A ‘Tranströmeration’ of the Nobel
Amatoritsero Ede
I remember walking through the rather sparse poetry section of Chapters bookstores downtown recently and stopping for a moment before a Tomas Tranströmer collection – probably fresh off the press, rushed out to meet the galloping demands attending a Nobel moment. My instinct was to buy a copy of the collected works. But I demurred. Would I be giving a nod of encouragement to the wise but befuddled Swedish heads in Stockholm? The instinct of a poetry lover took over. I flipped through the work. Apart from some flashes of brilliance, I did not think this effort was worth the prize it has been burdened with. General public response to the news of this particular award has ranged from dismay to glee and disillusion. I am dismayed.
According to the awards committee, Tranströmer won “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” From my own readings of the poet’s work, I understand ‘translucent’ to be a euphemism for either ‘prosaic’ or ‘light verse.’ There is an example from Carol Rumens ‘Poem of the Week’ in a London Guardian selection from Tranströmer’s work, beginning like this: “In the black hotel a child is asleep. And outside: the winter night where the wide-eyed dice roll… See the rest of “Six Winters” here:
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/23/poem-of-the-week-tomas-transtromer>.
Perhaps there is a need to give a more detailed example of the poet’s work. Two should suffice. The first stanza of “Schubertina”:
In the evening darkness in a place outside New York, an outlook point
where one single glance will encompass the homes of eight
million people.
The giant city over there is a long shimmering drift, a spiral galaxy
seen from the side.
Within the galaxy coffee-cups are pushed across the counter, the
shop-windows beg from passers-by, a flurry of shoes that leave
no prints.
The climbing fire escapes, the lift doors that glide shut, behind doors
with police locks a perpetual seethe of voices.
Slouched bodies doze in subway coaches, the hurtling catacombs.
I know too – without statistics – that right now Schubert is being played
in some room over there and that for someone the notes are
more real than all the rest.
And the poem, “Memories Look at Me”:
A June morning, too soon to wake,
too late to fall asleep again.
I must go out – the greenery is dense
with memories, they follow me with their gaze.
They can’t be seen, they merge completely with
the background, true chameleons.
They are so close that I can hear them breathe
although the birdsong here is deafening.
The above is adequate as poetry but I would not describe it as a great verse but poetic prose arranged in verse. Well, that leads to this phenomenon, that (oxy)moron, which I can never really fathom – prose poetry. It is a very lazy way to write poetry and allows for a lot of short cuts, a notable one being the inability to make the diction carry more than its usual weight of meaning. The syntax and line arrangement of the above announces them as prose poetry, so does the diction. There is more of the same fair on the Nobel website at:
<http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2011/transtromer-lecture_en.html>.
It must be admitted that Tranströmer’s work has an imagistic charm, a brevity and elegance all its own; such charm as made Teju Cole, the writer of Open City declaim in joy in a New Yorker blog, the same publication in which pages the poet, Paul Muldoon, also praised the Nobel committee for acknowledging Tranströmer despite the latter’s apolitical and ‘translucent’ poetry. It is noteworthy that Cole is not a poet, while Muldoon’s poetry is similar in spirit to Tranströmer’s work and equally apolitical – in the main. I have especially quoted the first poem above since it is one of those which captures for Cole the confusion of bodies that is New York City, his home, and “an outlook point where one single glance will encompass the homes of eight million people.” Nevertheless, for me as a reader, there is something missing in diction, scansion, and overall poetic depth and resonance to merit a Nobel Prize – unless translators have not done ‘poetic justice’ to the Swedish originals. This is however belied by a quiet noise and ponderous invocation of the poet’s personal circumstances in public references to the 2011 prize.
Commentary, usually of the positive sort, about this particular award invariably intones sympathetic murmurs about the travails of a poet struck speechless by stroke. There is a disconcerting sense that the Nobel Committee is compensating the poet more for his personal circumstances than for overall poetic excellence. The pointer to this is the committee’s own infringement of a standard overriding criterion for the award – a large body of work. The Nobel is given to a living writer for a life’s work, that is, an expansive body of work. Tranströmer’s oeuvre is a relatively slim volume compared to previous winners, even if we were to ignore matters of aesthetic quality and consider that questions about value can, after all, be as subjective as the poet’s own reclusive and socially-distanced muse. The fact of Tranströmer’ Swedishisness adds to the dissenting camp’s bemusement with the 2011 prize. How convenient, they clamour: the Nobel Committee in Stockholm abandons its own chief criterion and favours a native son. This is what I call a ‘Tranströmeration.’ There is a heavy weight on the poet in terms of future range and production.
The 2011 prize is more likely to inhibit and limit than free the spirit. We are yet to get a magnum opus from Tranströmer, and in this instance the award of a Nobel is a limiter and came too soon. While it is said that comparisons are odious, in this literary matters, perhaps, a comparative evaluation is what will bear the burden of proof. Let the discerning reader place the 1992 winning volume in the same genre, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, beside any of the 2011 laureate’s work.
