Remembering Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s time in Provincetown

December 5, 2011

       Books

The Word On The Street

By Jan Gardner |   December 04, 2011

March is a month of awakenings. Sap flows; birds return from their wintering grounds; and mating seasons begin. It’s the month with which Vermont naturalist and wildlife photographer Mary Holland begins her book, “Naturally Curious: A Photographic Field Guide and Month-by-Month Journey through the Fields, Woods, and Marshes of New England’’ (Trafalgar Square).

“Naturally Curious’’ is a fine guide, providing about 900 photographs and dozens of annotated lists of animals, plants, and fungi you might expect to see or hear at various times throughout the year. Holland writes about creatures big and small, from the habits of the bull moose in rut to the migration of the snow flea. Her book is this year’s winner in the nature guidebook category of the National Outdoor Book Awards.

Fond memories

When the Nobel Prize in Literature is conferred on Tomas Tranströmer on Saturday, a handful of poets who got to know him decades ago on Cape Cod will take notice. They fondly remember the Swedish poet from his two teaching residencies 30 years ago at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Read full article at Boston Globe

Filed under Nobel Prize, Poetry

Chinese writers cheer Swedish poet’s Nobel win

November 28, 2011 Leave a comment

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  • Culture

  • Lee Yi-yun and Staff Reporter
  • 2011-10-08
  • 10:19 (GMT+8)

The Nobel literature laureate Tomas Gosta Transtromer counts Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Yan Lianke

and Bei Dao among his Chinese admirers. (Photo courtesy of Nobel Prize website)

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The announcement of Swedish poet Tomas Gosta Transtromer as the recipient of this year’s Nobel prize for literature has been celebrated in China, with many publicly commending the writer who has many fans in the country.

Although the general view may be that Transtromer won because of his nationality after being nominated several times in past years, the reactions in China was largely positive. Transtromer had visited Beijing in March 2001.

In addition to counting leading Chinese writers such as Mo Yan, Yu Hua and Yan Lianke among his fans, exiled Chinese poet Bei Dao, who was nominated for the same prize in the past, is also friends with Transtromer and says he has influenced his own work.

Bei wrote about Transtromer in his 2005 book The Time of Rose, which included the Chinese writer’s observations about the Swede and other fellow poets.

The symbolism and surrealism displayed in Transtromer’s poems, often based on daily life and the natural world, have also influenced to some degree another Chinese poet, Li Li, who translates the new Nobel laureate’s works into Chinese.

Several Chinese writers shared their thoughts on the news on their microblogs. Poet Yu Xinqiao wrote, “Today, he is finally awarded the Nobel prize in literature, which is a right decision worth cheering for.”

References:

Bei Dao 北島

The Time of Rose 時間的玫瑰

Li Li 李笠

Want China Times

Filed under Chinese Poets, Nobel Prize, Poetry

In Praise of Tranströmer the Transformer—and His Translator, Robert Bly

November 28, 2011 Leave a comment

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  • Christopher Benfey

  • October 7, 2011 | 12:00 am

“Tranströmer!” Of course, I knew immediately what the email message meant. After years of waiting among the also-rans, and amid speculation that this was the year for an Arab poet to win the Nobel Prize in Literature to honor the Arab Spring, or maybe, a late-breaking rumor, that Bob Dylan was the bettors’ choice, a Swede was named to win the Swedish prize.

Tomas Tranströmer: The name always makes me think of some kind of giant transformer, sending out signals from his redoubt in the snowy fields west of Stockholm. He is said to be a respected psychologist there—someone who has worked in a juvenile prison and cares for convicts and drug addicts—and an amateur pianist. Until a recent stroke, he also wrote poems. Those poems are well known to American readers in the poetry world, if such a world can be said to exist. He still plays the piano, with one hand.

Every poet has a distinctive music. Here is the closing stanza of Tranströmer’s poem on Vermeer:

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”

I told my emailing friend, himself a Scandinavian “by background,” as we say, that I’d always suspected he had invented Tranströmer. Not at all, he responded, “Tranströmer invented us.” A typical Northern sally of wit, I thought, as I walked the dog on a sunny and crisp fall morning in New England, crossing the stubble fields into the dark woods. But then I thought, hey, what if he’s right?

