Swedish Poet Wins Swedish Literary Prize
D. G. Myers
That should be the headline. Tomas Tranströmer, an 80-year-old “surrealist” or “mystical” poet from Stockholm, became the fourth Swedish writer to be recognized by the Swedish Academy with the Nobel
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Commentary Magazine
That should be the headline. Tomas Tranströmer, an 80-year-old “surrealist” or “mystical” poet from Stockholm, became the fourth Swedish writer to be recognized by the Swedish Academy with the Nobel Prize in literature. He was the first Swede to be honored since the novelists Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, two writers on every reader’s shelves, shared the prize in 1974. (The German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, who split the 1966 prize with Israeli novelist Sh. Y. Agnon, was living in Sweden at the time.)

More Swedish writers have now taken home the award than Italian (three), Spanish (three), Polish (two), Greek (two), Australian (one), or Indian (none), Canadian (none), or Dutch writers (none). Who knew that Sweden was a world power in literature? Tranströmer became the first poet in a decade and a half to win the Nobel Prize.

The poets say that he is something of a transnational figure. In a review of Tranströmer’s New Collected Poems published in the Guardian early this summer, Paul Batchelor calls him a “non-English-language poet who has been fully accepted into British and US poetry in his own lifetime.” In an essay on him at the Academy of American Poets’ website, Tom Sleigh says the reception of Tranströmer’s poetry in this country “is now part of American literary history.” Both of them mention that Tranströmer is associated with Robert Bly’s “Deep Image” movement. (For those of you keeping score at home, Bly’s “deep image” is not exactly the same as Jerome Rothenberg or Clayton Eshleman’s “deep image,” but is no less fuzzy in conceptual content.)

Bly explains helpfully that the “deep image” is a “geographical location in the psyche,” but the critic Kevin Bushnell seems to be on firmer ground in saying that it is “the first attempt in American poetry to incorporate fully the theories of Freud, Jung and other depth psychologists into the poet’s expression.” Tranströmer, a trained and practicing psychologist, would be attracted to such a conception for obvious reasons.

Tranströmer’s poems are serene and unfazed, even when describing the “terror” of an automobile accident as in “Alone” (translation by Robin Fulton):

I

One evening in February I came near to dying here.

The car skidded sideways on the ice, out

on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars—

their lights—closed in.

My name, my girls, my job

broke free and were left silently behind

further and further away. I was anonymous

like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.

The approaching traffic had huge lights.

They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel

in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.

The seconds grew—there was space in them—

they grew as big as hospital buildings.

You could almost pause

and breathe out for a while

before being crushed.

Then something caught: a helping grain of sand

or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free

and scuttled smartly right over the road.

A post shot up and cracked—a sharp clang—it

flew away in the darkness.

Then—stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt

and saw someone coming through the whirling snow

to see what had become of me.

II

I have been walking for a long time

on the frozen Östergötland fields.

I have not seen a single person.

In other parts of the world

there are people who are born, live and die

in a perpetual crowd.

To be always visible—to live

in a swarm of eyes—

a special expression must develop.

Face coated with clay.

The murmuring rises and falls

while they divide up among themselves

the sky, the shadows, the sand grains.

I must be alone

ten minutes in the morning

and ten minutes in the evening.

—Without a programme.

Everyone is queuing at everyone’s door.

Many.

One.

“Antitheses such as isolation and society are brought together, generating a powerful field of force,” Batchelor says in his Guardian review, commenting on this poem. “The poem offers no explanation for its abrupt change of scene, and we soon learn that a Tranströmer poem can change with the speed of a dream.”

What else do we learn? Batchelor does not say, and I have no idea. Perhaps, as he implies, the learning is contained wholly within the poem, like a bird in a cage. Even when Tranströmer addresses an outside world, he is not likely to refer to it with any distinguishing exactness. Here is a poem called “November in the Former DDR,” although we never learn why the location is specified (translation, again, by Fulton):

The almighty cyclop’s-eye clouded over

and the grass shook itself in the coal dust.

Beaten black and blue by the night’s dreams

we board the train

that stops at every station

and lays eggs.

Almost silent.

The clang of the church bells’ buckets

fetching water.

And someone’s inexorable cough

scolding everything and everyone.

A stone idol moves its lips:

it’s the city.

Ruled by iron-hard misunderstandings

among kiosk attendants butchers

metal-workers naval officers

iron-hard misunderstandings, academics!

How sore my eyes are!

They’ve been reading by the faint glimmer of the glow-worm lamps.

November offers caramels of granite.

Unpredictable!

Like world history

laughing at the wrong place.

But we hear the clang

of the church bells’ buckets fetching water

every Wednesday

—is it Wednesday?—

so much for our Sundays!

Iron-hard misunderstandings, poets! How far we have drifted from a time when poetry was an art of reflection, measuring thought in exact units. Tranströmer’s award may explain why no poet has won the Nobel Prize in 15 years, and why the Swedish Academy, in an age in which poets no longer perform any public function, was at a loss when it came time to pick the greatest poet now writing, and settled for one of its own.