For the Left Hand Alone

In “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Ezra Pound cautions poets against veering into abstraction and abandoning the primacy of the image, insisting that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” An image gifts an “emotional complex in an instant of time,” which, Pound argues, engenders “a sense of sudden liberation.” In other words, an image is self-revealing and thus self-transcending. It needs only itself to rise above its own weight.

I often think of this idea in relation to the late Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, whose work rests so comfortably—and yet so impossibly—in this instant. At once avant-garde and traditional, his poetry straddles the worldly occasional and the metaphysical, the ordinary and the numinous, standing, as it does, in the space between waiting and revelation. 

One sees this in-betweeness immediately in the titles of his collections: Secrets on the Way (1958), The Half-Finished Heaven (1962), Seeing in the Dark (1970), The Truth Barrier (1978), and The Great Enigma (2004). These comprise half of Tranströmer’s poetic output—14 slim books in total, including a modular memoir, Memories Watch Me (1993). It’s a modest body of work, perhaps appropriate for a poet from a nation lauded for modesty. Nonetheless, his work has been translated into more than 50 languages. Both Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky admired him. And he is eminently decorated, having won a slew of prestigious awards, including the Nobel Prize in 2011.

Tranströmer’s unhurried production is reflected in the brevity and infrequency of these slender collections—most contain no more than 20 poems. The new bilingual edition of his collected works, The Blue House (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), translated by Patty Crane, boasts a total of 168 poems. There is something admirable about such restraint. More still, Tranströmer seems to have had a saintly patience during composition. According to his wife, Monica, a single poem could sometimes take up to a year between conception and completion, going through various arrangements. Yet none ever “smell of the lamp” (overworked)—in Samuel Johnson’s derisive phrase. When a poem is done, it comes to readers seemingly unlabored, as if it were not made but given. The point at which the poem overtakes the poet is described in “Morning Birds”:

Fantastic to feel how my poem grows
while I myself shrink.
It’s growing, it’s taking my place.
It shoves me aside.
It throws me out of the nest.
The poem is ready.

Tranströmer has been praised for the apparent effortlessness of his craft. The poet and critic David Orr writes, “The typical Tranströmer poem is an exercise in sophisticated simplicity, in which relatively spare language acquires remarkable depth, and every word seems measured to the millimeter.” I think of his poetry as being like a Kagan couch, its upholstery fixed with a single staple, or a Newtonian bridge that needs no nails and is held together by the elegance of its stress equations. It is free of any superfluous furniture—“Truth doesn’t need any furniture,” Tranströmer writes in “Preludes.”

But this risks making Tranströmer sound like a Swedish minimalist. Far from it: the poems gathered in this collection—spanning 50 years—are remarkably varied, incorporating prose poems, long lines, and haiku. They move easily from the idyll to the suburb, the cloudscape to the metro station, the nave to the waiting room, yet all bear what his friend Robert Bly—whose early translations were partly responsible for introducing Tranströmer's work to English readers in the 1970s—described as his “strange genius for the image” and a “mystery and surprise [that] never fade, even on many readings.”

Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931. As a child, he was interested in natural history. He collected specimens, and the fossils and invertebrates displayed at the city’s national museum, with its “bone-scented arches,” fascinated him. Shells and insects, especially butterflies, recur in his work. When he was nine, he heard Churchill’s voice on the radio for the first time. These broadcasts opened with the “V signal.” V in Morse code—three dots and a dash—mimics Beethoven’s Fifth: da-da-da-DAHH.

Music features heavily in Tranströmer’s poems—“distant music,” “incomplete music,” “Music’s voiceless half …”—as do the influences of Schubert and Liszt, from whom Tranströmer took the title for The Sorrow Gondola (1996). Tranströmer began playing piano when he was 15 during a long winter of sleepless anxiety he later described as “an empire of illness.” In Memories Watch Me, he writes, “At that time, I was distrustful of all religion and never prayed. Had the crisis come a few years later, I could have experienced it as a kind of revelation. ...” 

Though Sweden was nominally unallied during the war, Tranströmer remembers a kind of insidious neutrality toward the Nazis—a “half-hearted, wait-and-watch, opportunistic attitude.” His adolescence was marked by the tyranny of gray disciplinarians. The adults around him, especially his teachers, were prone to fits of “hysterical indignation” and bristling rage. The boys’ school he attended, which drilled children in Latin and hymn-singing, was so miserable it was the inspiration and shooting location for the 1944 drama Torment, written by Ingmar Bergman, in which Tranströmer appeared as an extra. 