For me, a Nobel for Tranströmer, well deserved, is also a Nobel for his close friend, translator, and collaborator Robert Bly. Bly! I can’t even begin to calculate how much I owe, in all things literary and spiritual, to Robert Bly. I don’t mean the Bly of later years, the prophet of Iron John and the Men’s Movement, though I can’t say I’m unmoved by his lament for the fathers, now that I’m one myself. I don’t mean the ecstatic Bly who performs Kabir with some mysterious rhythm instrument in hand, chanting and dancing and making his serape flap like wings. But I can’t say I mind that either. The truth is, I love Robert Bly.

Read full article at New Republic

Filed under Nobel Prize, Poetry

Tomas Tranströmer: Ten things you never knew about the poet you never knew

November 17, 2011 1 Comment

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Our guide to the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature.

 By Marie-Claire Chappet
4:34PM BST 06 Oct 2011
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Whilst we would all like to claim awareness of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, a poll currently underway at Nobelprize.org reveals that eighty-eight percent of those who logged on to discover this year’s winner had never read his poetry. Should you find yourself within this statistic, here is our handy guide to Tomas Tranströmer.

1. Born in 1931 in Stokholm to a schoolteacher mother and journalist father, Tranströmer spent much of his childhood in an Enid Blyton style blurr of jolly seaside holidays on Runmarö Island (in the Stockholm archipelago.) This became fodder for his nostalgic poems Östersjöar (1974; Baltics, 1975) and his 1993 memoir Minnena ser mig (The Memories See Me).

2. Tranströmer studied literary history, history of religion and psychology at Stockholm University. After graduating he was employed at the Institution for Psychometrics at Stockholm University in 1957 and, between 1960 and 1966, worked as a psychologist at Roxtuna, a youth correctional facility.

3. Despite a previous smattering of poems published in journals, Tranströmer’s literary debut was in 1954 with 17 dikter (17 Poems.) It has been consided one of the most acclaimed literary debuts of that decade.

4. In Sweden he is known as a ‘buzzard poet’ because his poetry views the world from a great height…like a buzzard, apparently.

Read full article

Filed under Nobel Prize, Poetry

The Mystique of Tomas Tranströmer

November 17, 2011 Leave a comment

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November 5, 2011, 4:01 AM IST

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BOOKS – INDU K. MALLAH
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Once in a sterile while, there happen those rare untethered moments when one is catapulted from the humdrum to a sublime plane. I had just invoked the name of Tomas Tranströmer vis-à-vis another piece of writing when my son rang to tell me that Tranströmer had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and I hit the ceiling.

My mind immediately went back to The World Poetry Festival (Vagarth) held at Bharat Bhavan, in Bhopal in 1989, where I first met Tranströmer. I still remember his sonorous voice reading, inter-alia, from his oeuvre, the lines: “Each man is a half-open door leading to a room for all,” which set the key-note for the Festival. He had later inscribed these words in my souvenir copy.

Three-way engagement

Born in Stockholm in 1931, Tranströmer is a writer, poet and translator acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since World War II. He has published 15 collections of poetry and has been translated into over 60 languages. He worked as a psychologist until 1990. He also plays the piano and there is a constant cross-flow and symbiosis between all three engagements.

Among Tranströmer’s many awards are the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, The Petrarca-Pries in Germany, The Golden Wreath of The Struga Poetry Evenings, and the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum.In 2007, Tranströmer received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of The Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry. His crowning glory has been the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2011.

It is a measure of his humanism that he visited the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 long before Vagarth. His empathy for the human condition comes across even in a casual encounter.

Tall, imposing, with an arresting personality, Tranströmer strides the international scene like a colossus. There is a heightened awareness in his poetry, a state of sharpened perception. The outstanding characteristic of all his writing is a keenly visualised sense of all his poems.

Sense of rhythm

“I love images,” he says. “I have abstract images also; my memory is very visual too.” This is clear from these lines: “The lake is a window into the earth.” “I put on my sun-glasses, The birdsong darkens.” “…their most secret thoughts meet and flow into each other/As when two colours meet and flow into each other on the wet paper of a school-boy’s painting.”

Tranströmer has an innate sense of rhythm and, in the original Swedish, his poems have an unmistakeable music of their own, which ties up with his love of music.

