens
and remains like an axe-cut in a tree-trunk.
Nothing could be more traditionally “poetic” than to contemplate the changing of the seasons in terms of changing emotional states; but simply by manipulating the timeframe – by having winter arrive with surreal speed – Tranströmer allows us to apprehend both from a fresh perspective.
Tranströmer is that rare thing: a non-English-language poet who has been fully accepted into British and US poetry in his own lifetime. In the 60s he became associated with Robert Bly and the Deep Image school of US poetry, and in the early 90s (after the publication of the first edition of this book) many UK poets caught on. More recently, Robin Robertson translated a selection of his poems in The Deleted World, and hopefully this new volume of Robin Fulton’s translations (which includes Tranströmer’s most recent work as well as some previously uncollected haiku and a prose memoir) will confirm a third wave of interest in this poet’s work.
