2023年6月12日 星期一

Thomas Tranströmer (Swedish Nobel laureate) dies aged 83

【2015,0429 ,昨天瑞典舉行托馬斯・特朗斯特羅默的葬禮。】
可惜悅然留在臺北不能返瑞出席葬禮。謹以一張悅然跟托馬斯一九八三年在悅然、寧祖的家裡合照懷念這超過五十年的友誼。 當時悅然翻譯《狂暴的廣場》英文版,托馬斯到悅然家裡簽約商量出版事宜。
錄一首托馬斯自選在2011,12,07,瑞典學院朗讀會的選詩
【孤獨】,馬悅然翻譯,陳文芬中文朗讀
I
二月的一天晚上 我在這裡 接近死亡。
汽車在冰上 斜滑
到路的對面。 從對面來的汽車‒
它們的前燈‒靠近了。
我的名字 我的女兒 我的工作
掙脫了束縛 默默地留在
越來越遠的後頭。 我是無名的,
像一個在校園上 被敵人圍繞的 男孩。
從對面來的汽車 有巨大的前燈。
它們照射在我身上
當我在蛋清一樣粘的透明的恐懼裡,
緊握著駕駛盤。
秒鐘加長了‒ 甚至容納你的身體‒
長得像醫院大樓一樣高大。
你幾乎可以停一下,
在你被壓碎前一片刻
出一口氣。
忽然 輪胎抓牢路面: 一粒幫助的沙子
或者一陣奇妙的風 叫汽車掙脫了束縛,
輕快地爬過道路。
一個突出來的電線桿 啪的一聲 折斷了,
在黑暗裡 飛走了。
等到靜止。我繫著安全帶 坐着那兒,
看見有人 在飛雪裡 走過來,
想看我怎了。
II
我在臨省凍冰的田野上
走了很久。
一個人都不見了。
在地球其他地區
永久的擁擠中
有人出生,生活,死亡。
總是給人看到的,
總是生活在一群眼睛中
一定會產出一種特殊的表情。
塗上泥巴的臉。
喃喃的聲音起伏
當他們彼此分攤
天空,影子,沙粒。
我必須孤獨
早晨十分鐘
晚上十分鐘。
沒有規劃。
大家在大家的面前排隊。
很多。
一個。陳文芬的相片。


《特朗斯特羅默詩選》《特朗斯特羅姆詩歌全集》 《記憶看見我》.../我必須孤獨 Thomas Tra...





