Another Nobel Prize

I don't know why I am not a fan of Tomas Tranströmer's. Perhaps because he looks down from a high perch, like a gyrfalcon, smothering the life out of earth with his pitiless gaze, perhaps because I have no access to the music of his native language, perhaps because he is a cold Swede whose images lie static on the page, like simple snapshots in a stranger's photo album, over which you find yourself feigning interest, perhaps because so many of his poems end unfinished.

I came to him through Robert Bly's Leaping Poetry many years ago which cited the justly oft-anthologized poem about the stopped train. (You can read it here.) But Bly is such an insistent proselytizer that he sometimes turns me off. I also find some of his translations slack.

Even so, there is one poem of Tranströmer's I carry with me all the time:

FROM MARCH 1979

Weary of all who come with words, words but no language
I make my way to the snow-covered island.
The untamed has no words.
The unwritten pages spread out on every side!
I come upon the tracks of deer's hooves in the snow.
Language but no words.

(Translated by Robin Fulton, from The New Collected Poems, published in 1997 by Bloodaxe Books.)