The Deleted World- Poems Read online

  MIDWINTER

  A blue light

  streams out of my clothes.

  Midwinter.

  Ringing tambourines of ice.

  I close my eyes.

  There is a silent world,

  there is a crack

  where the dead

  are smuggled over the border.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the London Review of Books, The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Review, and The Times Literary Supplement, where versions in this book first appeared, some in earlier incarnations.

  “To Friends Behind a Border” appeared on the Blinking Eye website, and was read on BBC Radio 4.

  The original Swedish poems are published by Albert Bonniers Förlag, and are reproduced here by permission.

  These English versions would not exist without Karin Altenberg—though any infelicities of translation are mine alone. I would also like to give my thanks to Ingemar Fasth of Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Helen Sigeland of the Swedish Institute, and Stephen Stuart-Smith of Enitharmon Press for their enthusiasm and assistance in bringing this project into being; to Robert Bly for his generosity; and to Krister Henriksson for reading Tomas’s original poems at memorable events with the author and translator onstage in Stockholm and London.

  My particular gratitude goes to Monica and Tomas Tranströmer for their kindness and hospitality in Södermalm and Runmarö and for accepting these imitations in the spirit in which they were made.

  ALSO BY TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

  Twenty Poems

  Windows and Stones

  Baltics

  Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems, 1954–1986

  The Half-Finished Heaven

  The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

  The Sorrow Gondola

  Tomas Tranströmer

  THE DELETED WORLD

  Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931. He has written eleven books of poetry and has received numerous international honors, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany’s Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and, in 2007, the Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award. In October 2011 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He lives with his wife in Stockholm.

  Robin Robertson is from the northeast coast of Scotland. His fourth collection of poetry, The Wrecking Light, was published in 2010 and was short-listed for the Costa Book Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Forward Prize. He compiled and edited Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame and has translated Medea and the Bacchae by Euripides. He has received a number of accolades, including the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has won all three categories of the Forward Prize.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2006 by Tomas Tranströmer

  Translation copyright © 2006 by Robin Robertson

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by Robin Robertson

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in 2006 by Enitharmon Press, Great Britain

  Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First American edition, 2011

  Robin Robertson’s introduction originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The New York Review of Books.

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  ISBN: 978-0-374-53353-3

  www.fsgbooks.com

  eISBN 9781466886124

  First eBook edition: October 2014