He seems to be the front runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature, so let’s look at a Tomas Tranströmer poem — prose poem — so that if he does actually win we won’t be totally ignorant.
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Madrigal
I inherited a dark wood where I seldom go. But a day will come when the dead and the living trade places. The wood will be set in motion. We are not without hope. The most serious crimes will remain unsolved in spite of the efforts of many policemen. In the same way there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark wood, but today I’m walking in the other wood, the light one. All the living creatures that sing, wriggle, wag, and crawl! It’s spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.
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(Madrigal poems are “serious, brief, irregular lyrics.”)
This is a brief, allegorical, philosophical, spiritual expression; it feels Blakean in its flat declarative statements and packed, strange metaphors.
Here’s one possible unpacking.
We are born into mental chaos, into the dark mystery of existence. We all inherit this dark wood, and we spend our lives fleeing it. It’s frightening; its caverns are measureless to man. We hate the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe.
Yet as we die – on that green evening when our death begins – the dark wood will be set in motion, whether we like it or not. We’ll enter it again, as we did at our birth.
Human suffering (the most great crimes) we will never understand, and never significantly lighten, despite our best efforts. Yet along with the darkness we intuit a great unsolved love…
Meanwhile, though, we continue to live, in the bright light that we fashion for ourselves out of the horror of the darkness. We adore existence! It’s spring here; everything’s passionately alive…
Yet I’ve moved forward in time far enough to be unable, now, to remain oblivious to the dark wood. Even as I love the world and electrify it with my imagination, I know I’m ultimately nothing.
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This post’s title is from another Tranströmer poem, The Clearing.
October 5th, 2010 at 7:07AM
If this sort of thing can win a Nobel Prize, they might as well put the names of every graduate of a creative writing program in a hat and make a random drawing.
October 5th, 2010 at 8:08AM
Given my blogging obsession I start reading it as a poem about being a poet – he inherited Dante’s selva oscura and has to write his way out of it. Or back into it, since he’s walking in the bright wood (up at the top of Mt. Purgatory).
October 5th, 2010 at 9:14AM
Absolutely, Michael. It could very easily be read in the way you suggest – with major Dantean echoes.
October 5th, 2010 at 9:15AM
Didn’t knock my socks off either, tp. I read quite a bit of his other work, and — insert proviso about translation here — wasn’t very impressed.