Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015)

I've been reading this relatively slim volume of poetry for quite a long time. It felt challenging to my grey matter - I couldn't get the gist of what Tranströmer was getting at quite often.

When I first started this review, my thoughts were entirely negative. The poetry was pretentious, overwrought, the kind of poetry that made me think I would never enjoy poetry when I was younger. I started flicking back through the poems to validate my annoyance with it, but then to my surprise started to 'get' some of the poems a bit more. I wouldn't go so far as to say enjoy, but I understood and appreciated them the more I read them, and I realised I'd been speed reading a lot of them previously as I just wanted to finish the book.

I learnt a bit about myself and poetry in this little reading experience. I enjoy poetry that's straightforward and speaks to my heart. I'm not into poetry that requires me to 'figure it out'. I switch off; I lose attention.

Anyway, back to Tranströmer, I respect the abilities he had as a poet, but he's not for me.

3 stars - respectfully not for me.… (more)

This is a small selection from Tranströmer's lyric verse, in translations selected by editor Daniel Halpern from among the numerous English versions available, sandwiching the poet's childhood memoir "Memories look at me".

I enjoyed the memoir, where Tranströmer writes about growing up in Stockholm before and during World War II and going to the Södra Latin Grammar School (which featured in an Ingmar Bergman film). But it was difficult to get a grasp of the poems, possibly because of the profusion of different translators involved.

One or two appealed to me at first reading — "Grief Gondola No.2", for instance, a poem about Liszt and Wagner in Venice (but it's weird seeing the title of Liszt's piece translated into English when it's normally left in Italian); "Motifs from the Middle Ages"; and the "Vermeer" poem that ends the selection. Others left me baffled with their incongruous or surreal images and leaps of subject. Perhaps he's a poet you need to read in the original, but I didn't really see anything in this selection that would have made me go out and learn a bit more Swedish. At best it seemed good, but not earth-shattering.… (more)

Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm and raised by his mother after his parents divorced when he was very young. He loved nature, especially entomology, as a child, although his interests were varied. His grandfather indulged his passion for trains, and he filled sketchpads with drawings of things that interested him. He attended Södra Latin Grammar School, made famous in Ingmar Bergman's first film Hets/Torment. This small book of sketches from his childhood gives a glimpse both of a child's life in Stockholm in the 1930s and 40s, but also a sense of the poet's beginnings.

What we live through in school is projected as an image of society. My total experience of school was mixed, with more darkness than light—just as my image of society has become.

We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains it's rings. The sum of them is "me."… (more)