The Sorrow Gondola » (Translatio)

Considered by many to be an inevitable recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Tomas Tranströmer is one of Sweden's most noted authors, and his several collections have been translated into several languages, including English. Recently, New Directions published his "new collected poems" in The Great Enigma. But this collection, one of his most renowned, is in a single volume.

One of Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer's greatest poetic achievements, published here in a single volume.

Publishers Weekly

There is no explicit mention in these pages of the devastating recent stroke that severely impaired the ability of Transtrmer, one of Sweden's most distinguished poets, to speak, read and write. Nevertheless, this slender volume, published in Sweden in 1996 and the first new collection to appear there since Transtrmer's illness, centers unmistakably on the controlled anguish that the 66-year-old poet's physical conditionand encroaching mortalityimposes. "I am carried in my shadow/ like a violin/ in its black case," he writes in "April and Silence": "The only thing I want to say/ glitters out of reach/ like the silver/ in a pawnbroker's." What saves the collection from morbidness is the formal beauty and remorselessly compressed clarity of the writing. Indeed, the almost telegraphic brevity of the poems is the volume's only concession to Transtrmer's handicap. With the exception of the four-page title poem, a meditation on Wagner's final months, most of the pieces are only a few stanzas long, yet they retain all the force of the poet's earlier work. Fulton's translations, while able, are marred by occasional inaccuracies. Alternate versions of some of the poems can be seen in Ecco Press's 1995 Transtrmer collection, For the Living and the Dead. (Sept.)