The Deleted World

by Tomas Tranströmer, Robin Robertson (Translator)

A short selection of haunting, meditative poems from the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature

Tomas Tranströmer can be clearly recognized not just as Sweden's most important poet, but as a writer of international stature whose work speaks to us now with undiminished clarity and resonance. Long celebrated as a master of the arresting, suggestive image, Tranströmer is a poet of the liminal: drawn again and again to thresholds of light and of water, the boundaries between man and nature, wakefulness and dream. A deeply spiritual but secular writer, his skepticism about humanity is continually challenged by the implacable renewing power of the natural world. His poems are epiphanies rooted in experience: spare, luminous meditations that his extraordinary images split open—exposing something sudden, mysterious, and unforgettable.

Genres: Poetry, Nobel Prize, Sweden, Swedish Literature, Scandinavian Literature, Adult, Literature

54 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

His poetry, building on Modernism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, contains powerful imagery concerned with issues of fragmentation and isolation. “He has perfected a particular kind of epiphanic lyric, often in quatrains, in which nature is the active, energizing subject, and the self (if the self is present at all) is the object,” notes critic Katie Peterson in the Boston Review.

Critic and poet Tom Sleigh observed, in his Interview with a Ghost (2006), that “Tranströmer’s poems imagine the spaces that the deep then inhabits, like ground water gushing up into a newly dug well.”

His honors include the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrarch Prize in Germany, the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum,the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and especially the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature. His work has been translated into more than 50 languages.

Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990, and after a six-year silence published his collection Sorgegondolen (Grief Gondola) (1996). Prior to his stroke, he worked as a psychologist, focusing on the juvenile prison population as well as the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives in Sweden.

On Thursday, 6th of October 2011 he was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality".

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slim 2006 collection of poetry from the Swedish poet and therapist Tomas Tranströmer, who worked with young people as a psychologist with troubled youth at a juvenile detention facility and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. He was also an accomplished pianist who suffered a stroke later in life, only able to use his left hand to play after that. Composers the world over sent him left hand compositions for him to play, doesn't that make you happy?

The poems in Deleted World are typical of his work, focused on the natural landscapes of Sweden, the changing of the seasons. Tranströmer was seen as out of touch in the sixties seventies for not confronting social or political issues, but his language and images are luminous.

In February life stood still.
The birds refused to fly and the soul
grated against the landscape as a boat
chafes against the jetty where it’s moored.

The trees were turned away. The snow’s depth
measured by the stubble poking through.
The footprints grew old out on the ice-crust.
Under a tarpaulin, language was being broken down.

Suddenly, something approaches the window.
I stop working and look up.
The colours blaze. Everything turns around.
The earth and I spring at each other.

Here's my only quibble. These poems Robin Robertson, who does not speak Swedish, created as " free versions" of Tranströmer's poetry, splitting the difference between literal translation and invention. I don't speak Swedish, either, but I have seen some reviews critical of just how free his versions are.

Still, I think he captures the tone I have heard in other Tranströmer translations, most specifically The Half-Finshed Heaven, translated by his lifelong friend and poet (who does speak Swedish) Robert Bly. Bottom line: I love the poems, and recommend them, but if you are curious and want to try some of his work (In English) I would start with Half-Finished Heaven or his first translated collection into English (by Bly), Twenty Poems (1970).

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spent an absolutely delightful afternoon at the lake with this charming volume which I found on the shelf of the local library. Robin Robertson who prepared the English versions of the Transtömer poems contained in this volume is without question an excellent poet. The chief problem is that the delightful tones and cadences of the Swedish texts cannot be rendered in English which Robertson himself readily acknowledges in his preface:

"The supply rhythms of the original poems are hard to replicate and, equally, the plosive musicality of Swedish words like 'domkyroklocklang' lose all their aural resonance whey the they become the 'peal of cathedral bells'.'' (p. xi)

This problem of translating English into Swedish should not surprise anyone like myself who in the 1970s attended numerous screenings of Bergman movies. Streams of beautiful sounds filled the cinema as very prosaic English subtitles explained the literal sense of what was being said.

However, as I have already said, Robertson's talent as an English language poet compensates to a large degree for what has been lost in translation.

"In the middle of the night, death comes
to take your measurements. The
visit is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit is
is being sewn on the sly."

[Raquel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In the middle of life, death comes to take your measurements"

Uma longa espera feita de poemas. Na linguagem metódica e melancólica de Tranströmer.

[Iulia Kyçyku · Rating 5 out of 5]

'I dreamt I was the needle in a compass / some orienteer bore through the forest with a spinning heart.'

