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Bright Scythe: Selected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer by David Wojahn, Tomas Tranströmer, Patty Crane
pianorunner421's review against another edition
3.0
I am not a lover of poetry but this collection was enjoyable and thought provoking. There were a few I have marked to read again
cryo_guy's review against another edition
5.0
“[Inspiration is] the feeling of being in two places at the same time. Or, of being aware that you are in a place that seems very closed but that actually everything is open”
“But right here time doesn't exist. Just the nightingale's voice, those raw ringing notes that whet the night-sky's bright scythe.”
I really loved this collection. I'd seen it in a bookstore, but decided not to buy it (because I already had 4 or 5 books I was going to buy) and then a friend bought it for me for my b-day (Thanks Jill!). I'll also say that the cover is very cool and I love the title-Bright Scythe-which comes from his poem “The Nightingale in Badelunda.” Such a good title (I must confess I used it in one of my own poems, tehe).
Anyway, with the preliminaries out of the way, let's begin. So the introduction is written by David Wojahn, a Minnesotan teaching in Virginia. I don't really know anything about him, but he must know something of Tranströmer's existence being from the state with a decent amount of Scandinavians and a climate to match. He starts off saying Tranströmer is a poet of liminality. I'm always conflicted about this word. Do people even know what it means? If I describe a room as having a liminal quality or a person as being liminal are they liable to catch the meaning? Well, regardless, it comes from the latin, limen, meaning “threshold” and so our word comes to mean two different sorts of things- first that it is an entryway and an exit into or out of one place and into or out of another. Easy enough. Most openings are like that. But the second definition is what it is when there is no motion: a state of being between things, being on the threshold after we have left one place and we are about to enter another, but we are still...liminal. This second one is the more vivid sense to me, although surely the other is at play whenever we find ourselves in a situation to let the word roll of our tongues. Wojahn does a decent job of explaining this he talks of boundaries and oppositions. And truly, Tranströmer is full of both. His knack for duality is one of the charms of his poems, as if life could be always dark or always light anyway.
The other thing to note here is that this allows his other imagery to take on deeper meanings, if there is a forest, there is a dark and a light forest, if there is one world of light, there is another of darkness to match it, if there is life, there is also death. Wojahn says Tranströmer is a poet of astonishment rather than dread. Another good point I think. While one might imagine a poet continually pairing his light with dark would get dolorous, Tranströmer's angle is more unknowing of the darkness than painfully aware of it. In that way, I think his poems are less morose and more satisfying. And realistically, sad poems are not a bad thing, there is explicit sadness in his poems, but what I'm trying to say is that his poetry isn't overcome by that, somewhat remarkably.
A few other things to note about this collection. It is quite varied in style and chronology which gives you a nice broad survey of his poetry. It is also extremely thoughtfully translated by Patty Crane, who met and spoke with Tranströmer and his wife. We get short poems, nicely organized stanzas, some more messy stanzas, prosey paragraphs, longer poems-stanzas and no, and one epic-”Baltics.” This was my first time finishing a complete collection of his. I've had The Great Enigma by Fulton and Collected Poems edited by Hass featuring many different poets, but had really only taken a serious look at 3 or 4, “The Blue House” being my favorite that I would read over and over again. It was nice to finally commit myself and read a whole fucking book of his haha. I found myself again and again saying oh wow this one is great, or if not a whole poem, underlining a line or two to remember for later.
So what do I have to say about his poetry? Well it's great. I wasn't crazy about his longer poems, I'll admit. “Baltics” wasn't super inspiring, despite having some vivid lines, I wasn't crazy about his others based on real people, Balakirev or Liszt and Wagner, although the latter has a really compelling story to go with it that makes it worth a read. I was crazy about his scenes of landscapes, life in general or life in abstract, meditations on growing old, travel, writing, the inner lives of people, or events. The first poem I have marked out is “The Half-Finished Heaven” which features the line:
“Each person is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.”
And in a later poem, “Romanesque Arches,” he echoes this sentiment with
“Don't feel ashamed that you're human, be proud!
Inside you, vault behind vault opens endlessly.
You'll never be complete, and that's how it should be.
I was blind with tears”
The thing that strikes me about this is his acknowledgment of our inner lives, his willingness to embrace that with metaphors, and the underlying duality of its tragedy and victory in never being complete but always striving to complete. Yeah, I'm into that. Another poem hits at these same ideas of private lives, “Under Pressure”
“The smaller boat sets out from the larger boat.
You're alone on the water.
Society's dark hull drifts further and further away.”
