On the death of Tomas Tranströmer: From now on, it’s late – Times Online

The letters he guarded as the finest, most expensive things. The Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer was a poet of Fürsichbehaltens. An obituary

28th March 2015 07:51 clock

The poet and Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer in 2011 | © Jessica Gow / AFP

“The funerals come / denser and denser / how the street signs / when approaching a city.”

Tomas Tranströmer wrote ten years ago, with early seventies, in the poem Snow falls . Death as something that going towards a lifetime, which eventually begins to announce by signs and more signs – but even remain nameless: a city. They no longer leaves and also does not stay there. It has finally arrived nowhere. Coming from nowhere. Now everything goes back to the beginning going on? “A bridge slowly builds up / straight out into space.”

The view of reincarnation gave Tomas Tranströmer the spiritualists and other speculators. Forecasts he never met, not even the past concerning. The Big Brain , En stora Gatan – so he called his book of poems by 2004, in the fall also snow contain. He did not try to solve it, he has rather described it as accurately as possible, more and more accurate, until he stood before the great mystery.

What other a starting point, Tranströmer was the target. But how can someone give an answer if no one knows the question? At the sight of an old photograph he once wrote: “A man in his thirties: the strong eyebrows, the face that almost looks me in the eyes and whispers. ‘Here I am’ But there’s no one remembers who I ‘is. ”

knowledge, know, dominate, be sure to look through – it was all him suspicious, even the Grand Therefore speeches as its expression. He was “tired of all those who come up with words, words, but no language,” he wrote in the poem From March ’79 . As a boy his collection of the most wonderful, most expensive things – Butterflies, coins, minerals – he kept the 29 letters of the Swedish alphabet, she held up to the light, put them in ever new rows to the third to fifth to tenth, alone, shut it off, thinking of her, she kept secret, never wasted it. They belonged to him.

Reduced to the Maximum

In 60 years of poetic work since its first publication 17 Poems of 1954, he has barely 500 pages filled with his 29 letters. That seems a little, but only if you measure truth in page numbers and time in years. The greatest in the youngest mapping, pointing to deeper and deeper into the Molecular until a letter contained a world and the alphabet a universe a fractal – In fact, each piece – and every bit of it. If he had just left a poem, it would also not have been enough. Geographers know: The more accurately you measure the intricacies of a coastal path, the greater the length obtained. If others have had no language, if there was no common language, then at least the very own.

She deepened Tomas Tranströmer in natural images, as well as in family stories, in the spirit of the plants as well as in the young offenders, he worked as a psychologist, “When the runaway was taken / he had the bags / full of chanterelles, “says the Haiku From prison . A Life in a day of freedom, a life in eleven words, reduced to the maximum.