New Collected Poems: Transtömer

I would love to say that Tranströmer’s New Collected Poems is easy reading material but I have to admit it isn’t. He is a poet of the unintelligible, and his language reflects that. And yet I always feel that there is a certain clarity to his poems. How does that work?

‘Weary of all who come with words, words but no language’ he says – but still, it’s possible to feel that all there is to his poems are words because of the quantity of images and a degree of abstraction.

‘We look almost happy out in the sun, while we are bleeding fatally from wounds we don’t know about.’

I think these are the sort of lines that make Tranströmer great – as if there is an epiphany, a sudden clarity that is given to us. And you feel that it’s like in life when you understand something which is unintelligible and ineffable

‘And the emptiness turns its face to us / and whispers / ‘I am not empty, I am open.’ Having gained this, you can go into the words, the images and find that they are an intelligible, and beautiful language.

Now you know I’m a huge fan of his, and militant as well. Anyway, his best poems possess a sort of transparency: ‘Oak-trees and the moon. / Light. Silent Constellations. / And the cold ocean.’ Abstract images, yes, but clear and with a feeling of meaningfulness.

But why is the language so difficult if Tranströmer is all about clarity?

Perhaps it is the feeling that literature cannot stay the same after Auschwitz – how can you write verse after so much horror? ‘The language marches in step with the executioners. / Therefore we must get a new language.’ – Tranströmer is one of those who is inventing a new language after the darkness – and it is a difficult one.

I feel Tranströmer is someone who gives a voice to a tenuous richness. A poet of the crossroads – between dream and waking, death and life, art and reality.

He expresses both sides, though such a language is difficult, as he shows in a poem about a memory, which is also a dream taking place somewhere where nobody can understand him nor him anyone as ‘rhetoric is impossible here’.