Review by New York Times Review
UNTIL HE WON the 2011 Nobel Prize, Tomas Transtromer, who died in March, was a secret treasure for American readers, known mostly to poets and Europhiles - except no one really wanted to keep his work secret. Writers from Robert Bly to Mary Karr tried to interest a wider audience in Transtromer's austere beauty and stark mystery, but he never quite took, despite being considered, along with Seamus Heaney and Wislawa Szymborska, one of Europe's greatest poets. Why? Perhaps Americans have tended to favor warmer poems than, say, Transtromer's "Kyrie": Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark. A feeling as if crowds moved through the streets in blindness and angst on the way to a miracle, while I, invisible, remain standing still. Like the child who falls asleep afraid listening to his heart's heavy steps. Long, long, until morning slips its rays in the locks and the doors of darkness open. If we're going to join a poet in "blindness and angst," we want the "miracle" to happen with fireworks by the poem's end; merely watching "the doors of darkness open" - the sunrise - isn't enough to win the hearts of that most illusive audience, the "general reader." There are few fireworks in Transtromer. He's after much subtler shifts, as in "Kyrie," when fear gives way to what comes immediately after - not quite relief, but a slow state during which the dark fingers loosen, when "morning slips its rays in the locks." What an extraordinary phrase, and what an absolutely precise description of the almost imperceptible way a day begins. And who doesn't remember being terrified of oncoming sleep, warned and beckoned by the "heart's heavy steps." That sense of dread - will my heart stop before the next beat? - is an enduring metaphor for all fear. Transtromer gently seeks these intense in-between states, reminding us that life's thresholds aren't loud events but severe and silent everyday transitions. His poems' plainness, which can come off as coldness, is an expression of his search for "language but no words," visions that speak for themselves. Sweden's major poet of the last half-century, Transtromer also carried on a long career as a psychologist, publishing his first poems in the 1950s and continuing to write well into the new century, although a 1990 stroke made it difficult for him to speak and paralyzed his right arm. His work suggests a kind of high morality. His landscape, after all, is wintry Sweden, and Europe in its slow awakening to and recovery from two world wars, not to mention all the wars that came before and much turmoil since. But it's the landscape itself, or the inner self as landscape, that's the source of the moralizing. Transtromer is known for his striking metaphors ("I lean like a ladder and reach/with my face into the cherry tree's first floor"), but there's more to them than their strangeness. Transtromer recognizes no clear division between inner and outer worlds. Humanity strives to get closer to nature by describing it, but ends up describing only what the perceiving instruments - senses, words - will allow. Nature is personified - "greenness" is "filled/with memories, and they follow me with their gaze" - because it's described by a person. The man-made is "naturalized" because it's described alongside nature: "I am cradled in my shadow/like a fiddle/in its black case." Neither is right, and this yields the tragedy and the bounty of Transtromer's poems: We can come only so close to the world and to ourselves, perhaps closest when we straddle the two in words. One reason for Transtromer's relative obscurity in America is the limited availability of strong English translations. Before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, there were just a few major English-language editions: Robert Bly's, collected in 2001 in "The Half-Finished Heaven," was probably many Americans' introduction to Transtromer. The canonical text has long been the Scottish poet Robin Fulton's 1987 translation of the "Collected Poems," at first available only in a British edition, then expanded and republished in the United States in 2006 as "The Great Enigma." Fulton's edition is very good, but a close look at "Kyrie" shows why the American poet Patty Crane's new renderings are slightly better. In "Kyrie," Fulton's child hears the "heart's heavy tread" instead of Crane's "heavy steps." It's a small difference, but a meaningful one - "tread" is distancing, hypothetical, while "steps" feels menacing and immediate, bodily. Fulton translates the poem's extraordinary penultimate line as "morning puts its rays in the locks," where Crane uses the much more vivid "slips" for her verb. "Puts" is generic: It's how a thing gets to a place. "Slips" is full of intent and personality. It's the human manner in which the sun unlocks the dark that matters in this poem: with a certain quiet furtiveness, careful not to wake anyone, though without a care for anyone desperate for the night to end. How to render a poem with fidelity to the original and as a great poem in the new language? It's the translator's perennial problem. To my ear, Crane has so far made the best English version of Transtromer because of these small choices. She actually worked with the poet and his wife, as she describes in a moving afterword; perhaps that has much to do with her sensitivity. Transtromer's poetry is concerned with precisely how little we're able to really see, yet how much that little is worth. His is a tense, taut music, easier to hear in Crane's slightly relaxed interpretation. CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER is director of digital operations at Publishers Weekly and the author, most recently, of the poetry collection "To Keep Love Blurry."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 27, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Swedish Nobel laureate Tranströmer (1931-2015) was often admired for his melancholy single lines, his wintry Scandinavian seascapes, and his evocative, terse, almost dreamlike poems: "I am cradled in my shadow," one says, "like a fiddle/ in its black case." Tranströmer was also regularly translated by notable U.S. and U.K. poets, so why this new version? It's far-ranging: not all-inclusive, but attentive to all the decades of his career. It holds, for example, the big sequence "Baltics," with its long views of the sea and of Swedish history, and the entirety of The Sorrow Gondola. Crane's verse sounds good in English, and it comes with facing-page Swedish. It also reflects the cooperation of the poet's wife: Crane visited Tomas and Monica Tranströmer periodically from 2007 to 2010, when she had begun to render the poems, often with masterly care, into syllables sharper, more brittle, more urgent, than some prior translators chose. Her Tranströmer wants to be heard: "If I could at least get them to feel," he writes, "that this trembling beneath us/ means we're on a bridge." Readers who know earlier versions, or who know Swedish, will want to contrast these versions with what they know; readers new to Tranströmer should bundle up and dive in. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
In the introduction to this Selected from Nobel Prize-winning poet Tranströmer, translator Crane points to the poet's focus on liminality as a subject. Yet the poems in this collection, which has the original Swedish opposite the English translation, make reality itself liminal, as in the work of Charles Simic or Mark Strand-a skill present, if this book is any indication, throughout Tranströmer's career. Although his earlier poems appear more derivative, with serious marks of the Deep Image movement (though the poet was half a world away from the likes of W.S. Merwin and Charles Wright), the voice is consistent from 1954 to 2004. Things are said plainly-with lots of blacks and grays and darknesses-and reality slips in and out completely without magic. VERDICT Overall, it is not whole poems, which at times are stilted, directionless, or overly somber, but lines that are revealed as this poet's lifelong strength (e.g., "The mailbox shines calmy, what is written cannot be taken back"). In the last half of the book, the poems settle, grow calm, and stray less into the unconscious as reverence takes over, rendering the reading experience quite ordinary. -Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
