For Whom the Nobel Tolls: Tomas Tranströmer’s “The Blue House”

“The lines, like long, rolling ocean waves on a cold Baltic sea, create their own reasons, their own rhythm, their own understanding. Anaphora is used, as Whitman did, to summon us to the great historical pageant of life, of happenings beyond our immediate knowledge.”

Did the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer deserve the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature? Does anyone? One thinks of the case of Gabriel García Márquez, the talented Colombian novelist and author of the justly lionized One Hundred Years of Solitude. Perhaps one such work of epochal writing is enough to get over the bar. Yet having read multiple others of García Márquez’s books, I find some of them redundant, either warm-ups for his famous novel, with similar characters, themes, and situations, even identical ones, or close variations on a theme. May one even presume to challenge the great ones? My experience with Faulkner has been similar; many of his novels now feeling negligible or dated, even interchangeable, albeit he changed storytelling in America. Is that the criterion: influence on other writers? A Nobel Prize putatively represents a life’s work, and, in truth, most writers’ production fluctuates in quality and transcendence throughout that life. Some do experiment, change and mature reliably, ever questing, ever self-reinventing, not repeating themselves. Yet this phenomenon is rare. Further, the Nobel Prize in Literature, like the Peace Prize, not infrequently is awarded as much according to cultural and political criteria as aesthetic ones.

Which brings us back to Tranströmer. Unfamiliar with his work, I attacked The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer, which was released with Copper Canyon Press in October of last year and translated by Patty Crane, with enthusiasm for the undiscovered. At times, I found the excitement I sought. Others, it was a slog. One wished in such a compendious volume for more scholarly context for understanding such a massive corpus (600 pages). Alas, poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s cursory, brief introduction fails to satisfy, studded with wan phrases such as “fantastical voyage,” “human nature plays out,” “a keeping of time and seasons,” affording only the formulaic approach to a book one expects from back-cover blurbs. This is despite Komunyakaa’s claim to having read this Swedish heavyweight for 50 years.

Yet I pressed dutifully on, seduced by the beautiful hardback edition, reasonably priced and of the highest quality, an object of art in itself. Tranströmer’s verse falls, like that of many modernist poets of the second half of the 20th century, halfway between “free verse” and a conventional and even mechanical attachment to tercets and quatrains. The earlier poems often feel prosaic, their more interesting features being occasional enjambment, and frequent, clustered consonance and assonance (viskar/svar/komma/själv). Translator Crane’s own ear is quite adept, coming up with sonically enticing phrases in English such as “Sky-thunder whispers” and “thunder strikes straight out of the stillness.” Reading the Swedish text aloud made me wish to be fluent in that language, but even without that advantage, it is clear that Tranströmer has a superb sense of sound.