*

'One day when she was rinsing clothes at the jetty / the chill of the sea rose up through her arms / and into her soul.'

*

'The earth and I spring at each other.'

*

'The storm puts its mouth in the house / and blows to get a tone. / I toss and turn, my eyes closed / reading the storm's text.'

*

'The forest in this season is a silent palace of abandoned rooms.'

*

'In the middle of life, death comes / to take your measurements.'

*

'We milked the cosmos secretly, and survived.'

[Deea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought that poetry was not for me, but lately I have started to develop a taste for it. And the effect of some of these poems really lingers...

The Couple

They turn out the lamplight, and its white globe
glimmers for a moment: an aspirin rising and falling
then dissolving in a glass of darkness. Around them,
the hotel walls slide like a back-drop up into the night sky.

Love’s drama has died down, and they’re sleeping now,
but their dreams will meet as colours meet
and bleed into each other
in the dampened pages of a child’s painting-book.

All around is dark, and silent. The city has drawn in,
extinguishing its windows. The houses have approached.
They crowd in close, attentive:
this audience of cancelled faces.
___________________
TO FRIENDS BEHIND A BORDER

I

I wrote to you so cautiously. But what I couldn't say
filled and grew like a hot-air balloon
and finally floated away through the night sky.

II

Now my letter is with the censor. He lights his lamp.
In its glare my words leap out like monkeys at a wire mesh,
clattering it, stopping to bear their teeth.

III

Read between the lines. We will meet in two hundred years
when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten –
when they can sleep at last, become ammonites.
_________________________
From March 1979

Sick of those who come with words,
words but no language,
I make my way to the snow-covered
island.

Wilderness has no words. The
unwritten pages
stretch out in all directions.

I come across this line of deer-slots
in the snow: a language,
language without words.
_______________________
Black Postcards

I
The calendar is full but the future is
blank.
The wires hum the folk-tune of
some forgotten land.
Snow-fall on the lead-still sea.
Shadows
scrabble on the pier.

II
In the middle o life, death comes
to take your measurements. The
visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the
suit
is being sewn on the sly.
________________________
Fire Graffiti

Throughout those dismal months
my life was only sparked alight
when I made love to you.
As the firefly ignites and fades,
ignites and fades, we follow the
flashes
of its flight in the dark among the olive trees.

Throughout those dismal months,
my soul sat slumped and lifeless
but my body walked to yours.
The night sky was lowing.
We milked the cosmos secretly, and survived.
_______________________
Island City, 1860

I
One day when she was rinsing clothes at
the jetty
the chill of the sea rose up through her
arms
and into her soul.

Her tears froze to a pair of spectacles. The
island
gathered itself, its white grass bristling,
and the herring lag streamed in the
depths of the sea.

II
The swarm of smallpox caught up with
him
and settled on his face.
He lies in bed, staring into the ceiling.

What huge effort to move through this
silence.
The stain of this moment spreading out
forever,
this moment's wound in its ever-
widening pool.

[Billy O'Callaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a number of years prior to 2011, the name of Tomas Transtromer surfaced every time an announcement was due as to who the next Nobel laureate would be. So I seemed to know of him long before I actually got to read him. And then I came across a copy of The Deleted World (an edition that had a dark wooden cross on a dusky, snow-covered landscape), and I was stunned by the beauty of the poems.
Poetry is strange kind of magic. What works for some won't necessarily work for others. But Transtromer is one who resonates. I read him and find that he lingers with me, like music. These poems are rich in contrasts of darkness and light, and stillness, and are full of minute parts. His imagery is wonderfully vivid, and his tone is sometimes melancholic but always extremely intimate. I return to him often, and I've read this short book numerous times over the past few years. This time I picked it up because I'd just read of his death. I could have gone into his collected volume, but since 'The Deleted World' was my formal hello to his work, it seemed also a natural choice for saying goodbye. Except, of course, it will never be that, because these poems exist and aren't going anywhere, and I'll need to read them again and again in years to come. Such finely honed lines challenge and inspire me to do better with my own sentences, they raise my awareness of what matters. Poetry of this kind just seems to light me up.

"They turn out the lamplight, and its white globe
glimmers for a moment: an aspirin rising and falling
then dissolving in a glass of darkness..." ('The Couple')

[Madeleine Moreland · Rating 5 out of 5]

not to flex but his writer's voice sounds like mine <33

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Black Postcards

I

The calendar is full but the future is blank.
The wires hum the folk-tune of some forgotten land.
Snow-fall on the lead-still sea. Shadows
scrabble on the pier.

