Bright Scythe
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and Sweden’s most acclaimed poet. “Readers new to Tranströmer should bundle up and dive in” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Known for sharp imagery, startling metaphors and deceptively simple diction, Tomas Tranströmer’s luminous poems offer mysterious glimpses into the deepest facets of humanity, often through the lens of the natural world. These new translations by Patty Crane, presented side by side with the original Swedish, are tautly rendered and elegantly cadenced. They are also deeply informed by Crane’s personal relationship with the poet and his wife during the years she lived in Sweden, where she was afforded greater insight into the nuances of his poetics and the man himself.
A New York TimesBook Review Editors’ Choice
A Los Angeles Times Fabulous Holiday Book
“Immediate, bodily . . . vivid . . . Full of intent and personality. To my ear, Crane has so far made the best English version of Tranströmer.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Patty [Crane]’s book has such transparency and illumination and candor. . . . For me, this is the finest translation since Bly’s.” —Teju Cole
“Sometimes a new piece of shared cultural heritage seems to click into place; the appearance of Bright Scythe—selected poems by Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane—feels like such an occasion . . . A lasting tribute to the poet’s passing.” —World Literature Today
“Quietly revelatory . . . A haunting, mysterious, but ultimately warm and humanistic work, and a welcome introduction both to Tranströmer’s poetry and in the debates over how best to translate it into another tongue.” —Biographile
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Swedish Nobel laureate Transtr mer (1931 2015) was often admired for his melancholy single lines, his wintry Scandinavian seascapes, and his evocative, terse, almost dreamlike poems: "I am cradled in my shadow," one says, "like a fiddle/ in its black case." Transtr mer was also regularly translated by notable U.S. and U.K. poets, so why this new version? It's far-ranging: not all-inclusive, but attentive to all the decades of his career. It holds, for example, the big sequence "Baltics," with its long views of the sea and of Swedish history, and the entirety of The Sorrow Gondola. Crane's verse sounds good in English, and it comes with facing-page Swedish. It also reflects the cooperation of the poet's wife: Crane visited Tomas and Monica Transtr mer periodically from 2007 to 2010, when she had begun to render the poems, often with masterly care, into syllables sharper, more brittle, more urgent, than some prior translators chose. Her Transtr mer wants to be heard: "If I could at least get them to feel," he writes, "that this trembling beneath us/ means we're on a bridge." Readers who know earlier versions, or who know Swedish, will want to contrast these versions with what they know; readers new to Transtr mer should bundle up and dive in.
