Tomas Transtromer: The story of a Nobel Laureate

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Dr. Rashid Askari

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 been, as usual, accused of being too Eurocentric and prejudiced for such a choice. 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 the event of 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 the prize 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 gave him wide recognition as the most influential Scandinavian poet of recent decades. In Sweden he is popularly known as a “buzzard poet” as his poetry views the world from a great height like a large European prey-bird soaring high above the cliffs.

Transtromer, 80 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 criticised 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 clarity of Transtromer’s unusual imagery. 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, a psychologist, and an 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 practicing 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 bears testimony to it.

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 (2004) 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. His most notable works are Windows and Stones (1966) and The Great Enigma (2004).

Transtromer’s early poems were rooted in the landscape of the island where he spent his summers in childhood. Although written in keeping with the tradition of Swedish nature poetry, they display a vivid, Surrealistic use of metaphor. They are composed in a personal style, with simple diction and unusually strong rhythmic patterns manifest in free verse. His precise poetic observations of nature blend richness of meaning with the simplicity of style. His use of deceptively plain imagery opens strange and uncanny perspectives through the associations with the bitter-sweet memories of his life. His famous metaphor “Sweden is a hauled-up, unrigged ship”, which suggests a state of stagnation in Swedish society, is a shining example of his strangely resonant imagery. His later work is more personal, open-ended, and relaxed, embracing a wide range of interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology, and natural sciences.

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 issues (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 mostly wrote poems in free verse.

Transtromer had a debilitating stroke in 1990 that left him half-paralysed and unable to speak. In spite of this, he is going on to write with unflagging energy and aptitude. His surrealistic explorations of the inner world and its relation to the rugged landscape of his native country have raised his literary career to the apex. The reason why he has been held in high esteem by so many critics, translators, and readers is that his poetry is particular and universal, personal and metaphysical.

Taking it all around we can safely say that Scandinavia’s best-known and most influential contemporary poet, Tomas Transtromer turned out to be a poet par excellence. His winning the Nobel Prize has been a just reward.

Dr. Rashid Askari writes fiction and columns and teaches English literature at Kushtia Islamic University. Email: rashidaskari65@yahoo.com

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