Robert Bly, a prominent translator of Tranströmer, noted that when Tranströmer began to craft his early poems in the 1950s, it was still possible to write a nature poem in which nothing technological entered. As his career progressed, however, it was not so easy to separate the two, as we see in his 1974 long poem Östersjöar [Baltics] and the mingling of maritime life in that wonderful labyrinth of forested islands and the waters of his native Stockholm Archipelago along the Baltic Sea coastline. We marvel that the poetry of earth is never truly dead.
The American poet and critic Stephen Burt tells us: “More than most poets, Tranströmer survives translation, since his effects so often come from metaphors, images and situations. Other effects come from silence, from negative space . . . .”
In memory of Tranströmer’s passing, I would like to share one of his earliest poems, “Solitary Swedish Houses,” which was published in his second collection of poems, Hemligheter på vägen [Secrets on the Way] (1958), and translated by Robin Fulton. I first heard Tranströmer read this poem in Tucson, in 1974, and again a decade later, in Stockholm:
“Solitary Swedish Houses”
A mix-max of black spruce
and smoking moonbeams.
Here’s the croft lying low
and not a sign of life.
Till the morning dew murmurs
and an old man opens
– with a shaky hand – his window
and lets out an owl.
Further off, the new building
stands steaming
with the laundry butterfly
fluttering at the corner
in the middle of a dying wood
where the mouldering reads
through spectacles of sap
the proceedings of the bark-drillers.
Summer with flaxen-haired rain
or one solitary thunder-cloud
above a barking dog.
The seed is kicking inside the earth.
Agitated voices, faces
fly in the telephone wires
on stunted rapid wings
across the moorland miles.
The house on an island in the river
brooding on its stony foundations.
Perpetual smoke – they’re burning
the forest’s secret papers.
The rain wheels in the sky.
The light coils in the river.
Houses on the slope supervise
the waterfall’s white oxen.
Autumn with a gang of starlings
holding dawn in check.
The people move stiffly
in the lamplight’s theatre.
Let them feel without alarm
the camouflaged wings
and God’s energy
coiled up in the dark.
Tranströmer was a hugely popular, almost rock star figure in his native land. One American critic referred to him as “Sweden’s Robert Frost.” So in closing, let me paraphrase that American bard: The woods are lovely, dark and deep; he has shared his music . . . and earned his sleep.
