Tranströmer.I heard him read just once, at one of the early Poets House
venues or NYU where I taught and was immediately taken by the clean
precision, the almost conversational and yet insistent tone of the
translations---I think they were Robin Fulton's---a tone that I could
only intuit as being in the Swedish lines that Tranströmer read.Looking
again at those translations, I sense that the poetry was always
performing some balancing act between the poet's need to get down what
he saw and felt, and a certain almost disbelief about whether literary
composition could ever achieve the rendering of a personal vision.So
many of Tranströmer's poems begin in observable data and end in an odd
swerve into the surreal, almost an escape mechanism into an unplanned
and unforeseen imaginative realm.He remarked to Fulton in an interview
that the release of inner pressure sparked by a "very special kind of
ignition" began the poem. Where it would go, no poet could ever be
sure.Confidence then is an odd thing in poetry, not that the next word
will be right, but that our loyalty to the process is itself a leap into
the unknown.I think this is the nature of Tranströmer's fidelity to the
poem, the willingness to leave (to surrender?) the known spaces of the
world in order to find what is true simultaneously to both that
"ignition" and to language itself:
And the sea wind is in the dry pines further away, hurrying over the
churchyard sand,
past the leaning stones, the pilot's names.
The dry sighing
of great doors opening and great doors closing.
(page 118 from "Baltics" of /Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems/
translated by Robin Fulton)
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Home page: michaelhellerpoetry.com
Recent books: Beckmann Variations& Other Poems (Shearsman, 2010); Eschaton (Talisman, 2009); Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the work of George Oppen (Salt, 2008); Uncertain Poetries: Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics (Salt, 2005); Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2003). Available at bookstores, SPD and at Amazon.com
Collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson: This Art Burning and other poetry, Benjamin (a music-theater work based on the life of Walter Benjamin), go to: http://www.efjcomposer.com/efjcomposer/Welcome.html and for excerpts visit Ellen's Youtube videos at: http://www.youtube.com/user/efjcomposer
Michael Heller PennSound page: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Heller.php
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