Photo

Tomas Transtromer with his wife, Monica, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011.CreditJonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011 for a body of work known for shrewd metaphors couched in deceptively spare language, crystalline descriptions of natural beauty and explorations of the mysteries of identity and creativity, died on Thursday in Stockholm. He was 83.
The Swedish publisher Albert Bonniers announced the death without giving a cause. In 1990, at age 59, Mr. Transtromer had a stroke that severely curtailed his ability to speak; he also lost the use of his right arm.
With a pared-down style and brusque, forthright diction, Mr. Transtromer (pronounced TRAWN-stroh-mur) wrote in accessible language, though often in the service of ideas that were diaphanous and not easy to parse; he could be precisely observant one moment and veer toward surrealism the next.
“The typical Transtromer poem is an exercise in sophisticated simplicity, in which relatively spare language acquires remarkable depth, and every word seems measured to the millimeter,” the poet David Orr wrote in an essay in The New York Times in 2011.
He was a hugely popular figure in his home country — one American critic referred to him as Sweden’s Robert Frost — whose more than 15 books over nearly six decades were translated into 60 languages. And though he was not especially well known among American readers, he was widely admired by English-speaking poets, including his friends Robert Bly, who translated many of his poems, and Seamus Heaney,himself a Nobel laureate in 1995.
“I was utterly delighted when I heard Tomas Transtromer had won the Nobel Prize,” Mr. Heaney, who died in 2013, said in 2011. “Everybody was hoping for that. For years.”
Many of Mr. Transtromer’s themes and interests, including music (he was an accomplished pianist) and the beauty and inspiration of the outdoors, were evident in his first book, “17 Poems,” published in 1954. The succinct poem “Ostinato” (translated by Robin Fulton) — the title is a musical term referring to a repeated phrase or rhythmic figure — observes nature in both meaning and form:
Under the buzzard’s circling point of stillness
ocean rolls resoundingly on in daylight,
blindly chews its bridle of weed and snorts up
foam over beaches.
Earth is veiled in darkness where bats can sense their
way. The buzzard stops and becomes a star now.
ocean rolls resoundingly on and snorts up
foam over beaches.
For many years, Mr. Transtromer, a trained psychologist, worked in state institutions with juvenile offenders, parole violators and the disabled, and many critics noted that he frequently deployed his inventive and striking metaphors to examine the depths of the human mind.
He often began his poems with descriptions of mundane settings and acts, but he was also interested in dreams and the other uncontrollable wanderings of thought. In “Preludes” (translation by May Swenson) he wrote:
Two truths approach each other
One comes from within,
one comes from without — and where they meet you have the chance
to catch a look at yourself.
His poems often had transcendental moments that led some critics to consider him a religious poet or a mystic. In “Further In,” from the 1973 volume “Paths,” the quotidian and the unfathomable collide, in both the body of the poet and in the world. Translated by Robin Fulton, the poem reads in its entirety:
On the main road into the city
when the sun is low.
The traffic thickens, crawls.
It is a sluggish dragon glittering.
I am one of the dragon’s scales.
Suddenly the red sun is
right in the middle of the windshield
streaming in.
I am transparent
and writing becomes visible
inside me
words in invisible ink
that appear
when the paper is held to the fire!
I know I must get far away
straight through the city and then
further until it is time to go out
and walk far into the forest.
Walk in the footprints of the badger.
It gets dark, difficult to see.
In there on the moss lie stones.
One of the stones is precious.
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine.
It is a switch for the whole country.
Everything depends on it.
Look at it, touch it ...
Tomas Gosta Transtromer was born in Stockholm on April 15, 1931. His father was a journalist. His parents divorced when he was young, and he was reared mostly by his mother, a teacher. He studied literature, history, religion and psychology at Stockholm University, graduating in 1956. His survivors include his wife of more than 50 years, the former Monica Bladh, and two daughters.
Mr. Transtromer’s poetry production slowed after his stroke, but he took refuge in music, playing the piano with just his left hand. As a testament to his prominence in Sweden, several composers there wrote pieces for the left hand specifically for him.
He was also an amateur entomologist. The Swedish National Museumpresented an exhibition of his childhood insect collection, and a Swedish scientist who discovered a new species of beetle named it for him.
Mr. Transtromer was considered a candidate for the Nobel for a decade or more. Each year, on the day the prizes were to be announced, Swedish journalists, anticipating his selection, gathered in the stairwell of his Stockholm apartment building, about a mile from the Swedish Academy, which administers the prizes.
He was the seventh native Swede to win the Nobel for literature — Nelly Sachs, a German Jew who moved to Sweden during World War II, won in 1966 — and he was the only winner in nearly 20 years to be known mainly as a poet. (The last was Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.) His selection was not without controversy. Some critics complained of home-nation favoritism and said that Philip Roth and other fiction writers were more deserving.
Mr. Transtromer’s work was also at the center of a dispute between translators: Robin Fulton, whose work with Mr. Transtromer included the 2013 collection “The Great Enigma,” and Robin Robertson, a Scottish poet who translated a 2006 Transtromer volume, “The Deleted World.”
Mr. Robertson, who does not speak Swedish, referred to his work as “versions” of Mr. Transtromer’s poems and suggested that it was more important to get the spirit and tone of a poem right than every last idiom. The book set off a debate about the nature of translation. Mr. Fulton objected to what he called “the strange current fashion whereby a ‘translation’ is liable to be praised in inverse proportion to the ‘translator’s’ knowledge of the original language.”
Mr. Transtromer’s other works in English translation include the collection “The Half-Finished Heaven,” translated by Mr. Bly; “Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer”; and a memoir, “Memories Look at Me,” translated by Mr. Fulton.
“Through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality,” the Swedish Academy said in awarding him the Nobel.

馬悅然院士專題講座11 月 14、18、19、20 日


Tomas Transtroemer, Swedish poet and Nobel winner, dies at 83

27 March 2015
From the sectionEntertainment & Arts
Transtroemer was also a trained psychologist

Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer, who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at the age of 83.

His publisher, Bonniers, said the writer died in Stockholm on Thursday after a short illness.

A trained psychologist, Transtroemer suffered a stroke in 1990 that affected his ability to talk.

