A prized poet

Nobel winner

When the Swedish Academy bestows the Nobel Prize on a Scandinavian poet, it is hard not to be skeptical. After all, the academy has managed to award the prize to three Swedish poets alone, and the last such poet — Harry Martinson in 1974 — was actually a member of the academy at the time. But it would be wrong to scold the Swedes for elevating their countryman Tomas Transtromer. Transtromer is not only a first-rate artist, but his selection corrects an almost 15-year drought for poetry. (The last Nobel laureate to be known mostly for poetry was Wislawa Szymborska, who won in 1996.)

Transtromer, 80, has written more than 15 collections of poetry, many of which have been translated into English and 60 other languages.

Critics have praised Transtromer’s poems for their accessibility, even in translation, noting his elegant descriptions of long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature.

“So much poetry, not only in this country but everywhere, is small and personal and it doesn’t look outward, it looks inward,” said Daniel Halpern, the president and publisher of Ecco, the imprint of HarperCollins that has published English translations of Transtromer’s work. “But there are some poets who write true international poetry. It’s the sensibility that runs through his poems that is so seductive. He is such a curious and open and intelligent writer.”

Neil Astley, the editor of Bloodaxe Books in Britain, called Transtromer “a metaphysical visionary poet.”

“He’s worked for much of his life as a psychologist, and the work is characterised by very strong psychological insight into humanity,” Astley said.

Transtromer was born in Stockholm in 1931. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father, a journalist. He studied literature, history, religion and psychology at Stockholm University, graduating in 1956, and worked as a psychologist at a youth correctional facility.

In 1990, Transtromer suffered a stroke that left him mostly unable to speak, but he eventually began to write again.

The typical Transtromer poem is an exercise in sophisticated simplicity, in which relatively spare language acquires remarkable depth, and every word seems measured to the millimeter. It is no surprise that his chiselled body of work over a nearly 60-year career comes in at only 200 pages or so. Consider the powerful economy of the opening lines of Morning Birds from 1966:

I waken the car
whose windscreen is coated with pollen.
I put on my sunglasses.
The birdsong darkens.

Here, Transtromer carefully sets up several interconnecting themes: the act of creation (which is why the windshield is coated with pollen, not dust); the difficulties of perception (he is behind an occluded screen wearing dark glasses); and the surprising, unplannable nature of art (notice the startling blend of sight and sound in “birdsong darkens”).

All of this comes together in the poem’s finale, in which Transtromer observes, “Fantastic to feel how my poem grows/ while I myself shrink.” As the various images coalesce, the poem itself finally becomes “a bird that throws me out of the nest./The poem is ready.”
This is the sort of poetry that often appeals to casual readers as much as to specialists, in part because it tends to come across well in translation. (Transtromer has been fortunate in this regard, as English-language writers — notably Robin Fulton and Robert Bly — have helped make his work widely available.)

One of Transtromer’s abiding interests — obsessions, almost — is the complex nature of identity and the difficulty of safeguarding something so difficult to describe or analyse. Early in his career, in Kyrie, he writes:

Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark.
A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets
in blindness and anxiety on the way towards a miracle,
while I invisibly remain standing.

The trouble involved in seeing oneself, or other people, is continued in later poems like The Gallery, in which the poet notes, “a person shows himself for an instant/as in a photograph but clearer/and in the background/something which is bigger than his shadow.”

Transtromer’s conclusion in that poem is symbolic of much of his work: “It’s his life, it’s his labyrinth.” Little surprise, then, that he often fixates on the trappings that are taken for the self, but which are only discarded outer layers. “I walk slowly into myself,” he writes in Postludium, “through a forest of empty suits of armor.”

It is fitting that in his more recent career, Transtromer has been drawn increasingly to haiku, that form beloved (or not so beloved) of so many third-grade classes. The form plays to many of his strengths: economy, compression, metaphoric agility and speed. And in its ability to speak loudly through the smallest of gestures, the haiku serves as a poignant symbol for Transtromer’s own difficulty with speech since a stroke in 1990.

His last two collections, The Sad Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004), both contain memorable haiku sequences, and the latter series is especially striking. As he writes in its penultimate poem:

A wind vast and slow
from the ocean’s library.
Here’s where I can rest.
The turbulent stillness of Transtromer does honour to a prize that has not always done honour to itself.