Bright Scythe

By Tomas Tranströmer

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and Sweden’s most acclaimed poet. “Readers new to Tranströmer should bundle up and dive in” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
 
Known for sharp imagery, startling metaphors and deceptively simple diction, Tomas Tranströmer’s luminous poems offer mysterious glimpses into the deepest facets of humanity, often through the lens of the natural world. These new translations by Patty Crane, presented side by side with the original Swedish, are tautly rendered and elegantly cadenced. They are also deeply informed by Crane’s personal relationship with the poet and his wife during the years she lived in Sweden, where she was afforded greater insight into the nuances of his poetics and the man himself.
 
A New York TimesBook Review Editors’ Choice
A Los Angeles Times Fabulous Holiday Book
 
“Immediate, bodily . . . vivid . . . Full of intent and personality. To my ear, Crane has so far made the best English version of Tran­strömer.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Patty [Crane]’s book has such transparency and illumination and candor. . . . For me, this is the finest translation since Bly’s.” —Teju Cole
 
“Sometimes a new piece of shared cultural heritage seems to click into place; the appearance of Bright Scythe—selected poems by Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane—feels like such an occasion . . . A lasting tribute to the poet’s passing.” —World Literature Today
 
“Quietly revelatory . . . A haunting, mysterious, but ultimately warm and humanistic work, and a welcome introduction both to Tranströmer’s poetry and in the debates over how best to translate it into another tongue.” —Biographile

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Release date: Oct 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781941411223

Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer (1933-2015) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. His books of poetry, which have been translated into sixty languages, include The Deleted World and The Half-Finished Heaven, and he received numerous international honors during his lifetime. Tranströmer, a trained Swedish psychologist, worked for years in state institutions with juveniles and the disabled, and his work was often praised for the inventive ways in which it examined the mind. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy stated that "through his condensed, translucent images, he gave us fresh access to reality."

Book preview

BRIGHT SCYTHE

Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer

First published by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, Sweden

Published in the English language by arrangement with Bonnier Rights, Stockholm, Sweden

Translation Copyright © 2015 by Patty Crane

FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tranströmer, Tomas, 1931–2015.

  [Poems. Selections. English]

  Bright scythe: selected poems by Tomas Tranströmer / translated by Patty Crane.—First edition.

       pages cm

ISBN 978-1-941411-22-3 (ebook)

  I. Crane, Patty, translator. II. Title.

  PT9876.3.R3A2 2015

  839.71'74—dc23

2015017830

Cover by Kristen Radtke

Interior by Kirkby Gann Tittle & Kristen Radtke

Manufactured in Canada.

Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

To Monica Tranströmer, compass and lodestar

CONTENTS

• Title Page

• Copyright

Good Evening, Beautiful Deep: Introduction by David Wojahn

I. 1954–1973

Stenarna

The Stones

Hemligheter på vägen

Secrets on the Way

Spår

Tracks

Kyrie

Kyrie

Balakirevs dröm

Balakirev’s Dream

Trädet och skyn

The Tree and the Sky

Ansikte mot ansikte

Face to Face

Lamento

Lament

Allegro

Allegro

Den halvfärdiga himlen

The Half-Finished Heaven

En vinternatt

A Winter Night

Vinterns formler

Winter’s Formulas

Under tryck

Under Pressure

Från snösmältningen –66

From the Snowmelt of ’66

Skiss i oktober

Sketch in October

Längre in

Further In

Sena maj

Late May

II. 1974

Östersjöar

Baltics

III. 1978–1983

Övergångsstället

The Crossing Place

Galleriet

The Gallery

Kort paus i orgelkonserten

Brief Pause in the Organ Recital

Från mars –79

From March of ’79

Minnena ser mig

Memories Watch Me

Vinterns blick

Winter’s Glance

Stationen

The Station

Eldklotter

Fire Scribbles

IV. 1989

Den bortglömde kaptenen

The Forgotten Captain

Sex vintrar

Six Winters

Näktergalen i Badelunda

The Nightingale in Badelunda

Alkaiskt

Alcaic

Berceuse

Lullaby

Gator i Shanghai

Streets in Shanghai

Djupt i Europa

Deep in Europe

Flygblad

Leaflet

Inomhuset är oändligt

The Indoors Is Infinite

Vermeer

Vermeer

Romanska bågar

Romanesque Arches

Epigram

Epigram

Kvinnoporträtt—1800-tal

Portrait of a Woman, 19th Century

Medeltida motiv

Medieval Motif

Air Mail

Air Mail

Madrigal

Madrigal

Guldstekel

Golden Vespid

V. 1996

April och tystnad

April and Silence

Osäkerhetens rike

Insecurity’s Kingdom

Nattboksblad

Nightbook Page

Sorgegondol nr 2

Sorrow Gondola No. 2

Landskap med solar

Landscape with Suns

November i forna DDR

November in the Former GDR

Från juli 90

From July ’90

Göken

The Cuckoo

Tre strofer

Three Stanzas

Som att vara barn

Like Being a Child

Två städer

Two Cities

Ljuset strömmar in

The Light Streams In

Nattlig resa

Night Travel

Haikudikter

Haiku Poems

Från ön 1860

From the Island, 1860

Tystnad

Silence

Midvinter

Midwinter

En skiss från 1844

A Sketch from 1844

VI. 2004

Fasader

Facades

• Afterword by Patty Crane

• Acknowledgments

• The Author

• The Translator

Good Evening, Beautiful Deep

The great subject of the poetry of Sweden’s Tomas Tranströmer—it sometimes seems as though it is his only subject—is liminality. He is a poet almost helplessly drawn to enter and inhabit those in-between states that form the borderlines between waking and sleeping, the conscious and the unconscious, ecstasy and terror, the public self and the interior self. Again and again his poems allude to border checkpoints, boundaries, crossroads: they teeter upon thresholds of every sort—be they the brink of sleep or the brink of death, a door about to open or a door about to close. And these thresholds are often ensorcelled places, where a stone can miraculously pass through a window and leave it undamaged; where the faces of what seem to be all of humanity suddenly appear to the speaker on a motel wall, pushing through oblivion’s white walls / to breathe, to ask for something (The Gallery). Indeed, in one of his finest individual collections, called Sanningsbarriären in its original Swedish and The Truth Barrier in most English translations, he concocts a neologism which perfectly encapsulates his lifelong fixation with the liminal.

Yet this inhabitant of borderlands and denizen of thresholds is also deeply suspicious of binaries and dichotomies, of Manichaeism in any form. In Tranströmer’s universe, conditions are too much in flux, too subject to sudden and radical change, to ever permit dualistic thinking: every emotion can without warning turn into its opposite; every perception of what A. N. Whitehead called "the withness of the body can turn into an out-of-the-body experience; and visionary moments are possible but always fraught. Witness Patty Crane’s rendering of a later Tranströmer poem, Like Being a Child":

Like being a child and an enormous insult

is pulled over your head like a sack;

through the sack’s stitches you catch a glimpse of the sun

and hear the cherry trees humming.

But this doesn’t help, the great affront

covers your head and torso and knees

and though you move sporadically

you can’t take pleasure in the spring.

Yes, shimmering wool hat, pull it down over the face

and stare through the weave.

On the bay, water-rings teem soundlessly.

Green leaves are darkening the land.

This is, I suppose, Tranströmer’s canny way of expressing Keats’s concept of negative capability. Tranströmer is certainly a man who, in Keats’s memorable phrase, is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts. And yet he differs from Keats insofar as he sees this state not as a goal for the poet to aspire to, but as inevitable—and inevitably anxiety-provoking. In fact, he sees this condition as our fate in contemporary society.

Despite this, Tranströmer is a poet of astonishment rather than dread; his forays into the unknown and the self-annihilating are ones from which the speaker always returns, relatively unscathed. Because of his interest in the realm of dream, and his unerring ability to fashion surprising and original metaphors, he has often been labeled a surrealist. But his poems are shorn of surrealism’s romantic privileging of randomness and the unconscious. Although his work abounds in visionary moments, he examines them as a scientist would—not rhapsodically, and certainly not as some sort of magus or shaman. For many years the poet was employed as a child psychologist in his native Sweden, and even when he describes conditions of great emotional and psychological duress, he does so with the nonplussed detachment of a man in a lab coat jotting down notes on a clipboard. His stance is the epitome of grace under pressure. Madrigal, another late poem translated by Crane, is prototypical Tranströmer, both in its themes and its approach:

I inherited a dark forest where I seldom walk. But there will come a day when the dead and the living change places. Then the forest will be set into motion. We aren’t without hope. The most difficult crimes remain unsolved despite the efforts of many police. In the same way that somewhere in our lives there’s a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark forest but today I walk in another forest, the light one. Every living thing that sings wriggles sways and crawls! It’s spring and the air is intense. I have a degree from the university