Robin Roberston’s versions are worth examination, published post-Nobel by FSG. I do enjoy most poems by the “Buzzard Poet,” for their consistency of tone and voice, even if I consider his work too safe in subject matter and form, especially compared to a Nobel poet like Neruda, whose best (and most dangerous) work is relatively unknown by a public who adores his love poems. I treasure a first edition of Tranströmer’s Baltics, its deep brown flaps sun-spotted from age. The object itself, a thin volume, reminds me in some way of the poetry it contains.
While I think this is an eloquent criticism of Transtromer’s (can’t get the dotted O, apologies) Nobel prize, I find it wanting in terms of his achievement as a poet.
Evidently and confessionally, our author agrees that he hasn’t studiously analysed his rather slim body of work (Symborska too, RIP, had a slim one) to be fit to a thorough Transtromer critic. But I am of the opinion that prizes (even/especially the Nobel) have political facets to their disbursements. But I still think a thorough analysis of his ‘slim’ body of work will be requisite for a dismissive criticism such as this. I have read the few poems (on the Guardian and around) and I find them magical, I also take them in with a pinch of salt as I strongly subscribe to Frost’s assertion about poetry being what is lost in translation and the poems presented to us are translated works of the said poet. So I will leave the knots of argument untied and read a lil more of Transtromer’s poems. Then I might return to put forward a more robust word.
Dami, rather than being eloquent, this is a deliberately taciturn editorial. It does not want to spoil the moment for the winner. The goals is not to question the poet’s sufficiency but to point to the increasingly wayward behaviour of the Nobel Committee in its judgements. We cannot let them get away all the time with the excuse that each prize has its own politics. How about honesty, integrity and consistence? Remember the Obama peace prize? For what did he get the peace prize precisely? The fact of Syborska’s slim oeuvre does not make it right that the Nobel committee should, in the case under discussion, again flagrantly ignore its own set criteria for the prize. Again my intention was not to critique Tranströmer but to question the Nobel committee. If you want to do a criticism of Tranströmer’s oeuvre, which you refer to as magical, we will be glad to publish.
The deliberate taciturnity of this editorial which was evident from my first reading of it and which Mr. Ede has attributed to not spoiling Tomas Transtromer’s Nobel moment, disallows a full grasp of the hypothesis (or hypotheses) set forth and one is never at liberty to evaluate with perceptions, wrong or right, when the crux of the discuss have not been elaborated upon.
The standards that the Swedish Academy had set for its literary award and the associated politics which provides the clause of being able to abandon the standards when it so deems are rightly in question here. It is important to note though that the members of the Swedish Academy are humans and sentiments are factors that strongly influence and inform humankind decisions and choices, subtly, if it is necessary to decide and choose without bias. Will Skidelsky in the Guardian asked why the world should expect “a group of self-appointed Swedes” to get it right. I should add the always to the construct of that Skidelsky question as Nobels are liable to being perceived differently by individuals. Skidelsky further wrote that the grandeur of the Nobel has made the world to give the Nobel full rights that do not highlight human errors, to a “universal, definitive judgement” of what is recognition-deserving literature. Skidesky’s full article, A noble sentiment, but another Nobel error is here http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/09/tomas-transtromer-nobel-prize-literature
In view of the explanations to make Transtromer’s Nobel acceptable that were made by the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, the question is why aggregated, non-voluminous works should be unworthy of worthy recognition, and deserving of explanations as to why it is not voluminous when it is recognized. It can be safely said that had Transtromer not suffered from the debilitating ailment, he might have produced more work and not required Englund’s explanations of his not being, at any time in his career, a full-time writer, and which as a result makes all his works to fit, when collected together, into a “not-too large pocket-book” (the linkage was not Englund’s).
The Triumph of Tomas Tranströmer
‘…I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black box
The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker’s.’
– April and Silence; Tomas Tranströmer, as translated by Robin Fulton.
We received Tomas Tranströmer in translation, a bracing and surreally eloquent poetic presence. He came across as a haunting, spare, intense and ‘Nordic’ kind of poet – wrapped in a world of snow and shadow, stoic in the face of cold and the elements. Tranströmer is strong on imagery, his gaze penetrating and his lyrical offerings coming, for the most part, in free verse – his language shorn of fat and adipose. Through the work of translators like Robert Bly and Robin Fulton, Tranströmer came to be better known in the English-speaking world than most Scandinavian poets. Indeed, in his lifetime, he became one of the more widely translated poets alive.
When he turned 23, his first collection, Seventeen Poems, was published. Tranströmer continued publishing into the 21st century. From the beginning, his poetry was substantial; some would say ‘suggestive’. He is a poet of extreme capability when it came to mining significant moments even when all those came down to were milliseconds. In ‘Solitude’, translated by Robert Bly, (the same poem is translated as ‘Alone’ by Fulton) Tranströmer examines the motions of his own mind in one such moment.