His poems - described by Publishers Weekly as "mystical, versatile and sad" - have been translated into more than 50 languages.

Transtroemer was tipped as a potential Nobel prize winner for many years before he became the 108th recipient of the prestigious award in 2011.

The Royal Swedish Academy named him the recipient "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality".

He was the first Swede to receive the prize since authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson shared it in 1974.
Memorial service

Born in April 1931 in Stockholm, Transtroemer graduated in psychology in 1956 and later worked in an institution for juvenile offenders.

His first collection of poetry, Seventeen Poems, was published when he was 23.

In 1966 he received the Bellman prize for Swedish poetry, one of many accolades he received over his long career.

In 2003 one of his poems was read at the memorial service of Anna Lindh, Sweden's murdered foreign minister.

Transtroemer is survived by his wife Monika and their two daughters, Emma and Paula.



Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer dies aged 83

Poet and psychologist who ‘transformed the everyday into astonishment’




Tomas Tranströmer.
 Swedish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Tomas Tranströmer. Photograph: Maja Suslin/AP

The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2011, died in Stockholm on Thursday at the age of 83. He had lost the power of speech after a stroke in 1990, but continued to write poetry, and to play the piano with his left hand.
For most of his life, he worked part-time as an industrial psychologist and the rest of the time as a poet.
His sparse output was highly praised from the moment his first collection, 17 Poems, appeared in 1954 and he was acknowledged as Sweden’s greatest living poet long before he won the Nobel. He was translated into more than 60 languages.




He wrote in exceptionally pure, cold Swedish without frills. His descriptions of nature were as sparse and alive as a Japanese painting. In fact, in later life, he attempted to write haiku in Swedish. Peter Englund, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, said: “One of the secrets of his success around the world is that he’s writing about everyday stuff. The economy of words that you can see in his poems is manifested in the economy of his output; you can get the core of his work in a pocket book of 220 pages. You can get through it in an evening.”
Björn Wiman, writing in the Stockholm paper Dagens Nyheter, praised him for his capacity to transform the everyday into astonishment. “His poem C Major is almost unique in the history of literature, since it both describes and summons up pure delight.”
The Guardian praised him when he won the prize as “unobtrusively unforgettable”, a writer “whose style is so simple as to make most words seem vain and superfluous. In translation, some of the slippery hard simplicities of his lyricism can melt like ice. But enough remains to show a poet who transforms the ordinary in apparently ordinary language. The world he sees is sometimes bleak or terrible, but it is always also full of promise no less real for being inexpressible: ‘The only thing I want to say glints out of reach, like silver in a pawnbroker’s’.”




Despite his work as a psychiatrist, Tranströmer’s writings about the mind never bore any hint of medicalisation. Within the hard classical forms there was an unquenchable romantic flame. He was alive to movement, and to change. A cabbage white butterfly might in his poetry become “a fluttering corner of truth itself”.
“Every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as a blueprint of a storm”, he also wrote. Perhaps that is why his work seemed to heighten reality so much. The longer time goes on, the further it gets from eternity. Only the moment approaches timelessness.
Per Wästberg, another member of the Swedish Academy, and a childhood friend of the poet’s, wrote in Svenska Dagbladet that “his poems open doors, give you vertigo, and at the same time offer a still calm: this is how things are and you can’t put them otherwise”.
Tranströmer was a socialist, a humanist and an atheist, and he managed to make life seem much more delicious: “Don’t be ashamed because you’re human,” he wrote once. “Be proud! Inside you, vaults behind vaults open endlessly. You will never be finished, and that’s as it should be.”





Poem of the week: Six Winters by Tomas Tranströmer
This brief sequence of poems is a vivid illustration of the Nobel prizewinner's singular gifts


