"I moved in the great mystery": Tomas Tranströmer 1931-2015

Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature not quite four years ago, died last Friday, aged 83. When the announcement of the Prize was made, I had never read a poem by him. But what a name! Did we have a book of his poems? We did! A 30-year-old Selected Poems was squirrelled away in the good old Central City Library basement. Oh no, actually, not squirrelled away any longer: four quicker-on-the-draw readers had formed a queue within hours of the announcement.

So I turned to the newer publications which Auckland Libraries had quickly ordered au complet, and chose The great enigma: new collected poems from 2006. The fact that the diacritical marks weren't showing correctly on the catalogue, so that the name Tranströmer appeared as Transtr?mer is not the only reason I chose it, but it certainly cinched the deal. How could I resist someone described thus:

"Transtr?mer's dominant moods are almost warily inward-turning..."

As well as being a great poet (as I discovered for myself when the book arrived, and you will discover if you keep reading), Tomas Tranströmer was also a noted entomologist, a beetle collector. There is even a beetle named for him, in an 80th birthday tribute. The “Tranströmers tornbagge” was discovered on the island of Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, where Tranströmer spent his summers as a boy. You can't help getting a whiff of Nabokov. The image in my mind's eye, in fact, is a Nabokov who never left a St Petersburg which never stopped being St Petersburg, as Max von Sydow would interpret him in an Ingmar Bergman film.

Of the beetle, the Tomas Tranströmer website tells us "Its habits are still unknown". The Great Enigma. 

Mordellistena transtroemeriana photo: tomastranstomer.net

The Great Enigma includes a wonderful piece of autobiographical prose called Memories Look at Me, in which Tranströmer recalls (as well as his early visits to the library) his love of beetle-collecting:

"I moved in the great mystery. I learned that the ground was alive, that there was an infinite world of creeping and flying things living their own rich life without paying the least regard to us. I caught a fraction of a fraction of that world and pinned it down in my boxes... they're sitting there, those insects. As if biding their time."

And so, to

(Image: npr.org)

Vermeer

by Tomas Tranströmer (translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton, from The Great Enigma)

No protected world... Just behind the wall the noise begins,

the inn

with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din of bells

and the insane brother-in-law, the death-bringer we all must tremble for.

The big explosion and the tramp of rescue arriving late,

the boats preening themselves on the straits, the money creeping down in the wrong man's pocket

demands stacked on demands

gaping red flowerheads sweating premonitions of war.

And through the wall into the clear studio

into the second that's allowed to live for centuries.

Pictures that call themselves The Music Lesson

or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter --

she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking inside her.

On the wall behind is a wrinkled map of Terra Incognita.

Breathe calmly... An unknown blue material is nailed to the chairs.

The gold studs flew in with incredible speed

and stopped abruptly

as if they had never been other than stillness.

Ears sing from depth or height.

It's the pressure from the other side of the wall.

It makes each fact float

and steadies the brush.

It hurts to go through walls, it makes you ill

but is necessary.

The world is one. But walls...

And the wall is part of yourself --

we know or we don't know but it's true for us all

except for small children. No walls for them.

The clear sky has leaned against the wall.

It's like a prayer to the emptiness.

And the emptiness turns its face to us

and whispers,

"I am not empty, I am open."

 -- Karen

Nobel Prize in Literature announced!

So, Bob Dylan did not win the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, which went instead to another octagenarian poet, the Swedish writer Tomas Tranströmer. (Just kidding, Bob, I know you're only seventy.) As I had only read yesterday afternoon the post on The Guardian books blog which reported that the British bookmaker Ladbrokes was giving 5 to 1 odds on Dylan nabbing the prize, I hadn't even had time to decide whether I wanted him to (tending to think no, but open to discussion), or even to find out whether it was all a hoax or not.

I've just been doing a little reading up about this year's “Ladbrokes list”, as the list of favoured candidates and the odds on their winning which the company compiles every year is known among literary cognoscenti, looking for a clue. Bloomberg.com was an excellent source of information, including the nugget that the curator of the list is “a Swede named Magnus Puke, whose job title at Ladbrokes is Nordic Sports and Novelty Odds Compiler, and who writes love poetry in his spare time.”

This year Mr. Puke’s list had 77 candidates on it. At the top was the octagenarian Syrian poet Adonis as the most-favoured, followed by the octagenarian Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, followed by Haruki Murakami. The top English language contenders included Les Murray, Thomas Pynchon, Julian Barnes, Cormac McCarthy, John Banville, Don de Lillo and yes, Bob Dylan, at the time of that article being given odds of 25 to 1.

I am sure there is an apt line from a Bob Dylan lyric for this near-miss, but it isn’t popping into my mind. Maybe someone out there can suggest it. All I can come up with off the top of my head is “She knows there’s no success like failure, and that failure’s no success at all.”

So who is Tomas Tranströmer? He is Sweden’s most famous poet, translated into over 50 languages (I include this because I know what you are thinking). For a characterisation, I can relay from today’s newsfeed from The Guardian that he is known as a “Buzzard Poet”, “a term coined by a fellow-poet Lasse Söderberg to express how he views the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, while bringing every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states.”

Sounds good to me. The fantastic Central City Library basement has two collections of his poetry, which when I looked them up just now were both already winging their way out of the library to fill customer requests.

The great enigma: new collected poems from 2006
Selected poems, from 1981