Collected Poems
Published on 29. January 1987
Book
Paperback/Softback
160 pages
978-1-85224-023-3 (ISBN)
Description
Tomas Transtroemer (1931-2015) was Sweden's most important poet of the past fifty years, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. This edition covers all his collections up to The Wild Market Square (1983), and was superseded by the later New Collected Poems (1997, 2011).
In Sweden he was called a 'buzzard poet' because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brought every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states.
Tomas Transtroemer was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmaroe in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences. Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control.
Robin Fulton worked with Tomas Transtroemer on each of his collections as they were published over many years, which involved detailed exchanges between translator and poet on the meaning and music of numerous poems. There have been several translations as well as some books of so-called "versions" of Transtroemer's poetry published in English, but Fulton's prize-winning translation is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.
In Sweden he was called a 'buzzard poet' because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brought every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states.
Tomas Transtroemer was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmaroe in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences. Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control.
Robin Fulton worked with Tomas Transtroemer on each of his collections as they were published over many years, which involved detailed exchanges between translator and poet on the meaning and music of numerous poems. There have been several translations as well as some books of so-called "versions" of Transtroemer's poetry published in English, but Fulton's prize-winning translation is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-023-3 (9781852240233)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Tomas Transtroemer (1931-2015) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. He was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmaroe in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences.
Transtroemer started writing poetry while at the oppressive Soedra Latin Grammar School (its atmosphere caught by Ingmar Bergman in Alf Sjoeberg's Frenzy, which was filmed there, the young Tomas amongst the pupils). But he was devouring books on all subjects, especially geography, with daily visits to the local library, where he worked his way through most of the non-fiction shelves. However, this bookish adolescence was shadowed by the war, by his parents' divorce and the absence of his father, and at 15 he experienced a winter of psychological crisis. He published his first collection, 17 Poems, in 1954, at the age of 23.
After studying psychology at the University of Stockholm, he worked at its Psychotechnological Institute, and in 1960 became a psychologist at Roxtuna, a young offenders institution. From the mid-1960s he divided his time between his writing and his work as a psychologist, and in 1965 moved with his family to Vaesteras, where he spent the rest of his working life. In 1990, a year after the publication of his tenth book of poems, Transtroemer suffered a stroke, which deprived him of most of his speech and partly inhibited movement on his right-hand side. Swedish composers have since written several left-hand piano pieces especially for him to play.
After his stroke, he published a short book of 'autobiographical chapters', Memories Look at Me (1993) and a new collection, The Sad Gondola (1996), both included in Robin Fulton's translation of his Bloodaxe New Collected Poems (1997). In 2004 he published The Great Enigma, a slim volume containing five short poems and a group of 45 even smaller haiku-type poems. These were added to the New Collected Poems to form Transtroemer's first collected edition to appear in the States, licensed by Bloodaxe Books to New Directions in 2006 under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems. That edition was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK as the latest revised and expanded edition of New Collected Poems in 2010.
Transtroemer also translated other poets into Swedish, including Robert Bly and Hungary's Janos Pilinszky. Before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, he had won many other international awards for his poetry, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in the US, the Bonner Award for Poetry, Germany's Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize, and the August Prize. In 1997 the city of Vaesteras established a special Transtroemer Prize. In 2007, he received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize.
His correspondence with Robert Bly was published in Sweden in 2001, and in 2013 an English translation, Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtroemer, was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and by Graywolf Press in the US.
Transtroemer started writing poetry while at the oppressive Soedra Latin Grammar School (its atmosphere caught by Ingmar Bergman in Alf Sjoeberg's Frenzy, which was filmed there, the young Tomas amongst the pupils). But he was devouring books on all subjects, especially geography, with daily visits to the local library, where he worked his way through most of the non-fiction shelves. However, this bookish adolescence was shadowed by the war, by his parents' divorce and the absence of his father, and at 15 he experienced a winter of psychological crisis. He published his first collection, 17 Poems, in 1954, at the age of 23.
After studying psychology at the University of Stockholm, he worked at its Psychotechnological Institute, and in 1960 became a psychologist at Roxtuna, a young offenders institution. From the mid-1960s he divided his time between his writing and his work as a psychologist, and in 1965 moved with his family to Vaesteras, where he spent the rest of his working life. In 1990, a year after the publication of his tenth book of poems, Transtroemer suffered a stroke, which deprived him of most of his speech and partly inhibited movement on his right-hand side. Swedish composers have since written several left-hand piano pieces especially for him to play.
After his stroke, he published a short book of 'autobiographical chapters', Memories Look at Me (1993) and a new collection, The Sad Gondola (1996), both included in Robin Fulton's translation of his Bloodaxe New Collected Poems (1997). In 2004 he published The Great Enigma, a slim volume containing five short poems and a group of 45 even smaller haiku-type poems. These were added to the New Collected Poems to form Transtroemer's first collected edition to appear in the States, licensed by Bloodaxe Books to New Directions in 2006 under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems. That edition was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK as the latest revised and expanded edition of New Collected Poems in 2010.
Transtroemer also translated other poets into Swedish, including Robert Bly and Hungary's Janos Pilinszky. Before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, he had won many other international awards for his poetry, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in the US, the Bonner Award for Poetry, Germany's Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize, and the August Prize. In 1997 the city of Vaesteras established a special Transtroemer Prize. In 2007, he received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize.
His correspondence with Robert Bly was published in Sweden in 2001, and in 2013 an English translation, Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtroemer, was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and by Graywolf Press in the US.