Voices de la Luna

Prior to winning the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature, Tomas Tranströmer was known primarily in his native country of Sweden and throughout Europe, where his work has been translated into 50 languages. The Nobel Prize brought the 80-year-old poet greater name recognition in the United States, where he had occasionally toured for readings at major universities with his friend, poet Robert Bly.
     While building a career as a respected psychologist working at juvenile prisons, with the disabled, and drug addicts, Tranströmer compiled 15 collections of poetry in his native language. Eleven of his books have been translated into English. Undetered by a stroke he suffered in 1990, which left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, Tranströmer continued to write, with his last major collection appearing in 2004.
     In spite of having been criticized by other poets in the 1970s for being detached from his own age, Tranströmer has been nominated for the Nobel Prize every year since 1993. He is the first Swede to win the prize since 1974. The Prize Committee indicated he received the award due to the "condensed, translucent images" which "gives us fresh access to reality."
     Much of his early work was traditional, centered on nature. Over the course of his writing career, Tranströmer expanded his focus to include death, memory, and history. Tranströmer’s work builds on Modernism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. His lyric poetry, often in the form of quatrains, presents the reader with powerful images of fragmentation and isolation. While his poetry is influenced by the metaphysical, Tranströmer’s work remains easily accessible to a wide variety of readers. Even in translation, his poetry remains clear and concise with each word contributing to the overall structure and theme of the poem. In "Midwinter," a poem about the long winters of his native homeland, the reader stands beside Tranströmer as he closes his eyes and enters "a silent world." This quiet solitude is followed by the image of "a crack/where the dead/are smuggled across the border." 
     While "Midwinter" focuses on darker images, "Landscape with Suns" warms us on an Innsbruck street before we take our leave. We are reunited with "a glowing sun/in the grey, half-dead forest," reminding us that there are constants in our lives and that even in our darkest places, there is a promise of light to come.
     In Tranströmer’s poetry, the world is never really quite as it appears. If a reader is willing to look closely, he or she will discover hints of something vast and strange. Although Scandinavian readers are familiar with this, Americans will be discovering the delights of Tranströmer’s works in the coming days. Within hours of the announcement of the Prize, print copies of Tranströmer’s work were back ordered on retailer’s websites and electronic versions were difficult to find. Selected Poems, originally published in 2000, has recently been re-released. The Great Enigma and Half-Finished Heaven are also currently available. The Deleted World, originally published in 2006, should be available by year’s end.