Essay
Tomas Transtromer: Grand old man of poesy
At long last the ultimate accolade in literature-- the 10 million kronor award. The Nobel Prize (2011) was awarded to the octogenarian Swede, Tomas Transtromer, who has been a perennial frontrunner for the prize for several years now. It was to many 'a happy end to a long wait'. The award, however, is not past criticism, for highly acclaimed writers like Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Graham Greene were not found suitable for it. The Swedish Academy has as usual been accused of being too Euro-centric and prejudiced in making its choices. Transtromer is the eighth European to win the world's premier literary award in the last ten years. A recent online survey reveals that eighty-eight percent of those who logged on to discover this year's (2011) winner had never read his poetry. The Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, however, turns down the possibility of any preferential treatment with regard to this award to Transtromer. "He is already terribly famous", argues the Scottish poet Robin Fulton, who has worked on Tranströmer's writing for many years. It may, therefore, sound preposterous to smell a rat in Transtromer's winning the Nobel Prize. Cautious about giving awards to the Swedes for fear of favouritism, the Academy seems to have awarded its own countryman pretty judiciously. The merit of Transtromer's poetry well testifies to the fact. His surrealistic poetical works about myriad mysteries of the human mind already have given him wide recognition as the most influential Scandinavian poet in recent decades. In Sweden he is popularly known as a 'buzzard poet' since his poetry views the world from a great height, like a large European bird of prey soaring high above the cliffs. Transtromer, at eighty, is the ninth Swede to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but significantly different from his predecessors. His citation says "through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality." Although sometimes criticized as wanting in social awareness, his poetry is admired by most critics for the beauty of his language evident in the resonant and uniquely suggestive imagery. Marked by powerful poetic images, his poems generally revolve around his own experiences, and are infused with his love of nature and music. A great master of metaphor, Transtromer weaves strange images into his poems without embroidering on them. He writes surreal, imagistic poems that tend to explore his enduring fascinations with the music of nature. Although he creates offbeat and bizarre images, they are not devoid of clarity of thought, purpose, and vision. Robin Robertson, a poet who has translated Tranströmer's poems into English, explains: "The images leap out from the page, so the first-time reader or listener has the immediate feeling of being given something very tangible." Robin Fulton, too, agrees on the clearness of Transtromer's unusual images. As he puts it: "In many ways the language he uses is relatively unadventurous and simple [but] he gives people unusual images [which are] sometimes very surprising and give the reader a shock. That should be what poets do." A poet, psychologist and avid amateur pianist, Transtromer has many strings to his bow. He studied literature, history, poetics, religion and psychology at Stockholm University, and later devoted himself to writing poetry and practising as a psychologist at a juvenile prison, and with the disabled, convicts and drug addicts. As a result of his training in psychology he has been able to write subtle and multi-faceted poetry that delves deep into man's inner world, and explores his relationship with nature through quiet introspection. The following lyric poem shows how powerful his imagery is: April and Silence
Spring lies deserted
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side without reflections.
All that shines
are yellow flowers.
I'm carried in my shadow
like a violin in its black case.
The only thing I want to say
gleams out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnshop. Transtromer's oeuvre amounts to fifteen collected works which have been translated into more than sixty languages. An English translation of the entire corpus of his work was done by Robin Fulton with the title New Collected Poems, published in the UK in 1987, and expanded in 1997. Following the publication of The Great Enigma, Fulton's edition was further expanded into The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, published in the US in 2006. And again the updated edition of New Collected Poems was published in the UK in 2011. In addition, Transtromer published a short autobiography entitled The Memories See Me, in 1993. Transtromer's work has gradually gravitated toward a graver and darker world of self-contemplation. It moved into the void, striving to grapple with the unknowable in quest of transcendence of the ultimate reality. His poems are often explorations of the borderline between sleep and wakefulness and between consciousness and the unconscious. The chief motifs of his writing move around the big questions death, memory, history and nature. Transtromer has described his own poems as "meeting places", where light and darkness, inner and outer selves clash to create a connection with these four (death, memory, history and nature). To his thinking: "The language marches in step with the executioners. Therefore we must get a new language." His poetry strives to juxtapose the deep and inner workings of the human mind with the vivid scenes from his own country landscape. In his own words: "I am the place / where creation is working itself out." Although Transtromer did experiment with meter, he has mostly written poems in free verse. Taken as a whole, Scandinavia's best-known and most influential contemporary poet, Tomas Transtromer turned out to be a poet par excellence. He is easily comparable to the poets of the English-speaking world. Read Seamus Heaney here.
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