Sunday, April 6, 2014

Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer [b. 1931] is someone I want to highlight--he has incredible phrases, usually two lines together that are just amazing.

For example, in his "After a Death" here, he has a great ending--here translated from Swedish by Robert Bly:

[...]
The samurai looks insignificant 
beside his armor of black dragon scales. 


Over at Blackbird they have his poem "April and Silence" ["April Och Tystnad"], translated by Patty Crane here. It has such an amazing opening [and the poem is part of his larger work Sorgegondolen [Sorrow Gondola]]:

Spring lies forsaken.                  Våren ligger öde
The velvet-dark ditch                 Det sammetsmörka diket
crawls by my side                      krälar vid min sida
without reflections. [...]              
utan spegelbilder.


And his piece on the art of Madhat Kakei in TO-Ila here is great; a spare update of D'Annunzio or Pound, in a way. Just beautiful, here's an excerpt:


Birds have fallen silent
The cloud, atilt, above us
Cold raindrops fall
In the forest

[...]

to open with a gritty
glistening moonlit key
the doors of
darkness

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