II

In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is being sewn on the sly.

[Rise]

I close my eyes.
There is a silent world,
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled over the border.

—"Midwinter"

The last lines of Tomas Tranströmer's poem "Midwinter" closed the collection The Deleted World. It ended with an eerie image of the silent world and the dead being trafficked through a crack. The poems themselves offered a silent procession of images and left the reader with an atmosphere of foreboding. The world was not the only thing deleted, but words were seemingly redacted to produce extremely short poems. What's left were bare traces of ideas and a profound sense of incompleteness. Even crowding faces—of houses or the couple, it was not exactly clear—was cancelled. The landscape was as if annulled.

All around is dark, and silent. The city has drawn in,
extinguishing its windows. The houses have approached.
They crowd in close, attentive:
this audience of cancelled faces.

—"The Couple"

Whole poems themselves were seemingly deleted. The reader was treated to only 15 short pieces, in a book that ran for mere 37 pages, half of which were devoted to the original poems in Swedish facing the English versions of Robin Robertson. The criminally sparse selection of poems terminated a lot of potential richness from Tranströmer's oeuvre. It was a rather short introduction to the poet, though it in some ways gave an impression that the selection was representative of the poet's 11 books of poetry. Because the poems were short, the lines were short, the book was short, image subtraction and language condensation were the order of the day.

Tranströmer was a poet of compression. He could write poems using language, yet without using words. The poet confessed that he was "sick of those who come with words."

From March 1979

Sick of those who come with words, words but no language,
I make my way to the snow-covered island.

Wilderness has no words. The unwritten pages
stretch out in all directions.

I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language,
language without words.

The wordless natural world described everything for him. Language was derived from the essential meaning of silence. The utterance of words—mere superfluous words—would disturb the balance of nature. The Nobel laureate had the luxury to repudiate the wordiness of modern society, for he was a deleter of the inessential. He was a tranströmer of words.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Throughout those dismal months my life was only sparked
alight when I made love to you.
As the firefly ignites and fades, ignites and fades, we follow
the flashes
of its flight in the dark among the olive trees.

Throughout those dismal months, my soul sat slumped and
lifeless
but my body walked to yours.
The night sky was lowing.
We milked the cosmos secretly, and survived.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this short book of poems wonderful. I loved the imagery in particular. My favorites were "Autumnal Archipelago", "The Couple", "A Winter Night", "Out in the Open" and "From March 1979" (though there were no poems that I didn't like!).

[Aditya Shukla · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are familiar with the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, you would understand it. I always had this feeling and Pessoa even wrote in a poem 'that he is as natural as green grass, a sunflower or a moon', from the very beginning when I heard Tomas Tranströmer's name for first time I had this feeling that he too is as natural as green grass and sunflower, although his is a more modern naturalness, full of modern interruption in the nature, the cracking voices of aeroplanes, the intercepting wires inserted in the walls to pry, the contrast of dark and light, the contrast and nature and artificial existing together.

Although, I have read this book and marked as 'Read' on Goodreads bookshelf, have I really finished this book? The simple answer is 'no'. Poems are not meant to be read, they are meant to be seen and lived. So, I will be waiting for a day when I would have a hard copy of this small but precious collection of poetry by one of the greatest modern poet and only then by keeping my finger on the words of poems, seeing them by my eyes of a piece of paper and sniffing the pages, I will eventually finish it's first true reading.

[Sophia L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notable because it is a bilingual edition which I love.
I tried my hand at translating a poem from Swedish.
Notable because google translate’s version was better and somehow more literary.

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The bus negotiates the winter night
a flickering ship in the pine forest
on a road as narrow and deep as a dead canal.

Few passengers: some old, some very young.
If it stopped and switched off its lights
the world would be deleted.

[حسن · Rating 3 out of 5]

And that which was "I"
Is only a word
In the darkness of December's mouth

This metaphor is sublime..


My favourite poem from this mini-anthology of poems by Tranströmer is The Couple, so I have read different translations of it :
in Arabic by Adonis (his complete poetry works), in French by Jacques Outin and three different versions in English so far; by Robin Robertson, Robert Fulton and Robert Bly.. Hopefully next year in Spanish.

