Tomas Transtromer
Tomas Transtromer
Tomas Gösta Tranströmerwas a Swedish poet, psychologist and translator. His poems captured the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature. Tranströmer's work is also characterized by a sense of mystery and wonder underlying the routine of everyday life, a quality which often gives his poems a religious dimension. He has been described as a Christian poet...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth15 April 1931
CountrySweden
The language marches in step with the executioners. Therefore we must get a new language.
I walk slowly into myself, through a forest of empty suits of armor.
A ship's engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew's magnifying glass. Without really knowing, we divine; our life has a sister ship, following quietly another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands.
It's always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real.
I am still the place where creation does some work on itself.
We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is me. The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones.
Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark. A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets in blindness and anxiety on the way towards a miracle, while I invisibly remain standing.
Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.