The Great Enigma by Tomas Tranströmer

  In 2011, Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was as good a reason as any to put his poetry on my radar. I typically prefer reading full books of poems as intended, but I found a good deal on The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems and figured I might as well get a sampling from Tranströmer’s decades of writing.

I’d consider it high praise to say that a writer makes me think more poetically. As I was reading The Great Enigma, I found myself plucking little fragments of language from their drift amid the ether. While I’m somewhat limited in my ability to comment on the cohesiveness of the poems, not knowing what is or isn’t included from various individual volumes, there were a fair share of poems that caught my interest for their imagistic quality.

In general, I would say that Tranströmer’s poems present vivid scenes and build towards a powerful closing final line that revises the rest of the piece. An exemplary poem in that regard is “Weather Picture,” which reads as follows:

The October sea glistens coldly
with its dorsal fin of mirages.

Nothing is left that remembers
the white dizziness of yacht races.

An amber glow over the village.
And all sounds in slow flight.

A dog’s barking is a hieroglyph
painted in the air above the garden

where the yellow fruits outwits
the tree and drops of its own accord. (29)

The opening lines of the poem offer a strangely beautiful image, haunting in its way, of the sea glistening “with its dorsal fin of mirages.” Despite John Ashbery’s “Alcove” deriding poems about the “mugwump” of changing, I can’t help but feel that the closing down of a season is beautifully depicted here, the fading of yacht races and the “slow flight” of sounds. The dog’s bark is so old it is a “hieroglyph / painted in the air above the garden.” What a great line. The strange conclusion of the poem implies an agency of defiance, fruit jumping ahead of its schedule. Stunning.

Tranströmer’s poems vary in length. There are several haiku sequences throughout the collection, which have a simple elegance. One of my favourites deploys a shadow-stitching metaphor, which I find oddly resonant elsewhere and here: “Stag in blazing sun. / The flies sew, sew, fasten that / shadow to the ground” (“Haiku” 223). On the other side, there are longer poems like “In the Open” that really develop its ideas and flesh them out. “In the Open” begins with a “Late autumn labyrinth” (93), an evocative image—a poet of the seasons. He elaborates as follows: “At the entrance to the wood a discarded empty bottle. / Go in. At this season the woods are silent deserted halls. / Only a few kinds of noise: as if someone were cautiously removing twigs // with tweezers / or a hinge creaking faintly inside a thick tree trunk” (93). The descriptiveness of the writing really helps to paint the scene where “The frost has breathed on the mushrooms and they have shriveled” (93). At that point, we take a detour and Tranströmer fleshes out the mushrooms as: “like objects and garments found after a disappearance” (93). The poem takes a turn from there and has a faintly haunting quality: “Now twilight comes. It’s a matter of getting out / and seeing your landmarks again: the rusty implement in the field / and the house on the other side of the lake, a russet square strong as a / bouillon cube” (93). The poem gets subdivided further and the second part gets into a more lyric, personal mode: “A letter from America set me off, drove me out / one light night in June on the empty streets in the suburb / among newborn blocks without memory, cool as blueprints” (93). The narrative continues where the speaker has a letter in his pocket with “desperate furious striding, it is a kind of pleading” (93). The stanza ends with a strange couplet, setting up an opposition: “With you, evil and good really have faces. / With us, it’s mostly a struggle between roots, ciphers, and shades of light” (93). I love that blend of “roots, ciphers, and shades of light” in particular, as they all compete for a defined existence. Tranströmer’s poem continues on with some generalities that are, as the title of the collection might imply, enigmatic: “Those who run death’s errands don’t avoid the daylight. / They rule from glass stories. They swarm in the sun’s blaze. / They lean across the counter and turn their head” (93). The poet stops “before one of the new facades” (93). The juxtaposition of “glass stories” (think: skyscraper) with the woodland imagery from the first part extends into “Many windows all merging together into one single window” (93) and “The light of the night sky is caught there with the gliding of the treetops. / It is a mirroring sea without waves, erect in the summer night” (93). The section, like many of the poems, ends with a powerful couplet that grants the scene something deeper: “Violence seems unreal / for a little” (93).

