The Winged Energy of Delight
Selected Translations
Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Tranströmer comes from a long line of ship pilots who
worked in and around the Stockholm Archipelago. He is at home on
islands. His face is thin and angular, and the swift, spare face reminds
one of Hans Christian Andersen's or the younger Kierkegaard's. He has
a strange genius for the image -- images come up almost effortlessly. The
images flow upward like water rising in some lonely place, in the
swamps, or deep fir woods.
Swedish poetry tends to be very rational, and therefore open to
fads. Tranströmer, simply by publishing his books, leads a movement
of poetry in the opposite direction, toward a poetry of silence and
depths.
One of the most beautiful qualities in his poems is the space we feel
in them. I think one reason for that is that the four or five main images
that appear in each of his poems come from widely separated sources
in the psyche. His poems are a sort of railway station where trains that
have come enormous distances stand briefly in the same building. One
train may have some Russian snow still lying on the undercarriage,
and another may have Mediterranean flowers still fresh in the compartments,
and Ruhr soot on ... read full excerpt from: The Winged Energy of Delight ebook
