Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Tomas Tranströmer

Richard Lea and Alison Flood

 The Swedish Academy has responded to accusations of insularity over recent years by awarding the 2011 Nobel prize for literature to one of their own: the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.

Tranströmer becomes the eighth European to win the world's premier literary award in the last 10 years, following the German novelist Herta Muller in 2009, the French writer JMG le Clezio in 2008 and the British novelist Doris Lessing in 2007.

Sweden's most famous poet becomes the 104th literature laureate, joining former winners including Mario Vargas Llosa and Orhan Pamuk, and is the first poet to take the laurels since Wislawa Szymborska in 1996. Praised by the judges for "his condensed translucent images" which give us "fresh access to reality", Tranströmer's surreal explorations of the inner world and its relation to the jagged landscape of his native country have been translated into over 50 languages.

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, admitted the choice of a Swede could "perhaps" be seen as controversial internationally, but added that "one should also keep in mind that is soon 40 years since this happened": the last Swede to win the literature Nobel was in 1974, when the Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson took the prize jointly. "It's not that we spread them around on Swedes each and every year," said Englund. "We have been quite thoughtful about this - we have not been rash in choosing a Swede."

And Tranströmer is also well known internationally, translated into over 50 languages and "one of the world's now living poet that has been translated the most," said Englund, recommending two collections which have been translated into English, The Half-Finished Heaven and New Collected Poems. "Both of them are pure gold. They are very good, and I understand that he translates very well," said Englund.

The Scottish poet Robin Fulton, who translated New Collected Poems and has worked on Tranströmer's writing for years, said that "in some sense the win was expected - it's looking back on a life's work".

"He's terribly famous already - just about as famous as a poet could be," he said. "Some writers become famous after they get the Nobel - he was famous before."

The poet Robin Robertson, who wrote versions of the Swedish writer's poems for the collection The Deleted World, said that "readers of Tomas Tranströmer had almost given up any hope that this extraordinary poet might ever be recognised by his own country and receive the Nobel Prize". Robertson called the decision "a happy end to a long wait: joy with a wash of relief. Tranströmer is not only Scandinavia's most important poet, he is a writer of world stature – and that has finally been publicly acknowledged."

Fulton agreed with the Nobel committee's praise of Tranströmer's "condensed, translucent images". "These do jump through over linguistic boundaries," he said, adding that some poets "use their own language so densely they won't translate at all. Tranströmer is not one of these. In many ways the language he uses is relatively unadventurous and simple [but] he gives people unusual images [which are] sometimes very surprising, and give the reader a shock. That should be what poets do."

"I lean like a ladder and with my face / reach into the second floor of the cherry tree. / I'm inside the bell of colours, it chimes with sunlight. / I polish off the swarthy red berries faster than four magpies," Tranströmer writes in "Winter's Gaze". "A sudden chill, from a great distance, meets me. / The moment blackens / and remains like an axe-cut in a tree-trunk."

Although Englund said that Tranströmer 's production has been "sparse" - "you could fit it into a not too large pocket book, all of it" - the permanent secretary praised the poet's "exquisite" language. "He is writing about the big questions -about death, history, memory, nature," he said. "Human beings are sort of the prism where all these great entities meet and it makes us important. You can never feel small after reading the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer."

Born in Stockholm in 1931, Tranströmer studied at the University of Stockholm and worked as a psychologist at an institution for young offenders. His first collection of poetry, 17 Dikter (17 Poems), was published in 1954, while he was still at college. Collections including Hemligheter på vägen (1958) and Klangar och spår (1966) reflected on his travels in the Balkans, Spain and Africa, while the poems in Östersjöar (1974) examine the troubled history of the Baltic region through the conflict between sea and land.

He suffered a stroke in 1990 which affected his ability to talk, but has continued to write, with his collection Sorgegondolen going on to sell 30,000 copies on its publication in 1996. At a recent appearance in London, his words were read by others, while the poet, who is a keen amateur musician, contributed by playing pieces specially composed for him to play on the piano with only his left hand. "He is very gifted," said Fulton. "He has hardly any words, though. His wife communicates for him."

Tranströmer has described his poems as "meeting places," where dark and light, interior and exterior collide to give a sudden connection with the world, history or ourselves. According to the poet "The language marches in step with the executioners. Therefore we must get a new language."

"He is very subtle, very musical and multi-layered," said Neil Astley at Bloodaxe Books, which published New Collected Poems this year. Tranströmer is a "very immediate" poet, added the publisher. "He is metaphysical and visionary but very particular, and very personal," he said. "He worked as a psychologist for most of his life, and all that psychological insight is there in the poems. He writes about the border between sleeping and waking, between the conscious and the unconscious."
Guardian