They turn off the lamp and its white globe glimmersfor a moment before dissolvinglike a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then is lifted.The walls of the hotel soar up into the night sky.Their acts of passion have quieted down and they sleepbut their most secret thoughts are meeting nowlike when two colors join and flow into each otheron the wet paper of a schoolboy’s painting.It’s dark and quiet. But the city has drawn closertonight. With windows dimmed. Houses have come.They’re clustered together, waiting nearby,a crowd with blank expressions on their faces.ParetDe släcker lampan och dess vita kupa skimrarett ögonblick innan den löses uppsom en tablett i ett glas mörker. Sedan lyftas.Hotellets väggar skjuter upp i himmelsmörkret.Kärlekens rörelser har mojnat och de sovermen deras hemligaste tankar mötssom när två färger möts och flyter in i varannpå det våta papperet i en skolpojksmålning.Det är mörkt och tyst. Men staden har ryckt närmarei natt. Med släckta fönster. Husen kom.De står i hopträngd väntan mycket nära,en folkmassa med uttryckslösa ansikten.
The Couple
Feature Date
- November 22, 2023
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- Translation
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Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer
Blue House: The Collected Works of Tomas Transtromer
trans. Patty Crane (Copper Canyon Press, 2023)
Nobel Prize Laureate and beloved Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015) was born in Stockholm and worked as a psychologist. He wrote ten collections of poems that the Nobel Prize Committee praised for their “condensed, translucent images that give us fresh access to reality.” New Directions publishes his complete poems in one volume titled The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems. Tranströmer was first published by New Directions in 1966, in New Directions in Prose & Poetry #16. The best-known Scandinavian poet of the postwar period, and the most widely translated, his other books available in English include Selected Poems 1954–1986; The Half-Finished Heaven; For the Living and the Dead; Night Vision; and Windows and Stars. For many years after being seriously debilitated by a stroke, Tranströmer continued write. He was also an avid pianist and released a recording of classical piano pieces performed with his left hand. Tranströmer received numerous public recognitions for his poetry including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany’s Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, the August Prize, and a Lifetime Recognition Award in 2007 from The Griffin Trust. In 2011 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Patty Crane is the author of Bell I Wake To (Zone 3 Press First Book Award, 2019) and something flown (Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award, 2018). Her poetry has appeared widely in journals, including Bellevue Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry East, Verse Daily, and Northern Woodlands. Bright Scythe (Sarabande Books, 2015) includes a selection of Patty’s translations of Swedish poet and Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. Her translations of his collected works, The Blue House, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in Fall 2023. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Five Points, Guernica, Plume, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships at MacDowell. A third generation Cape Cod native, she divides her time between the hilltowns of western Massachusetts and the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Read more at:pattycrane.com
Port Townsend, Washington
"At once avant-garde and traditional, his poetry straddles the worldly occasional and the metaphysical, the ordinary and the numinous, standing, as it does, in the space between waiting and revelation."
—Poetry Foundation
“Incandescent. Crane’s translations feel as close to the original Swedish as one is likely to get. . . . This new gathering will draw readers into the poet’s grounded realm of both the familiar and the magical. . . . The Blue House will long be considered the definitive tome of Tranströmer’s work in English and should be on every poetry shelf.”
—Raúl Niño, Booklist, STARRED review
“Skillfully rendered in Crane’s translations, these frequently restrained poems are studded with unforgettable phrases, weaving music, mythology, and the personal. . . . This is a revelatory gathering from one of 20th-century poetry’s most enduring presences.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Known for compressed perceptions that capture numinous mysteries within the ranges of ordinary life . . . Tranströmer dismantled any Scandinavian stereotype of lugubrious alienation, finding the countervailing value within the despair (‘You drank the darkness / and became visible’) or celebrating ordinary pleasures like espresso: ‘the black droplets of deep insight / sometimes intercepted by the soul.’ Patty Crane’s beautifully judged translation fulfills the need for a version of Tranströmer in a current, American idiom. A must for the poetry lover’s library.”
—David Woo, Lit Hub
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