Transtromer
According to the London bookies, the odds-on favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year—at 5 to 1, far outpacing the usual suspects—was Bob Dylan. Dylan is currently on a European tour, playing to sold-out soccer stadiums. The tour schedule suggests that the news would have reached him in Dublin, perhaps in some baronial hotel room. I might at first have felt a slight pang for literature, whose quiet triumphs never filled an arena, and whose minions toil while Dylan counts the clouds from his cliff-top estate in Malibu. Soon, though, I would have joined the worldwide chorus of hallelujahs, for Bob Dylan is a genius, and there is something undeniably literary about his genius, and those two facts together make him more deserving of this prize than countless pseudo-notables who have won it in the past.
Instead, the Swedish Academy, which meets in the old Stock Exchange Building in central Stockholm, placed the call to a small apartment across town. There Tomas Tranströmer, now eighty and the greatest living Scandinavian poet, resides with his wife, Monica. Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990, at the age of fifty-nine, which robbed him of speech and impaired the use of his right arm. Rather than delivering the customary laureate’s address when he accepts the award, on December 10th, he will play a piece on the piano using only his left hand. This is a form of self-expression that Tranströmer has perfected in the years since his stroke, playing a small repertoire of compositions for the left hand, some of them written for Paul Wittgenstein and other pianists with damaged right hands, some by Swedish composers specifically for Tranströmer.
But Tranströmer’s primary form of expression is the taciturn, enigmatic poetry that he has been writing for sixty years. The poems are usually short and muted; his oeuvre, collected in “The Great Enigma” (translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton; New Directions; $17.95) and, courtesy of various translators, in two reissued volumes, “For the Living and the Dead” (Ecco; $15.99) and “Selected Poems” (Ecco; $14.99), is probably smaller than any previous laureate’s. Here, in its entirety, is his early poem “Tracks”:
Like much of Tranströmer’s work, the poem feels like a dreamed metaphor for what dreams do, stranding us, like a train in a plain (the rhyme is there in the Swedish, too, and suggests dream logic), in the alien stretches of our own minds. Here the dream is “like a dream,” a phenomenon that rhymes itself and, in the process, cancels itself: the poem ends where it began; it remains 2 A.M., and the train is “quite still,” in “the second that’s allowed to live for centuries,” as Tranströmer puts it in another poem.
There have been, among poets, many psychiatric patients; psychologists are scarcer. Tranströmer worked for years as a psychologist, mainly with juveniles. He was born in 1931 and brought up by his mother in Stockholm. He studied piano as a boy; his poems match the virtues of music to the virtues of psychological analysis. As an adolescent, he was afflicted by terrors: faces swam in the wallpaper, the walls ticked as though they might burst open. He conjures visions like those in a later poem, “The Gallery”:
The period of these terrors was, he has said, like being cast in “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse”: hiding “in a factory . . . while the machines and room vibrate.” Young Tomas wanted to be an explorer: somehow this was the nightmare mirror image of what he’d wished for. “I was surrounded by ghosts,” he wrote in an impressionistic memoir, “Memories Look at Me”: “I myself was a ghost.” Then, unaccountably, he got better:
That narrow escape lies behind all of Tranströmer’s poems. His fascination with the unconscious ignites his fear of its fickleness, its ruthless and random devastations: few poets have made so much of spooking themselves, which must be a method of keeping those demons at bay. If you regard the mind with such trepidation, you want to outflank it in every way devisable. Ministering to his patients by day, writing his stark, oneiric poems by night, Tranströmer was for years afterward haunted by the period when he felt certain he was going to go insane.
In the poems from his early volumes, “Secrets on the Way” and “The Half-Finished Heaven,” there were often only two elements in the frame: the unconscious and the landscape, both rendered in a flat and glare-proof style. Mushrooms are kicked “thoughtlessly” by nameless wanderers among the rowanberry clusters, peat bogs, spruces, and blackbirds. To enter this landscape, humans have to do something uncanny. In “Solitary Swedish Houses,” Tranströmer writes:
Like the stalled train in “Tracks,” this is a visual image drawn partly by clearing the space around it of clutter. The loneliness in the early poems was an atmosphere as well as a practical aesthetic strategy: we see things more vividly when they are surrounded by white space. These black-and-white poems, where earthly elements crouch under an enormous looming mystery, are Tranströmer’s sharply cinematic contribution to nature poetry.
But nature poetry, as we know, is usually about culture: what it represses, or ignores, or imperils. Sweden in the fifties and sixties thought of itself as an efficient machine for producing salubrious social outcomes: it was a welfare state before welfare states got a bad rap, and it rivalled Switzerland for the highest standard of living in Europe. But the old, weird Sweden was still there, its small churches and wooden saints standing for the vestiges of traditional culture that the new mood had papered over. Tranströmer, accustomed to thinking of mental reality as palimpsestic and often lost to itself, was the perfect delegate to that forgotten world:
In poems like this, the manner is so well matched to the subject matter that it almost seems part of it, just as Robert Frost’s Yankee flintiness seemed to spring from the same rocky crags it described. It is not surprising, then, that Tranströmer’s popularity in Sweden is often compared to Frost’s at its height here.
Video From The New Yorker
The New Yorker Recaps the Spurs’ Game 3 Win Over the Knicks
Yet Tranströmer is also what John Ashbery called Elizabeth Bishop: a “poet’s poet’s poet.” His poems were translated early by American poets like May Swenson and Robert Bly. Bly and others enlisted him, in the seventies, as an inspiration for what was known as “deep image” poetry. In the sometimes rather gooey practice of these poets, Tranströmer’s harrowing mindscapes are, as Bly put it, “a layer of consciousness that runs alongside our life, above or below, but is not it.” Gaining access to that stratum of consciousness was a major preoccupation of the era, but access has never been Tranströmer’s problem. His problem is that he feels stalked by the tragic sense that other, lesser poets court. Tranströmer’s poems therefore reverse the quest: they start in the dangerous mental substrate and look for the light. His many poems about objects suggest how hard-won the ordinary seems, visible only through the scrim of his psychologizing imagination:
Such imaginative interventions act in service of the real: Tranströmer seeks not the “deep image” but the elusive surface of things.
The Nobel Prize in Literature often acts like a lesser wing of the Peace Prize, as though art’s primary purpose were to grapple with injustice or put a human face on suffering. But in this case the prize has gone to a poet with almost no social upside. The stroke and the poems that Tranströmer has written from inside its cruel sentence have only dramatized what was always there in him: the sensation of being arrested by silence, the hope that poetry can make small gains upon it. The first book he published after his stroke was titled, in English, “The Sad Gondola” (translated by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl; Green Integer; $11.95), after the Liszt piano pieces inspired by the sight of funeral gondolas in Venice. It was an image for Tranströmer’s own predicament, “carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case”:
Comments
Post a Comment