The new Nobel laureate from Sweden

Tomas Transtroner is this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for literature He is the 108th recipient of this most prestigious award. He was a frontrunner for this award for many years. Tomas Transtromer is arguably the most well-known, both nationally and internationally, among Swedish poets; he has a formidable international reputation.

His poetry has been translated in to over sixty languages. He is also a translator of distinction. In awarding the Nobel Prize for literature for 2011 the Nobel Committee said that. 'Because through his condensed and transluscent images he gives us great access to reality.' Clearly, I think the Nobel committee is on the mark in its assessment. The compact and vivid imagery that illuminates aspects of his chosen human reality is certainly a defining feature of his poetry.

Tomas Transtromer is a poet with a deep social consciousness that is anchored to a comforting moral poise. Immediately after the Bhopal gas tragedy in India, he visited the country in order to demonstrate his solidarity with the victims. He read his poetry along with the Malayalam poet K. Satchidanandan. His poetry may not appear to be overtly political; however a social concern, an engagement with society, activates many of his most successful poems. I first read some of Transtromer’s poems in translations a few years ago; the translations were by the eminent American poet Robert Bly. I am a great admirer of Bly’s poetry, and I have attended his poetry readings where he displayed his indubitable performative gifts. After the news of Transtromer winning the Nobel Prize for literature spread, I decided to read all his collections of poetry translated into English. My observations in this column are based on my recent reading of his work.

Transtromer, by his own admission, is a great admirer of American poetry. He has been influenced by such poets as Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Gary Snyder, James Wright and Robert Bly. He was a close friend of Robert Bly, and they translated each other’s poetry. There is an affinity of interest, it seems to me, in terms of theme, style and technique between Bly’s and Transtromer’s poetry. In addition to the modern American poets listed above, Transtromer drew inspiration from such European and Russian poets as Eugenio Montale, Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca, Boris Pasternak and Giuseppe Ungaretti.

A knowledgeable critic of Tomas Transtromer’s poetry once remarked that, ‘Tomas Transtromer has always been impatient with any effort to make the poet more important than the poem he’s written, and he’s never been interested in the kind of personality nimbus that drifts, like a small rainbow over the careers of many popular poets in England and America.’

Despite his antipathy to too much biographical inquiry, let me start out my giving a little of his background that might enable Sri Lankan readers to enter into his created poetic world with some degree of assurance.

He was born in 1931 and spent many of years in his long life in the section of Stockholm referred to as Sodermalm. It is an island which is located south of the old section of the city; it possesses an individuality that makes it appealing to many Swedes.

Transtromer displayed an interest in poetry from his young days, and his work began to appear in literary magazines while he was a student. He published his first book of poems titled ‘17 Poems’ at the age of twenty-three.

It was received well by many critics, and the book was a formidable success. His second book of poems called ‘Secrets Along the Way’ was published four years later. Like his earlier work, it was a slim volume consisting of fourteen poems. And the poems were short too. As some critics have observed his books of poetry were small because he did not wish to include any poems that he thought had not reached the requisite pitch of perfection. In other words, his poems were complete and self-sustaining, and the reader was never left with the uneasy feeling that part of his compositions could have been be pruned or expanded with advantage.

The tentativeness that characterizes the poetry of even some of the greatest poets is clearly absent in Tomas Transtromer’s work. However, at the same time he has been able to retain a sense of spontaneity, unforced intimacy that served to infuse his writings with vigor and vitality that many readers found wholly appealing. This is evident in a poem like sketch in October.

The tugboat is freckled with rust. What is it doing here, far inland
It’s a heavy, quenched lamp in the cold.
But the trees wave wild colors; signals to the other shore
As if wanting to be rescued.

On the way home, horsetail mushrooms I see sprout from the grassy turf
They are the help-asking fingers of one
Who has sobbed by himself in the dark down there
We are the earth’s.

Literary career

He followed the Secrets Along the Way with such volumes of poetry as The Half Finished Sky (1962),’ Sounds and Traces (1966), Night Visions (1970).By the time he came to write his third and fourth books of poetry he was generally regarded as one of Sweden’s most important and consequential poets his long poem ‘Baltics’ (1973) served to cement his reputation as a poet with indubitable strengths. While he pursued his literary career with unabated fervor, he was also working as a trained prison psychologist. That was his chosen profession. His work as a psychologist has had a bearing on his efforts as a poet. Once in an interview when Transtromer was asked the question how his poetry relates to his work as a psychologist; he gave the following response. ’I believe there is a very close connection, though it can’t be seen. Everything one writes is an expression of a gathered experience. And the problems one meets in the world at large are present to a very great extent in what I write, though it doesn’t always show directly. Bit it’s close to hand, all the time.’

One aspect of Tanstromer’s poetry that has struck me rather forcibly is the compactness that he seems to treasure so very much. He is able to construct condensed and tightly-structured poems that carry within themselves many layers of poetic meaning. Let us consider a few short poems. The following poem d titled, ‘context’ and consists of eight lines.