In high school, Tranströmer discovered Horace, whom he regarded as “a contemporary,” and began to write poetry. Recalling a line from the Odes—“Remember when life's path is steep to keep your mind even …”—Tranströmer later wrote “This interplay between fragile triviality and sublime resilience. … That was the condition of poetry.” Tranströmer's teacher was scandalized by the young poet’s unpunctuated lines and lack of capitals. He composed poems in Horatian fashion, in Sapphic and Alcaic meters—Swedish being more trochaic than English—an inclination that reappeared in midlife. In 1982, Tranströmer wrote jokingly to Bly, “I was shocked to find—a couple of weeks ago—that I was writing a poem in Sapphic meter, something I did in the early 1950s. Is it Reagan?? Compare with your own development. We will both end up as neo-classicists!!” 

Tranströmer’s first collection, 17 Poems (1954), was published while he was studying psychology at Stockholm University. In a later interview, he admitted that these poems were “written by a very young person who hasn’t experienced much of life … but his own world.” Their pastoral absorptions are often retreats of interiority—“flee deep into your inner greenness” ends “Five Stanzas to Thoreau.” In the early 1960s, Tranströmer worked as a psychologist and dealt mostly with children, performing, among other things, daily counseling sessions at boys’ prisons. What impact this had on his poetry is hard to say—it never really comes up. Readers don’t expect such emotionally exhausting labor from poets; they expect rather a degree of banality. One thinks of Philip Larkin in his library in Hull or T.S. Eliot in the cellars of Lloyd’s bank.

When the family moved to Västerås in 1965, Tranströmer got a job with a state organization working with troubled youth. He also helped disabled people find employment and counseled drug addicts struggling with rehabilitation. Tranströmer is the exemplary poet of the welfare state: helping juvenile delinquents reenter society in the morning and writing haikus in the afternoon. When Swedish communists criticized him for being insufficiently engagé—a typical grievance—he wrote to Bly, “I have in fact been doing social work full-time for 7 years—you’re perhaps thinking that would grant me a kind of exemption—ah, then you aren’t familiar with the current Swedish cultural climate.”

Politics occasionally enters the poems, characteristically unrhetorical and conveyed through the moral force of imagery. From the ’89 revolution in the German Democratic Republic comes the lovely line “November offers caramels of granite,” evoking scenes of shattered statues. Or this, from “To Friends Behind a Border”:

My letter is now with the censor. He lights his lamp.
In the glare, my words fly up like monkeys in a cage,
shaking the bars, quieting down, baring their teeth!
 
Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years
when the microphones in the hotel walls are all forgotten
and can finally sleep, becoming orthoceratites. 

The image of a spy’s mic fossilizing, which recalls Ozymandias—the tools of the tyrant extinguished by time—shows Tranströmer’s descriptive affinities. His poems feature lots of clocks, labyrinths, and winged things—the word wings appears 23 times in The Blue House. Elsewhere, a splayed newspaper is “that big dirty butterfly,” and a wristwatch “shines with time’s captive insects.” The palette of the poems is cool, blue (the word appears 30 times) and green (33 times)—the colors of Swedish coastal vistas, sapphire seas, and pine islands, where Tranströmer sojourned to write. Apparently, the high concentration of ice crystals in the atmosphere in winter months gives everything a bluish hue. The Blue House, in this case, refers to the family’s clapboard cottage on the island of Runmarö in the Stockholm archipelago. These are the latitudes of midnight sun and afternoon twilight, of auroras and glacial lakes, and one can sense these elements in the poems. The seasons of the soul are reflected in titles such as “Weather Portrait” and “Midday Thaw” or here, in “Summer Grassland”:

Reality has consumed so much of you,
but here is summer at last:
 
a large airport—the flight controller bringing down
load after load of frozen
people from space.

Or in “December Evening, ’72”:

Here I come, the invisible man, perhaps enlisted
by a great Memory to live right now. And I’m driving past
 
the boarded-up white church—a wooden saint stands inside
smiling, helpless, as if they had taken away his eyeglasses.
 
He’s alone. Everything else is now, now, now.

