The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
Transtromer's poems, spare and image-driven, open suddenly onto vast inner terrains, like a trapdoor in a floor you thought you knew. A working psychologist, he wrote about consciousness, music, bureaucracy, and the Nordic natural world with dreamlike precision that made him the most translated Scandinavian poet of his era. He suffered a stroke in 1990 that largely took his speech; he continued writing with his left hand. Nobel Prize 2011.
Some readers find Tranströmer's speaker held at a cold distance from his subjects, “too emotionless to provoke much sympathy in me,” and the same compression fans call depth reads to others as opacity, images “so hard to decipher you eventually give up trying.” The closing haiku sequence, 45 poems written left-handed after a 1990 stroke, gets singled out as the collection's weak point, and one reader flags individual images elsewhere as “banal and punctuated.” Another calls a specific stretch “considerably worse than expected.” A critic faults Robin Fulton's translation for inconsistent handling of meter, rendering blank-verse originals only roughly into English, and flags specific mistranslated words. At least one reader questions whether the Nobel Prize was warranted at all, given the collection's small size and a felt absence of larger ambition.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
