Bright Scythe

Starred review from October 19, 2015
Swedish Nobel laureate Tranströmer (1931–2015) was often admired for his melancholy single lines, his wintry Scandinavian seascapes, and his evocative, terse, almost dreamlike poems: “I am cradled in my shadow,” one says, “like a fiddle/ in its black case.” Tranströmer was also regularly translated by notable U.S. and U.K. poets, so why this new version? It’s far-ranging: not all-inclusive, but attentive to all the decades of his career. It holds, for example, the big sequence “Baltics,” with its long views of the sea and of Swedish history, and the entirety of The Sorrow Gondola. Crane’s verse sounds good in English, and
it comes with facing-page Swedish. It also reflects the cooperation of the poet’s wife: Crane visited Tomas and Monica Tranströmer periodically from 2007 to 2010, when she had begun to render the poems, often with masterly care, into syllables sharper, more brittle, more urgent, than some prior translators chose. Her Tranströmer wants to be heard: “If I could at least get them to feel,” he writes, “that this trembling beneath us/ means we’re on a bridge.” Readers who know earlier versions, or who know Swedish, will want to contrast these versions with what they know; readers new to Tranströmer should bundle up and dive in.

February 1, 2016

In the introduction to this Selected from Nobel Prize-winning poet Transtromer, translator Crane points to the poet's focus on liminality as a subject. Yet the poems in this collection, which has the original Swedish opposite the English translation, make reality itself liminal, as in the work of Charles Simic or Mark Strand--a skill present, if this book is any indication, throughout Transtromer's career. Although his earlier poems appear more derivative, with serious marks of the Deep Image movement (though the poet was half a world away from the likes of W.S. Merwin and Charles Wright), the voice is consistent from 1954 to 2004. Things are said plainly--with lots of blacks and grays and darknesses--and reality slips in and out completely without magic. VERDICT Overall, it is not whole poems, which at times are stilted, directionless, or overly somber, but lines that are revealed as this poet's lifelong strength (e.g., "The mailbox shines calmy, what is written cannot be taken back"). In the last half of the book, the poems settle, grow calm, and stray less into the unconscious as reverence takes over, rendering the reading experience quite ordinary. --Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH

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