The different translations of the poem The Couple were very different, not only in terms of the musicality of the verses, the rhythm, the tonality and the different syntax, notably the chosen vocabulary and the grammar (for exemple:
"glimmers for a moment before dissolving" / "glows
an instant and then dissolves", etc.. ) but also regarding the flow and the fluidity of the successive elemental movements that influence the synchronic poetic images..
To each reader his own preference between the free translation or the more literal one:

{The Couple}
(Translated by Robert Fulton)

They switch off the light and its white shade 
glimmers for a moment before dissolving 
like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then up. 
The hotel walls rise into the black sky. 
The movements of love have settled, and they sleep 
but their most secret thoughts meet as when 
two colors meet and flow into each other 
on the wet paper of a schoolboy’s painting. 
It is dark and silent. But the town has pulled closer tonight. With quenched windows.
The houses have approached. 
They stand close up in a throng, waiting, 
a crowd whose faces have no expressions.
***

{The Couple}
(Translated by Robert Bly in « 20 Poems », Seventies Press, 1970 https://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2010/05...)

They turn the light off, and its white globe glows
an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet
in a glass of darkness. Then a rising.
The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.
Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep,
but their most secret thoughts begin to meet
like two colors that meet and run together
on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.
It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer
tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.
They stand packed and waiting very near,
a mob of people with blank faces.
***


The poem A Winter Night included in this collection is just wonderful.
In my opinion, the various translations of the text don't affect the content, i.e. the literal sense as well as the symbolic meaning. However, the form of the translated poem is radically different.(*)

Here's Robin Fulton's translation (in New Collected Poems, Bloodaxe, 1997):
{A Winter Night}

The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to produce a note.
I sleep uneasily, turn, with shut eyes
read the storm’s text.

But the child’s eyes are large in the dark
and for the child the storm howls.
Both are fond of lamps that swing.
Both are halfway toward speech.

The storm has childish hands and wings.
The Caravan bolts towards Lapland.
And the house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.

The night is calm over our floor
(where all expired footsteps
rest like sunk leaves in a pond)
but outside the night is wild.

Over the world goes a graver storm.
It sets its mouth to our soul
and blows to produce a note. We dread
that the storm will blow us empty.
***

{A Winter Night}
(Translated by Robin Robertson in the edition that I have read)

The storm puts its mouth to the house 
and blows to get a tone. 
I toss and turn, my closed eyes 
reading the storm's text.

The child's eyes grow wide in the dark 
and the storm howls for him. 
Both love the swinging lamps; 
both are halfway towards speech.

The storm has the hands and wings of a child. 
Far away, travelers run for cover. 
The house feels its own constellation of nails 
holding the walls together.

The night is calm in our rooms, 
where the echoes of all footsteps rest 
like sunken leaves in a pond, 
but the night outside is wild.

A darker storm stands over the world. 
It puts its mouth to our soul 
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid 
the storm will blow us empty.
***

(*) The form is essential as it contains "the aesthetic features and poetic effect of the original poem" (http://www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTI05/pdf...)

[Tabish · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Transtromer's best poetry collections.

[Sidharth Vardhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

And that which was ‘I’
is only a word
in the darkness of December’s mouth

I am always a little skeptical of nobel laureates of Swedish origin but these poems are simply beautiful despite their pessimism. The title itself provides enough of glimpse of what is to expected from this small collection.

A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty
*
In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is being sewn on the sly
*
What huge effort to move through this silence.
The stain of this moment spreading out forever,
this moment’s wound in its ever-widening pool.
*
The bus negotiates the winter night:
a flickering ship in the pine forest
on a road as narrow and deep as a dead canal.
Few passengers: some old, some very young.
If it stopped and switched off its lights
the world would be deleted
*
I wrote to you so cautiously. But what I couldn’t say
filled and grew like a hot-air balloon
and finally floated away through the night sky.
*
On the way back, I see mushrooms pushing up through the grass.
Stretching for help, these white fingers
belong to someone who sobs down there in the darkness.
We belong to the earth.

[Abeer Abdullah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very cold and arresting imagery that swelled up my throat on a weekend alone. Now I don't know what to do because I cant cry like the normal folks.
"What huge effort to move through this silence./
The stain of this moment spreading out forever,/
this moment's wound in its ever-widening pool."

[Khitkhite Buri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems for life spent indoors looking through a window. Lonely poems.

'Face to Face'
'A winter’s night'
'To Friends Behind a Border'
'Calling Home'
'Island Life 1860'
'From March 1979'and 'Solitude was underwhelming.

[Jomar Canales Conde · Rating 5 out of 5]

qué buenas traducciones. me gustan más que las del otro libro de tranströmer que estoy leyendo (the great enigma: new collected poems), qué pena que sean tan pocos. tranströmer me fascina.

[Goodreeds User · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lowkey might have a new favourite poet...