There's a literalness about drifting away from society by going out to sea, but there's also, I think, a metaphorical quality that asks us to consider how we separate ourselves from that dark hull, how it makes us who we are. Of course society is bound to have conditioned us in innumerable ways and will continue to do so, but Tranströmer is aware of the fact that we are still separate from it, enmeshed as we are, fish-in-a-fishbowl as we are. Sentiments like that give me a greater sense of my own selfhood and maybe a greater sense of freedom (which is of course, an illusion, but let's leave cynical talk to the philosophers. We are all poets here). And maybe my parenthetical hits on something else I really love about Tranströmer: that he is deeply romantic in his poetry even when cast under the shadow of Sweden's winter or society's dark hull.
Another thing to compliment about Tranströmer's poetry is his use of everyday metaphors like in “Batlics”:
“And that feeling of 'we're right here' that must be held, the way you carry a brimming pot so nothing gets spilled.”
and
“where a conversation between friends is really a test of what friendship means.”
and from “The Gallery”:
“It happens though rarely
that one of us really sees the other:
a moment when a person shows himself
like in a photograph but more clearly
and in the background
something that's larger than his shadow”
I loved “Brief Pause in the Organ Recital.” Consider:
“until the morning's pale light wings in through my eyelids
and I wake to the adamant PERHAPS that carries me through the faltering world.
And every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as the blueprint of a storm.”
“Fire Scribbles,” “Streets In Shanghai,” “Leaflet,” and “The Light Streams In” are all phenomenal.
The other poem I'd like to pick out in particular as being brilliant, one I read at the beginning when it was mentioned in the introduction and kept going back to reading to others, was “Madrigal” and I'm just gonna go ahead and put it here in full:
“I inherited a dark forest where I seldom walk. But there will come a day when the dead and the living change places. Then the forest will be set into motion. We aren't without hope. The most difficult crimes remain unsolved despite the efforts of many polices. In the same way that somewhere in our lives there's a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark forest but today I walk in another forest, the light one. Every living thing that sings wriggles sways and crawls! It's spring and the air is intense. I have a degree from the university of oblivion and I'm as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.”
There are a lot of things in this one poem that I've already mentioned-the duality, the everyday metaphors, the seasonal opposition, the respect for our inner lives, the romantic hope. Poems like these are why I read poetry in the first place and why I enjoy sharing them with others so much. So I'll just end here by saying thank you Tomas Tranströmer, you've done us all a great service by writing poetry and thank you Patty Crane, for so thoughtfully translating Tranströmer's poetry. Well done.
“But right here time doesn't exist. Just the nightingale's voice, those raw ringing notes that whet the night-sky's bright scythe.”
I really loved this collection. I'd seen it in a bookstore, but decided not to buy it (because I already had 4 or 5 books I was going to buy) and then a friend bought it for me for my b-day (Thanks Jill!). I'll also say that the cover is very cool and I love the title-Bright Scythe-which comes from his poem “The Nightingale in Badelunda.” Such a good title (I must confess I used it in one of my own poems, tehe).
Anyway, with the preliminaries out of the way, let's begin. So the introduction is written by David Wojahn, a Minnesotan teaching in Virginia. I don't really know anything about him, but he must know something of Tranströmer's existence being from the state with a decent amount of Scandinavians and a climate to match. He starts off saying Tranströmer is a poet of liminality. I'm always conflicted about this word. Do people even know what it means? If I describe a room as having a liminal quality or a person as being liminal are they liable to catch the meaning? Well, regardless, it comes from the latin, limen, meaning “threshold” and so our word comes to mean two different sorts of things- first that it is an entryway and an exit into or out of one place and into or out of another. Easy enough. Most openings are like that. But the second definition is what it is when there is no motion: a state of being between things, being on the threshold after we have left one place and we are about to enter another, but we are still...liminal. This second one is the more vivid sense to me, although surely the other is at play whenever we find ourselves in a situation to let the word roll of our tongues. Wojahn does a decent job of explaining this he talks of boundaries and oppositions. And truly, Tranströmer is full of both. His knack for duality is one of the charms of his poems, as if life could be always dark or always light anyway.
The other thing to note here is that this allows his other imagery to take on deeper meanings, if there is a forest, there is a dark and a light forest, if there is one world of light, there is another of darkness to match it, if there is life, there is also death. Wojahn says Tranströmer is a poet of astonishment rather than dread. Another good point I think. While one might imagine a poet continually pairing his light with dark would get dolorous, Tranströmer's angle is more unknowing of the darkness than painfully aware of it. In that way, I think his poems are less morose and more satisfying. And realistically, sad poems are not a bad thing, there is explicit sadness in his poems, but what I'm trying to say is that his poetry isn't overcome by that, somewhat remarkably.
A few other things to note about this collection. It is quite varied in style and chronology which gives you a nice broad survey of his poetry. It is also extremely thoughtfully translated by Patty Crane, who met and spoke with Tranströmer and his wife. We get short poems, nicely organized stanzas, some more messy stanzas, prosey paragraphs, longer poems-stanzas and no, and one epic-”Baltics.” This was my first time finishing a complete collection of his. I've had The Great Enigma by Fulton and Collected Poems edited by Hass featuring many different poets, but had really only taken a serious look at 3 or 4, “The Blue House” being my favorite that I would read over and over again. It was nice to finally commit myself and read a whole fucking book of his haha. I found myself again and again saying oh wow this one is great, or if not a whole poem, underlining a line or two to remember for later.