Look at the grey tree. The sky has run
Through its fibers down in the earth-
Only a shrunk cloud is left when
The earth has drunk. Stolen space
Is twisted in pleats, twined
To greenery – the brief moments
O freedom rise in us, whirl
Through the Parcae further.

In this poem which deals with the earth, the sky, clouds, greenery the metaphorically rich languages vivifies the poem while allowing it a compactness and tightness which make its brevity inescapable. Ultimately, the poem explores the idea of freedom that is a chief concern of Tomas Transtromer as a poet.

Let us consider another short poem; it is titled, ‘Weather Picture’.

The October sea glistens coldly
with its dorsal fin of mirages

Nothing is left that remembers
the white dizziness of yacht races

An amber glow over the village
And all sounds in slow flight.

A dog’s barking is a hieroglyph.
painted in the air above the garden

Where the yellow fruit outwits
The tree and drops of its own accord.

Nature

What we find in this poem is the way the poet engages with nature, bringing out its vividness and unpredictability through a series of carefully constructed images. The compactness of the poem is essential to its authority, and success. It is, in many ways, reminiscent of classical Chinese nature poems of Tu Fu or Li Po.

There are, it seems to me, three important themes that Transtromer has labored to explore in his poetry. The first is the complex relationship between human beings and nature. He finds nature immensely fascinating because of its unpredictability; it contains many unexpected secrets. This is admirably captured in the imagery of his poems. In the following poem titled The Tree and the Sky, we find the poet seeking to call attention to the mysteriousness of nature through deceptively simple images. What these images do is to provoke us to fresh thinking about the mysteries of nature.

There’s a tree walking around in the rain,
it rushes past us in the pouring grey.
It has an errand. It gathers life
out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard.

When the rain stops so does the tree.
There it is, quiet on clear nights
waiting as we do for the moment
when the snow-flakes blossom in space.

What is interesting about this poem is the way the author has taken an ordinary situation from nature and turned it into a novel experience through the power of poetic wit. This is indeed a feature found in many of Transtromer’s nature poems. The same sense of observing nature through fresh eyes, and thereby enticing the reader to join in an imaginative quest, is manifest in the following poem called Ringing.

And the thrush blew its song on the bones of the dead.
We stood under a tree and felt time sinking and sinking.
The churchyard and the schoolyard met and widened into each other
like two streams in the sea.

The ringing of the church bells rose to the four winds borne by the gentle leverage of gliders.

It left behind a mightier silence on earth

And a tree’s calm steps, a tree’s calm steps.

In the following poem titled ‘From the Thaw of 1966’, it is evident that the poet has succeeded in investing nature with a sense of mystery. Indeed it is that mystery which constitutes the heart beat of the poem.

Headlong headlong waters; roaring; old hypnosis.
The river swamps the car-cemetery, glitters
behind the mask.
I hold tight to the bridge railing.
The bridge; a big iron bird sailing past death.

Familiar

In some of his poems, Transtromer is able to de-familiarize what is familiar, and draw the reader into a newly created world of sensory experience. The following opening stanza of his poem storm serves to illustrate this point.

Suddenly, out walking, he meets the giant
oak, like an ancient petrified elk, with
mile-wide crown in front of September’s sea,
the dusk-green fortress.

The second important theme, in my judgment, that finds articulation in Tomas Transtromer’s poetry is the challenging relationship between the ordinariness of daily life and the strangeness that is embedded within than ordinariness. The extraordinariness in the ordinary and the ordinariness in the extraordinary is a phenomenon that fascinates him. Let us examine a poem like tracks.

2 a.m: moonlight the rain has stopped
Out in the middle of the plain. Far away, points of light in a town,
Flickering coldly at the horizon.

As when someone has gone into a dream so deep
He’ll never remember having been there
When he comes back to his room.

As when some one has gone into an illness so deep

Everything his days were becomes a few flickering points, a swarm, Cold and tiny at the horizon.

The train is standing quite still.
2 a.m: bright moonlight, few stars.

Strange

In poems such as this Tomas Transtromer is able to create a strange world of experience that is constantly intersecting with the ordinary world that we are familiar with. Such poems have detectable religious connotations. Some have called him a Christian poet, although he himself does not agree with that characterization. However, he does maintain that there is a religious dimension to his poetry. Once in an interview he remarked that, ‘I respond to reality in such a way that I look on existence as a great mystery and at 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 rime pointing towards a greater context, one that is incomprehensible to our normal everyday reason- although it begins in something very concrete.’

On another occasion he confessed that, ‘I think most of my poems deal with the mystery of life. Life is very mysterious and for e this has religious implications. But it is not orthodox religion. I think most bishops and priests would regard me as only half-Christian.’ The sense of mystery of life that was important to Transtromer as a poet found expression through religiously charged locutions and tropes. However, as he matured as a poet he deployed less and less overtly religious allusions and associations that marked his early poetry. Some commentators have seen this as a way in which Transtromer has sought to embrace a great measure of secularism. That might be an excessive reading; the more balanced way, I would argue, is to see his later efforts as explorations into the mysteries of life using newer frames of intelligibility that were not totally dissociated from religious modes of feeling and awareness. In his poetry, religiosity and secularism have been united in a symbiotic knot.