“Right here I was nearly killed one night in February/My car slewed on the ice, sideways,/into the other lane. The oncoming cars – / their headlights – came nearer./ My name, my daughters, my job/ slipped free and fell behind silently/ farther and farther back. I was anonymous,/ like a schoolboy in a lot surrounded by enemies./… The seconds lengthened out – making more room – / they grew long as hospital buildings…/
In 1999, Tranströmer suffered a stroke that left his speech and motor functions damaged but he survived and now in his eightieth year he is finally being awarded the Nobel in Literature. In ‘Solitude’ the persona in the poem says, following the almost-certainly-fatal ice skid: ‘It felt as if you could just take it easy/ and loaf a bit/ before the smash came./
In his art as in his life, Mr. Tranströmer took charge even when circumstances wrestled the wheels with him by paradoxical surrender, deferring the ‘smash’ by sheer force of mind. The persona in ‘Solitude’ found terra firma and survived. We find Tranströmer’s life a close parallel.
Africa and Asia very rarely featured in the poetry of Tranströmer. He concerned himself with man and with Sweden for much of his artistic life. But in a way that perhaps only poetry could, his work impacts whoever reads them whether s/he is Somali or Assamese, whether he is Burkina or descended from Australian aboriginals. Whenever that wo/man either descends or ascends a level in human experience. In a way, he has made his country, a ‘hauled up, unrigged ship’ a more familiar even if intrinsically alien presence to others through poetry.
Tranströmer reminds us that, contrary to clichés, it is not a small world after all. In ‘Breathing Space July’ the poet sits in his ‘catapult chair’ and travels in super-slow motion through time that is also space that is also consciousness. In ‘Track’ a poem that is deceptively direct and simple, he conveys vivid impressions of time that is both Chronos and Kairos. His poetry reaches farther into speech and consciousness than most practitioners of the lyric in his time.
For close to thirty years I have read Tranströmer in translation in anthologies, never in a complete collection by himself. Yet, in spite of the chance encounters with this poet, one never can deny the essential singularity of Tranströmer’s work, so much so that one learnt with time to look out for the occasional comet from Transtromer. The late American poet, Theodore Huebner Roethke, perhaps rivals Tranströmer in lyrical intensity but in accessibility and directness, qualities which have made Tranströmer the darling of translators, this poet is sui generis.
Tranströmer has been so thoroughly translated into English that in some major anthologies of poetry his very name is Anglicized as Thomas Transtromer.
Yet, Mr. Tranströmer has not been without his detractors, especially now. Some of them attack him simply because he is Swedish. Others because he is not American. Both bases are completely juvenile and some ‘critics’ like Hephzibah Anderson of Bloomberg make the unpardonable mistake, not only of launching their tirades on both premises but of putting a Tranströmer in the same category as an Elfriede Jelinek, a case of comparing passion fruit with lime.
Perhaps such ambulance chasing criticism should first examine the evidence. Here is a poet who, long before now, has been compared to William Carlos Williams, another poet of exceeding power and clarity. I personally think that a man’s success as an artist ought never to be compromised by the name of the country on the passport he carries.
A poet belongs to all mankind and all history. Mr. Tranströmer is that poet who, with a painter’s ladder, mounted extraordinary images on the walls of the poetic imagination of humankind, for all time, and we are lucky to have him.
I should explore more of the bard’s work. While the images in the first poem are in flames, I find the other longer example weighed down too, too much by the syntax and banality of prose, and not even impassioned prose. I could accuse those lines of being prosaic, but if the reader comes to them (what appears to me to be prosaic) with the cumulative force of the previous example, then he or she might see a shadow of the previous charged lines in those that are rather prosaic.I wish poets just wrote poetry and leave out the prose. What is prose or what is poetry or where the dividing lines is, is, of course, debatable. But when you re in the presence of elevated speech, which is what poetry is, beyond the merely prosaic, you will know it, feel it. Elliot is one of my favourite poets. Even though his modernist reaches has inspired what is now called prose poetry, Elliot’s prosody escaped the prosaic. Here him: “You say I am repeating something I have said before/ I shall say it again/ Shall I say it again?” And so on and so forth. Elliot builds the musical cadence of those and subsequent lines to perfect and fever pitch. Poetry for me is not just successful images, but a blend of that and rhythm – cadence – which does not necessarily require rhymes to be achieved, especially in so far as rhymes may become artificial and contrived. The repetitive echo, and cumulative roll and sway of those short Elliot lines above save them from the plainness of prose poetry. It does not mean he has not deployed the language of prose but that he has done so in such a way that it escapes the banal, becomes defamiliarized and the result appeal to the ears, eye and sense all at once. The echo lingers long after the reading of it.