So what do I have to say about his poetry? Well it's great. I wasn't crazy about his longer poems, I'll admit. “Baltics” wasn't super inspiring, despite having some vivid lines, I wasn't crazy about his others based on real people, Balakirev or Liszt and Wagner, although the latter has a really compelling story to go with it that makes it worth a read. I was crazy about his scenes of landscapes, life in general or life in abstract, meditations on growing old, travel, writing, the inner lives of people, or events. The first poem I have marked out is “The Half-Finished Heaven” which features the line:
“Each person is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.”
And in a later poem, “Romanesque Arches,” he echoes this sentiment with
“Don't feel ashamed that you're human, be proud!
Inside you, vault behind vault opens endlessly.
You'll never be complete, and that's how it should be.
I was blind with tears”
The thing that strikes me about this is his acknowledgment of our inner lives, his willingness to embrace that with metaphors, and the underlying duality of its tragedy and victory in never being complete but always striving to complete. Yeah, I'm into that. Another poem hits at these same ideas of private lives, “Under Pressure”
“The smaller boat sets out from the larger boat.
You're alone on the water.
Society's dark hull drifts further and further away.”
There's a literalness about drifting away from society by going out to sea, but there's also, I think, a metaphorical quality that asks us to consider how we separate ourselves from that dark hull, how it makes us who we are. Of course society is bound to have conditioned us in innumerable ways and will continue to do so, but Tranströmer is aware of the fact that we are still separate from it, enmeshed as we are, fish-in-a-fishbowl as we are. Sentiments like that give me a greater sense of my own selfhood and maybe a greater sense of freedom (which is of course, an illusion, but let's leave cynical talk to the philosophers. We are all poets here). And maybe my parenthetical hits on something else I really love about Tranströmer: that he is deeply romantic in his poetry even when cast under the shadow of Sweden's winter or society's dark hull.
Another thing to compliment about Tranströmer's poetry is his use of everyday metaphors like in “Batlics”:
“And that feeling of 'we're right here' that must be held, the way you carry a brimming pot so nothing gets spilled.”
and
“where a conversation between friends is really a test of what friendship means.”
and from “The Gallery”:
“It happens though rarely
that one of us really sees the other:
a moment when a person shows himself
like in a photograph but more clearly
and in the background
something that's larger than his shadow”
I loved “Brief Pause in the Organ Recital.” Consider:
“until the morning's pale light wings in through my eyelids
and I wake to the adamant PERHAPS that carries me through the faltering world.
And every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as the blueprint of a storm.”
“Fire Scribbles,” “Streets In Shanghai,” “Leaflet,” and “The Light Streams In” are all phenomenal.
The other poem I'd like to pick out in particular as being brilliant, one I read at the beginning when it was mentioned in the introduction and kept going back to reading to others, was “Madrigal” and I'm just gonna go ahead and put it here in full:
“I inherited a dark forest where I seldom walk. But there will come a day when the dead and the living change places. Then the forest will be set into motion. We aren't without hope. The most difficult crimes remain unsolved despite the efforts of many polices. In the same way that somewhere in our lives there's a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark forest but today I walk in another forest, the light one. Every living thing that sings wriggles sways and crawls! It's spring and the air is intense. I have a degree from the university of oblivion and I'm as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.”
There are a lot of things in this one poem that I've already mentioned-the duality, the everyday metaphors, the seasonal opposition, the respect for our inner lives, the romantic hope. Poems like these are why I read poetry in the first place and why I enjoy sharing them with others so much. So I'll just end here by saying thank you Tomas Tranströmer, you've done us all a great service by writing poetry and thank you Patty Crane, for so thoughtfully translating Tranströmer's poetry. Well done.
notoriouszoe's review against another edition
4.0
Loved some of these poems.
Book Riot’s 2017 Read Harder Challenge: "Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love."
Book Riot’s 2017 Read Harder Challenge: "Read a collection of poetry in translation on a theme other than love."
roastmayo's review against another edition
4.0
Mostly approachable, though a lot felt out of my range. Lovely moments
evilcallie's review
4.0
I'm not much of a poetry reader, unless it is Elizabeth Browning or Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Lady of Shallot is still, to this day, my favorite poet). However, as Tomas Tranströmer was the 5th Nobel Laureate on my list, I chose this selection of poems from his career, and I cannot say it was a bad choice. I am familiar enough with the Swedish language that I find I really like this particular translator, and I have found new poems that will stay with me, like April Och Tystnad (April and Silence) and Landskap Med Solar (Landscape with Suns).
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