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always go back to this book to reclaim something that I might have lost over time, and its generosity, its deep well of wisdom, always welcomes my revisit.

[chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Under the buzzard's circling point of stillness
the ocean rolls thundering into the light; blindly chewing
its straps of seaweed, it snorts up foam across the beach.

The earth is covered in darkness, traced by bats.
The buzzard stops and becomes a star. The ocean rolls
thundering on, blowing the foam away across the beach.
-- "Ostinato"

We will meet in two hundred years
when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten --
when they can sleep at last, become ammonites.
-- "To Friends Behind a Border"

I see mushrooms pushing up through the grass.
Stretching for help, these white fingers
belong to someone who sobs down there in the darkness.
We belong to the earth.
-- "Sketch in October"

[Jed Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stark and sharply delineated poems like icy winter light.

[CD Borden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have given this book three stars simply because I found it wanting (only 15 poems), but these translations--or "versions", if you will--are little gems of poetry so four stars it is.

Although a slim volume it is nonetheless an exquisite and eloquent sampler of what this Swedish poet is capable of when it comes to the written word (at least, that's what I could tell from these English renderings). Every poem captures the mood of the moment like a snapshot of frenzy ("Out in the Open"). For instance, Tomas Tranströmer might give us a meditation on the weather (inner and outer):

A blue light
streams out of my clothes.
Midwinter.
Ringing tambourines of ice.
("Midwinter)

Or an epiphany of the inevitable:

In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
     is being sewn on the sly.
("Black Postcards")

As you can see in the latter poem, even when he is not talking about the cold you can still feel the coldness seeping through. Therefore, Mr. Tranströmer must have, as Wallace Stevens appropriately puts it, "a mind of winter" to write poems such as these beautiful icicles. A "perfect introduction", indeed!

(4 out of 5 stars)


P.S.: The original poems are also on every other page to accompany the versions. I wish I could read them someday. Most probably in a cabin in the woods somewhere in Sweden as clouds of smoke float out the chimney, during winter I imagine, while the snowflakes out the window fall, one by one, to build its own snowman.

[Ryan Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Swedish is a beautiful language. I've never been to the country; I am no authority. But I am drawn to it. I find many of its films and writings confused as melancholic; but are actually pregnant (though subtly envisioned) with passion.

It is easy for David Fincher (erroneously) to imagine a landscape: dark, barren, mysterious, unforgiving. His eyes miss something greater. It is in Bergman that the same landscape (shot in similar light--painting a similar bleakness) enables a more vivid picture.

Transtromer's poems, like Bergman's films, paint snows and layers of ice with deep blues or rich grays. Allusions of death populate their pages and frames. But these descriptions signal us, perhaps counterintuitively, to treat these "dark" images as distractions in toto. They lay bare an opportunity for life. There is always a mushroom or blade of grass bursting through snow; lights shining through night.

The world here could be "deleted" if the lights go out. But only then do we dream of more light to come.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm never sure about reading poetry that has been translated, but these are deliberately called "versions," and the translator gives some examples where the English words can't come close to what the Swedish equivalents would have sounded like.

Tranströmer's poems are very tied to nature, and there isn't a single poem in this volume that does not have nature as a central theme, either representing itself or tying to topics like death, life, and connectivity. They are brief, but seem to leave room for the silence that the landscape he writes about demands. A few are specifically about some of the islands off the Swedish coast.

My favorite is probably Black Postcards, with the imagery of death coming to measure us for our measurements, sewing our suit on the sly while we go through our lives.

"We are afraid the storm will blow us empty."

[Andrea Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this particular book of poetry through more than once in both Swedish and English. I love that the two languages are on the pages across from one another. This gives me a chance to learn Swedish with a most beautiful flow. The language of verse from a poet who is most exquisite and so breathtaking. It is not a wonder that Tomas Transtromer is considered one of the greatest living poets of our time. Here's a sample for your soul to savor :

"In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten. and life goes on. But the
suit is being sewn on the sly. " (p.31)

[TLC Nielsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished the English translation by Robin Robertson of Tomas Transtromer's poetry, The Deleted World. Beautiful, elegant and unexpected! Here are three lines, which positively gripped me: "A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty." (A Winter Night)

[Holly Raymond · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovely versions of Transtromer, but kind of misleading to call them translations. That's fine with me, but this book is awfully short for the price. I'm complaining about pedantic stuff, but hey, there are a lot of worthy Transtromer editions out now that you can pick up at more or less any bookstore you choose to visit, and while this IS good and IS a nice textural take on the guy, there are better places to dip in.