The transformative and surrealistic works of Tomas Tranströmer

There is something magical about Beethoven at dawn. I spent my nights this past week with him, winding up on my balcony early each morning with strains of Presto Agitato floating out into the approaching day. It’s certainly a dramatic start to daily life’s chores, and I’m not sure I can survive the inevitable anti-climax much longer. While it lasts, I must confess, it is spectacular. I’m listening to Beethoven as an accompaniment to the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer, this year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature. More accurately, I’m listening and reading in turns, for neither is an artist that allows for distraction. It all began innocently enough, when I read the opening lines of the poem The Indoors is Endless and the wonderful centipedes of music were set in motion: It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven hoists his death-mask and sails off. A little later, I was firmly hooked by Allegro: [caption id=“attachment_102413” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer poses for a photograph at his home in Stockholm, Sweden.Transtromer, a Swedish poet whose surrealistic works about the mysteries of the human mind won him acclaim as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since World War II won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. Jessica Gow/AP Photo”]  [/caption] The music is a house of glass standing on a slope; rocks are flying, rocks are rolling. (We all know I could never resist a little rock n’roll.) The Nobel Prize in Literature, like classical music, is not a subject I normally dare voice an opinion about. My knowledge of High Culture is, to put it mildly, scanty; the more unkind might call it paltry. My hope for a life spent reading is that for every chance encounter and missed opportunity with a Great, I will meet another whose attention I can capture for longer. All reading is a conversation, and reading a new writer is usually a contest of wills: Who will give up first? The writer seduces, with titbits of wit and morsels of information; the reader succumbs, having threatened her book with millions of other options in entertainment. I could watch a movie, or cook a meal, or walk my dog; why should I bother with you? Because, any good book will tease, I know more than you. A lofty book will then flit away and expect you to follow meekly. These are the books, for reasons mystifying to this reader, most critics seem to adore. Personally, I like a book that tries harder, but this isn’t a blog about my literary indulgences. Well, it’s not always a blog about them. The past few years have been gentle with my ego. With the exception of Le Clézio in 2008, the writers that were awarded the Nobel were vaguely familiar, like your neighbour’s famous uncle. I knew they existed, had read an essay here or a novel there, they were people rather than celebrities. Mario Vargas Llosa— 2010’s laureate — was even an old friend. His Letters to a Young Novelist is the first piece of professional advice I remember reading. This, I told myself when he won, is what growing up feels like. The universe becomes a smaller place. Sometimes, you are allowed into the Inside and given the smug satisfaction of knowing precisely what all the fuss is about. This year, in a happy reversal, Tomas Tranströmer convinced me that the inside is endless. “Two truths approach each other” he writes, “One comes from inside, the other from outside, and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.” You will have surmised by now that I had never heard of this year’s literary toast until this week. Some bubbles only have to exist to burst. However, given that this is a books blog, and I am a lawyer, I did my due diligence. It was a scramble helped along by the little corner of the blogosphere I inhabit, where everyone else seemed to be uploading information as frantically as I was consuming it. I discovered that he was a national poet who never told his nation — Sweden— “what it thought it wanted to hear”. Sigrid Rausing then informed me of the appeal of this very private poet:

“No poet expresses better the relationship between humans and the natural world. The black and melancholy seas, the drifting seagulls, the oaks and elks, the storms, rowanberries, the moon and stars, the well, salt, and wolves are agents rather than background; they are what the world is, as much as we are. It’s dark, and thoughtful. It is, also, bleakly intelligent.”

I learned, also, of his stroke and subsequent paralysis; that, despite his infirmity, he continued to compose poems and perform piano concerts one-handed. It was this amazing display of determination, more than all the hoopla, that compelled to give his poems an earnest shot. Schubertiana is the poem doing the rounds with greatest enthusiasm. It opens with a few lines about New York that everyone at the New Yorker and The New York Times is predictably ecstatic about, and the literary world is a viral place. While it persuaded me to try Schubert soon as I’m over Beethoven (not for a long while, I suspect), it isn’t the easiest of his poems to tackle. The delicate little Midwinter is, in my opinion, a better introduction:

Midwinter A blue glow Streams out from my clothes. Midwinter. A clinking tambour made of ice. I close my eyes. Somewhere there’s a silent world And there is an opening Where the dead Are smuggled over the border.

(translated by Robert Bly) As you head out on a voyage to find your own Tomas Tranströmer, thus, perhaps a little company?