There is plenty of the pastoral in the poetry but no cult of nature. Nature is simply there, existing in the same field of experience as the motorway, the housing block, or the dockyard. Technology is integrated into the environment. It never sticks out: a jet plane is simply part of the sky, a contrail is another kind of cloud. Yet all these entities are equally unfamiliar. Within them lie the mystery and grace of creation, teased at via Tranströmer’s strange similes: the Manhattan skyline at night is like “a spiral galaxy seen from the side,” a face is “like a shard of marble,” a dog’s bark is like “a hieroglyph / brushed in the air over the garden,” a woman’s earrings “dangle like Damocles’s sword.”

In his introduction to The Blue House, Yusef Komunyakaa notes Tranströmer’s “power to fuse what would otherwise be confused.” Bly, too, noted the “wild associations” that abound in Tranströmer’s work, which move untroubled between aesthetic orders. It is how lines such as “But the jet curtsying in its thundering skirts / intensified the strength of silence on Earth” can stand entirely free of contrivance.

Tranströmer’s poetry is often described as surreal. But to say this is at once too much and not enough—surely because it is not easy to describe—for it implies a deliberate distortion or schooled subversion. What the poems reveal are the uncanny operations of the world. From “Baltics”:

The strategic planetarium rotates. The lenses stare into the darkness.
The night sky is full of numbers, and they’re fed into
a twinkling cabinet,
a piece of furniture
housing the energy of a locust swarm stripping acres of Somalia’s land bare in half
         an hour.

Everything is powered; there is always a great engine running somewhere. In one poem, readers are told “You can hear the grass growing: … a faint drumming from below, the / faint rumbling of a million small gas flames.” And then, as if to confirm the soundness of this description, “that’s how it is to hear the grass / grow.”

Tranströmer is also frequently referred to as a religious poet. But this too seems to insist on something. To describe someone as “religious” is itself the product of an unreligious age—would John Donne have been considered religious by the standards of his time? If Tranströmer’s poetry is religious, it is so to the extent of whatever being religious in a society such as Sweden, famously secular and technologically modern, in the second half of the 20th century means. The disenchanted age, as sociologist Max Weber put it, in which “there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play” is marked by a contented incuriosity: few people really know what carries the tramcar down the street or keeps the airplane aloft—and most people don’t care to know. They could learn if they wished—all things are calculable—but many are perfectly at ease counting on what they don’t understand. In “Schubertiana,” readers see that the “trust” a modern, technologically furnished world requires approaches an act of faith:

So much trust we must have just to live our daily lives without sinking through the earth!
Trust in the masses of snow clinging to the mountain slopes over the village.
Trust in the promises to keep silent and the smile of accord, trust that the fateful
telegram doesn’t concern us, and that the sudden axe-blow from within
never comes.
Trust in the axles that carry us down the highway in the midst of the three-
hundred-times-magnified swarm of steel bees.

But faith in what, we are unable to say:

But none of this is actually worthy of our belief.
The string quintet says we can trust in something else.
In what? In something else, and it follows us for a while on our way there.
As when the light goes out in the stairwell and your hand follows—with trust—the
blind railing that finds its way in the darkness.

The hand on the banister finding its way through the darkness is not a bad summation of Tranströmer’s poetic instincts. The poetic image is in its own way an act of faith—a trust in the likeness of unalike things or the likeness of all things despite their taxonomy. The world, as seen through the eye of the poet, is one in which everything (re: Horace) is both trivial and sublime, not in its romantic usage but in its chemical sense: the transformation of what is solid into vapor and back again.

In 1990, Tranströmer suffered a stroke at the age of 59, which greatly affected his speech and partially paralyzed the right side of his body. His ability to call upon words was diminished, and in his last 20 years he produced only two collections, The Sorrow Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004). The latter is composed almost entirely of haikus, which capture the silence of the later days:

The November sun…
my giant swimming shadow
becomes a mirage.
 
All of these milestones
that went for a hike. Listen:
the wood pigeon’s call.
 
Death leans over me,
like facing a chess problem.
Has the solution.

Unable to write with the same speed, he took to piano more. He often entertained his guests, whom he couldn’t address, by playing for them. The paralysis in the right side of his body meant that he was able to play only with his left hand. It is in some ways a fitting image. His poems are like solos for the left hand alone. They have the same meditative space, the same studied turns and leisurely andante, the same rare melody and illusion of simplicity. Poetry, after all, requires only one hand.