Carol Rumens

Monday 23 January 2012 10.44 GMT

omas Tranströmer, the 80-year-old Swedish poet deservedly honoured last October with the Nobel prize for literature, is the author of this week's poem-sequence, Six Winters, translated by Robin Fulton. It comes from his 1989 collection, För Levande och Döda (For Living and Dead) and is included in a highly recommended New Collected Poems, published recently in an expanded edition by Bloodaxe Books.
These six short imagist poems are rather like extended haiku, a form in which the poet has always excelled. They may centre on a single image, or use surreal combinations of imagery, as does the first, with its haunting triad of black hotel, sleeping child and dice. In this poem, even the proportions of the objects seem altered. The dice, having eyes, are larger and more menacing than real dice, for all that "wide-eyed", in English, has connotations of innocence. Perhaps these dice are being rolled by a vast, unseen, malevolent hand? The atmosphere is that of the child's nightmare, transposed into the winter night beyond the hotel's walls. Terse syntax heightens the strangeness, with the colon in the middle line acting as a kind of portal, similar in dramatic effect to the haiku's traditional "cutting word".
In the second poem, we're deep in the Kingdom of Winter. The concept of an "elite of the dead" is ironical and appalling. It prefigures the subsequent reference to wartime. That this is an elite of conquerors is reinforced by the entrance of the armoured wind. The dead may be reduced to emblems of grim and silent stone, but the wind from icy Svalbard "shakes" in its armour, suggesting not fear or even cold, but vigorous movement, the brandishing of noisy weapons, fresh savagery.
There's a more anecdotal tone to the next poem. "Neighbour and harpoon" are kept separate, but the imagination adds them up to the cartoonish figure of a harpoon-wielding neighbour. Perhaps the child had a half-delirious notion of the icicle as a whale, and the neighbour as a local Ahab. The poet sets these images squarely before us, not trying to make sense of them. They are simple there, elements of "unexplained memory".
The image of icicle as animal is pursued further in the next tercet. Here again we get a haunting juxtaposition – the architectural "upside-down Gothic" and the weird cow whose udders are made of icicles and resemble glass.
The fifth takes us farther beyond the window-frame. Trains are usually comforting sights, belonging to the pleasures of childhood. This one has become a wild beast, though a heraldic one, holding "the journey in its claws". As in the first terect, we sense that events have been set uncontrollably in motion. The shape of the child's unlived life is already decided by forces that cannot be checked or altered.

An obvious reading of the sixth poem, nevertheless, would suggest a post-childhood, post-war setting, that of adolescence and first love, or even maturity and marriage. The "snow-haze" and "moonlight" are romantic images, contrasting with the earlier surreal nightmare and Gothic humour. But a characteristic flick of the wrist produces the unexpected jellyfish. "Jellyfish moonlight" packs two nouns together: although "moonlight" is a noun that may do duty as a modifier, the substantive adds more force to the image. Having seen large white jellyfish stranded on the sands at Portmeirion last summer, I find the metaphor of hazy, mis-shapen moonlight a brilliantly accurate one.Of course, there is no obligation to imagine we are still in the child's world at this point. The six winters are not necessarily consecutive. They may have been picked at random from the poet's memory: some may have simply been assembled with no autobiographical intent. They could also be read as the entire life-story, moving swiftly on at the rate of one winter per decade. They might be the omniscient narrator's different views of a single winter. It's up to the reader to decide the chronology, if it exists.
The menace of future journeys has now been left behind, and, for the first time, there is the collective pronoun, "our", providing reassurance. The isolating dread has diminished in the pleasure of a new and shared perspective. What lies ahead is only an avenue, a slender element in the journey, but a promising one. The word "bewitched" might have been ominous, but instead it seems to imply a benign and beautiful enchantment effected by snow, moonlight and companionship.
Dreams and the transitions between different levels of consciousness are suggested by the poet's very name. They are Tranströmer's territory. He worked as a psychologist for many years, and his poems seem to me to be extraordinarily honest elucidations of the "secret ministry" of the mind. From the fascinating childhood memoirs included in the Bloodaxe collection, one might guess that Tranströmer, like a number of poets, could suffer from Asperger's (see, particularly, "Museums"). How impressive it is that he has never compromised on his singular perceptions, and that the resulting poetry is so luminous, and has yielded so much meaning to his readers.

1Six Winters
In the black hotel a child is asleep.
And outside: the winter night
where the wide-eyed dice roll.
2
An élite of the dead became stone
in Katarina Churchyard
where the wind shakes in its armour from Svalbard.
3
One wartime winter when I lay sick
a huge icicle grew outside the window.
Neighbour and harpoon, unexplained memory.
4
Ice hangs down from the roof edge.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract cattle, udders of glass.
5
On a side-track, an empty railway-carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journeys in its claws.
6
Tonight snow-haze, moonlight. The moonlight jellyfish itself
is floating before us. Our smiles
on the way home. Bewitched avenue.

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