Tomas Tranströmer – The Captain – Süddeutsche.de

Had

A few poets as the ability to express very complicated things in very simple images. Now the Swedish poet and Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer has died.

By Thomas Steinfeld

Tomas Tranströmer was in March 1990 in Venice. The journey there had pleased him very much. In Heidelberg he had read in the then existing bookstore Brown, before sixty listeners. In Innsbruck, the sun was shining. But arrived when the poet in Venice, the Widernisse accumulated: The apartment not far from Rialto, which he had as always in winter in Venice living Joseph Brodsky taught the whole palace appeared to him “macabre”, as a “haunted house”: “Now we have the nerve to keep in shape,” he wrote in his diary.

At that time arose in Tomas Tranströmer amazingly short period of two months, the unusually long poem “The Mourning Gondola 2 “. It owes its title to a piece of Franz Liszt, and it contains the line: “The green cold of the sea penetrates through the floor into the palace.” It is doubtful whether it is really the sea, the flushed Venice. But the cold floor also belongs to the apartment where Tomas Tranströmer lived at that time, is likely to be certain.

The work of the poet Tomas Tranströmer is small. It begins in 1954, completed in 2004, and it covers only a dozen smaller volumes, which together make up no more than five hundred pages. In 2011, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, for good reason, considering the ability to express very complicated things in very simple images, is it to keep ready for an argument. That had not been at the beginning so. In the “Seventeen Poems”, his debut, it goes to the “rotten pole” of the moon, and the like liberties of a surreal modernism.

Literature Nobel Prize Tranströmer of honor surprised

The newly minted Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer was taken completely by surprise Thursday by the decision of the Swedish Academy.

(Video: Reuters , Photo: AP)

When he 1965 moved to the province, he was already a famous poet

But soon take the place of the gorgeous dazzling metaphor the shortened to a brief formula experience, the flash of only seconds image from which Tomas Tranströmer large rooms, dramatic stories (such as the interplay of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, father and son, both old men in Venice) unfolds, with the precision of haiku: “The poem is entirely possible // I looked out than that. branches swayed. / White seagulls ate black cherries “. These poems are more laconic, more clearly an “I” will report it to word, and there is nothing Hermetic them. An unusual for Poetry large readership, especially in his native country, loved him for it.

Tomas Tranströmer, who was born in April 1931 in Stockholm, Södra Latin had visited a famous in Sweden humanistic Gymnasium of whose students Anacreontics Carl Michael Bellman had heard how the writer Stig Dagerman. Studied had Tranströmer first literature before he got his degree in psychology and a regular job seized. He worked at the psycho-technical Institute, University of Stockholm, and as a curator in a juvenile detention center before moving in 1965 in the province to half day there to serve as a guidance counselor in the employment services of Swedish towns.

At the time, he was already a famous poet after the Swedish criticism had “17 Poems”, his debut, proclaimed him by the belt for genius. And a more or less ordinary employee, he remained, although the uniform sequence of working days has become increasingly interrupted by reading tours and awards ceremonies. A stroke that paralyzed him one side and robbed him of speaking and writing, put this in good faith life in 1990 to an end. Thereafter, and until his death lived Tomas Tranströmer in Stockholm, assisted by his wife, who understood his character and even got dictates new poems, and for a long time yet able to play with your left hand piano, Franz Schubert, above all.

As it was, the life Tranströmer. He seemed to have accepted that as it all are urgent, demanding, avant-garde, but also that the pain and the rejoicing was unfamiliar with serenity. “What me most writers thus interfering,” he wrote in the summer of 1976, a friend, the American poet Robert Bly, “is her desire to be great.” Although he wrote mainly in free verse, without rhythm and rhyme, but there is not a poem by him in which, and it would be by mere apartheid, a lyric I aufspreizte.

He wrote objectively, in emphatic sense of the word – although one always noticed that there were personal experiences, designed as: “The Oktoberfest sea flashes / cold with its dorsal fin of mirages // Nothing is left behind, which remembers the white / frenzy of sailboat racing. . // amber light on the city. / And all the sounds in slow flight. // The hieroglyph of a barkings of the dog is in the air / painted over the garden, // where the yellow fruit the tree / outwitted and slumps. “

memoirs on 80 pages

This is Tomas Tranströmer, a poem of 1958, the “Weather Paintings” is and was transferred by Hanns Grössel without the Tomas Tranströmer had not existed at least in German , His memoirs “Minnena ser mig” and not (“Memories see me”, 1993) are just eighty pages long, because there would have been nothing to say, but because of what was to say, let condense so, until every remembrance the quality of a small-sized image assumed, in which an entire life situation seems summarized.

In 2011, Tranströmer, almost silent, the Nobel Prize for Literature contrary.

(Photo: dpa )

Tomas Tranströmer maternal grandfather was a pilot been. The family owned a summer home in the archipelago outside Stockholm, and the images from there run through his work: “We have a lot of shadows,” it says in the poem “The Forgotten Captain” from 1989, “I was on my way home / in the September night when O / after forty years of his grave rose / and provided me with society “

At this psychic situation is nothing spectacular, but only represents a kind of extension of everyday experience”. apply now it, the nerves to keep in shape “, this pragmatic set seems to be true for the encounter with the captain: For a moment the tyranny of time elapsing is repealed. Something is a gap in between past and present, and through this gap continues the poem, the poet rather than of silent pilots and the reader as plapperndem passenger. On Thursday, the captain Tomas Tranströmer has died at the age of 83 years.