Though he is deprecating about being called a mystic or religious poet, he does “respond to reality in such a way that I look on existence as a great mystery, and at certain moments, this mystery carries a strong charge, and it is often in such a context that I write. So that these poems are all the time pointing to a greater context: one that is incomprehensible to our everyday reason. Although it begins in something very concrete.”

The Hindu

Filed under Poetry, Reviews

Where Should I Start with Tomas Tranströmer?

November 16, 2011 Leave a comment

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By Colin Cheney| Posted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2011, at 3:20 PM ET

A picture taken on March 31, 2011 shows Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer at his home in Stockholm, Sweden.

Photo by JESSICA GOW/AFP/Getty Images

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Not to be confused with the Michael Bay franchise, the 80-year-old Swedish psychologist and poet Tomas Tranströmer, just awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, writes surreal, imagistic poems that explore his fascinations with the music of memory and nature. If you want to get to know his work, here are a few good entry points:

1. Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems, 1954 – 1986. Edited by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, this selection of over 100 poems provides perhaps the best introduction to Tranströmer. Here, the poems are Englished by twelve different translators, including Hass; it’s a good way to figure out whose translations make you feel closest to the ‘real’ Tranströmer. 

2. The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems. This 2006 collection of Robin Fulton’s clear-eyed and spare translations will give you the most complete picture of the arc of Tranströmer’s career. It’s also one of the only readily available books that shows how the poems were originally collected in Swedish. The Great Enigma includes everything from the astonishing teenage lyrics published in 1952 (17 Poems), to the haunting Baltics, to the late poems of The Sad Gondola.

Read full article

Filed under Books, Nobel Prize, Poetry

The Beauty Of Stillness

November 16, 2011 Leave a comment

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Nobel Literature Winner Tomas Tranströmer

by John Freeman

October 6, 2011

Paula Tranströmer/AP

Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for Literature October 6

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Like a glass-blower by a wintry sea, Tomas Tranströmer has been slowly and painstakingly making poems in his native Stockholm since the early 1950s. In his debut work, the modestly titled Seventeen Poems, published when Tranströmer was just 23, the Swedish poet imagined Thoreau in the woods, “disappearing deep in his inner greenness/artful and hopeful.”

A private man in his work and life, Tranströmer has been following Thoreau’s example for 50 years. He will have more difficulty doing that after today’s announcement that he is this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In truth, though, Tranströmer is far from obscure. Since the 1960s, when his work first began to appear in English — translated by Robert Bly, Robert Hass, May Swenson and others — he has been one of the most regularly translated European poets. On this, the morning of the prize, Tranströmer has already been translated into over 50 languages.

Read full review

Filed under Poetry, Reviews

Documentary Captures Tranströmer’s Nobel Day

October 30, 2011 4 Comments

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Fortunately, Bloodaxe Books, the major British and European publisher of Tranströmer books in English, commissioned a documentary that captured events as they unfolded on October 6, 2011, the day that Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The previous August, British documentary filmmaker Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Tranströmer in his apartment playing the piano. Robin Fulton’s translations appear as subtitles for the Swedish-language readings  Tranströmer recorded prior to a stroke in 1990 which rendered him speechless.  The poems in Swedish  include “The Nightingale in Badelunda,” “Allegro,” “From the Thaw on 1966,” “The Half-Finished Heaven,” “April and Silence,” “From March 1979,” and “Tracks.”

www.bloodaxebooks.com

Filed under Music, Nobel Prize, Poetry

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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Listen to Tranströmer read in 1981 at Harvard 

Go to Harvard University Scandinavian Studies Department

Filed under News, Nobel Prize, Poetry

Bonniers förlag Tranströmer Video

October 28, 2011 Leave a comment

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Produced by Albert Bonniers förlag, Sweden’s oldest (established 1937) and most prestigious publisher (Bonniers is the Swedish publisher of the new Steve Jobs biography) as a Youtube video channel to promote their authors, this brief video captures Tomas Transtromer in images with his grandfather, mother and wife Monica. A brief but eloquent congratulatory video celebrating the Nobel Prize for Tomas Tranströmer.
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Filed under Books, Nobel Prize, Poetry, Publishing

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