There are certain works—paintings, films, books, gardens—that have an effect on me that I can most simply describe by saying: in their presence, I remember that I am a human being. Dry shallowness falls away. In this series, I write about works that have this effect on me.
This part is about the work of poet Tomas Tranströmer.
See also, part 1 about Herzog’s Into the Abyss and part 2 about Shostakovitch String Quartet no 8.
Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
—Tomas Tranströmer
In 1954, when the poet Tomas Tranströmer published his first collection, reviewers hailed him as the most gifted writer of his generation. He was 23. You could sense forces rushing forth to prepare a path for him. There would be reading tours and residencies. He would be given literary grants and other support. In thirty years, when he had been groomed, they would induct him into the Swedish Academy to decide the Nobel prize.
But this path did not fit with Tranströmer’s sense of integrity.
Six years after his debut, he moved into a bungalow at the juvenile prison in Roxtuna. There, he would work as a psychologist, living next to the inmates in a secluded pine forest by the Roxen Lake. Tranströmer, who had grown up in Stockholm, attending Sweden’s most prestigious Latin high school, spent the rest of his life in small Swedish towns, away from the literary power centers.
After his move, he fell out of favor with the literary elite. They felt he didn’t keep up with the times. In 1966, when he released Klanger och spår (Bells and Tracks), one reviewer called him a “used-up poet.” Used-up meant: he wasn’t political enough.
During the Vietnam War, literature in Stockholm was synonymous with politics (even more so than in other countries at the time, and more than in most quarters today). Writers staged a war tribunal in Stockholm where President Lyndon B. Johnson was sentenced in absentia for crimes against humanity. That sort of thing. Tranströmer, who attended the tribunal, wrote to the American poet Robert Bly: “It is one of those things that makes you feel like you have a crack through the top of your head down to the crutch.” And: “I’m not going to apologize for writing poems about blades of grass.”
Since Tranströmer felt alienated in Sweden, his social life revolved around letters to poets in other parts of the world. The poets found each other by circulating their work in letter networks and small magazines; their poems became search queries that surfaced people they could relate to.
The first letter Tranströmer and Bly shared is Tranströmer asking for permission to translate a poem he has read in The Sixties Press, the magazine Bly edited. Bly replies that he found the letter in his box the minute he returned from a 600-mile drive to Chicago where he had gone to locate copies of Tranströmer’s collections!
The letters to Bly often return to the war. They were both appalled by Vietnam. But Tranströmer (unlike Bly) was also appalled by many of the critics of the war. The critics were, in Tranströmer’s eyes, more driven by political intoxication than a care for the victims in Vietnam. The stated goal of an open letter Tranströmer was asked to sign was to create “a hundred Vietnams.” He wanted none. In one letter, Tranströmer quotes an op-ed by a friend from his days in Stockholm: the friend says he hopes the US will continue its bombings since it helps spread anti-American sentiments.
Being bothered by this was not something Tranströmer talked about publicly. But sometimes his poems gave him away. In “With the River,” a poem about a bridge across the Dala River, he wrote:
In conversations with contemporaries, I saw-heard behind their faces
the current
that flowed on and on and pulled with it the willing and unwilling.And the creature with stuck-together eyes
that wants to go right down the rapids with the current
throws itself forward without trembling
in a furious hunger for simplicity.
When “With the River” was published in the magazine Konkret in 1967, Tranströmer received a letter from the Writer’s Association informing him that Göran Sonnevi had reservations. Sonnevi was the leading Swedish poet of the 1960s. The letter was signed by Göran Palm—later a Tranströmer scholar—who seemed genuinely unsettled by the idea that he might be a creature that hungers for simplicity. The letter ended with Palm asking Tranströmer what he plans to do when the revolution comes?
There will be no comfortable social democracy to lean your head against when the river gets violent enough and only the political extremes remain. . . if there is a right-wing coup, no one is going to care about your capacity to see . . .