The third theme that finds powerful expression in Tomas Transtromer’s poetry is the power and reach of history; here I am using the term history in its broadest sense to include personal memories as well. For example in the poem The Bookcase, the poet confronts the death of her mother who was so close to him (the father was absent from his life as he has divorced his mother when he was a child) in poignant terms. Memory infuses his imaginings with weight of poetic richness. We see how in his poems dealing with intensely personal memories, the poems strive for larger ends. Transtromer has also composed poems that deal with history in a trans-personal sense that focuses on well-known historical figures and events. What is interesting about these poems is the way that he seeks to enlarge our sympathies for his chosen subjects with the accumulated densities of sensory life as is exemplified in a poem like ‘Gogol.’ These are its two opening stanzas.

The jacket threadbare as a wolf-pack.
The fate like a marble slab.
Sitting in the circle of his letters in the grove that rustles
with scorn and error
the heart blowing like a scrap of paper through the inhospitable
passageways
The sunset is now creeping like a fox over this country,
igniting the grass in a mere moment.
Space is full of horns and hooves and underneath
the barouche glides like a shadow among my father’s
lit courtyards.

Tomas Transtromer was an ardent traveler and the impressions garnered from these travels fed his poetic imagination leading to destinations of compelling poetry. In his travel poems, it is important note, that the emotional peaks reached are never unearned. Buoyed up by the conviction that outsiders can have a vantage point that is denied to the locals, and occupy a unique space of observation, he is unafraid to present his distinct takes on a given cultural geography while gesturing towards counter- truths. In these poems, the illusion of simplicity is a part of his rhetorical strategy. For example the following poem titled ‘In the Nile Delta’ is based on his travels to Egypt. Interestingly, this a poem to which Sri Lankan readers can readily relate to.

The young wife wept over her food
In the hotel after a day in the city
Where she saw the sick creep and huddle
And the children bound to die of want

She and her husband went to their room.
Sprinkled water to settle the dirt.
Lay on their separate beds with few words.
She fell in a deep sleep. He lay awake.

Out in the darkness a great noise ran past.
Murmurs, tramping, cries, carts, songs.
All in want. Never came to a stop.
And he sank in sleep curled in a No.

A dream came. He was on a voyage.
In the grey water a movement swirled.
And a voice said;’ There is one who is good.
There is one who can see all without hating.’

Comment

Every now and then, Tomas Transtromer has opted to comment on his own poetry, and these comments can often lead us to a deeper and newer awareness of his poems. This is a part of what he had to say about the poem ‘In the Nile Delta’ which I have quoted in full above.’ In the first place it is a direct description of something I actually experienced. It is not something I invented – I recount in the concentrated form of the poem the experiences of a day in the town of Tanta in Egypt in 1959. I and my wife (who was only nineteen then and had never before confronted with the reality of a poor country)- had with difficulty managed to escape from the tour guides – there were never any help available if it was a matter if making one’s way into parts of the country which the authorities did not want to show foreigners – and there we were in Tanta. It could be asked why I used ‘he; instead of ‘I’ in the poem – I think it is a way of giving distance and generality ti a difficult and troubling experience. I have tried to write unsentimentally and nakedly as possible and mainly with monosyllabic words. well – we went to sleep in the indescribably dirty ex-hotel and then I dreamt what is in the poem….’

Tomas Transtromer, the new Nobel Laureate, then, is a poet that Sri Lankan readers can relate to, and they are bound to find his work of great interest. He is complex but accessible; there is nothing in his work that is forbiddingly opaque and obscure- the kind of fashionable obscurity that mars the writings of some modern poets. His themes as well as his preferred representational devices are not too distant from the perimeter of Sri Lankan experiences. Let me conclude with a comment by Tomas Transtromer that allows us entry into his deeper intentions and investments. He observed that, ‘My poems are meeting-places. Their intent is to make a sudden connection between aspects of reality that conventional languages and outlooks ordinarily keep apart. Large and small details of the landscape meet, divided cultures and people flow together un a work of art…poems are active meditations, they want to wake us up, not put us to sleep.’

Tomas Transtromer, I am persuaded, is a poet of prodigious talent who has a remarkable ability to cajole language to yield up its manifold secrets. This power shines through even in English translations. Inevitably, much is lost in poetic translation, but what has survived, in this case, in the ordeal of translation from Swedish to English is substantial enough to reinforce this fact. In my own experience I find Transtromer, with his resolute concentration of phrase and earnest introspection, his will to impose a shape of reason on fleeting emotions while retaining the luxury of shadows, to be a poet who grows through re-reading and re-engagement.