As you may have noticed, Tranströmer’s work is replete with nature-oriented imagery and stands out as a real highlight. In “The Journey’s Formulae,” Tranströmer describes “Four oxen [that] come, under the sky. / Nothing proud about them. And the dust thick / As wool. The insects’ pens scrape” (41). You can imagine the scrabble of insects, or what I’ve described in a poem as “summer’s buzzsaw.” The poem continues with “A swirl of horses, lean as in / grey allegories of the plague. / Nothing gentle about them. And the sun raves”(41). Later in the poem, a grim mood dominates: “An old house has shot itself in the forehead” (42). What a darkly connoted phrase. Meanwhile “Two boys kick a ball in the twilight. / A swarm of rapid echoes. — Suddenly, starlight” (42). It presents itself as a kind of twisted pastoral that offers enough intrigue to sustain the poem. The poem also makes use of recurring motifs: insects and their sounds, darkness, pathways. He continues, “On the road in the long darkness” (42). The speaker is inserted more thoroughly into the narrative vision of the poem: “My wristwatch / gleams obstinately with time’s imprisoned insect” (42). The ticking. The scratching. Love it. The poem continues, “The quiet in the crowded compartment is dense. / In the darkness the meadows stream past. // But the writer is halfway into his image, there / he travels, at the same time eagle and mole” (42). For me, a few things come to mind. I think about the scene in The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford when the fields are rendered impressionistic. I also think about the Künstlerroman genre exemplified in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Derek Walcott’s poem “Prelude” as the writer finds himself. It’s an apt description where the writer sees all as if from above (the “eagle”) and burrows deep down for truth (the “mole”). The longer I savour the poems, the better they feel.

Other poems pick up on the thread of becoming a writer. In “Lament,” for example, Tranströmer writes the following about the challenges of being a writer:

He laid aside his pen.
It rests still on the table.
It rests still in the empty room.
He laid aside his pen.

Too much that can neither be written nor kept silent!
He is paralyzed by something happening far away
although the wonderful traveling bag throbs like a heart. (64)

The poem seeks the secret messages in the world that become the fuel for poetry:

Outside it is early summer.
Whistlings from the greenery—men or birds?
And cherry trees in bloom embrace the trucks that have come home. (64)

The best part of the poem, in my view, are again the closing lines: “Weeks go by. / Night comes slowly. / The moths settle on the windowpane: / small pale telegrams from the world” (64). I adore the idea of moths being “small pale telegrams” sending messages. Beautiful.

In “Baltics,” there’s a similar kind of grappling with the writing process. The poem is lengthy and diaristic, dated with various kinds of milestone moments. In one section, the subject “wrote music to texts he no longer understood— / in the same way / we express something through our lives / in the humming chorus full of mistaken words” (136). The poem revolves around death and “the death-lectures went on for several terms” and the speaker “attended / together with people [he] didn’t know,” meeting and departing in their own ways, erasing into “profiles” (136). Despite the nature-heavy focus in the poems, there’s a real human core to them. The speaker “looked at the sky and at the earth and straight ahead / and since then [he’s] been writing a long letter to the dead / on a typewriter with no ribbon just a horizon line / so the words knock in vain and nothing sticks” (136). First of all, I really like the idea of a typewriter not having a ribbon “just a horizon line.” The poem continues with a hesitation: “I pause with my hand on the door handle, take the pulse of the house” (136). That personification resonates beautifully. From there, the poem gets a little more obscure and more medieval and there’s discussion of escargot and a snail “almost motionless in the grass, the antennae are sucked in / and rolled out, disturbances and hesitation” (136)—and in that, the speaker identifies himself.

Let’s go back to houses. In “A Winter’s Night,” Tranströmer describes a house in a storm: “The storm puts its mouth to the house / and blows to produce a note” (68). The transformation of a storm into a song is pretty compelling, but the speaker “sleep[s] uneasily, turn[s], with shut eyes / read[ing] the storm’s text” (68). The poem goes on with a child’s “eyes [...] large in the dark” and “for the child the storm howls” (68). There’s a kind of symbiosis between the storm, an interplay. Both the child and storm are “fond of lamps that swing. / Both are halfway toward speech” (68). Meanwhile, “the house fleets its own constellation of nails / holding the walls together” (68). Everything is teetering on collapse. Again, the poem takes a dark turn, calmness never quite still: “The night is calm over our floor / (where all expired footsteps / rest like sunk leaves in a pond) / but outside the night is wild” (68). The idea of footsteps resting like sunk leaves gives a chilling kind of tone. Meanwhile, “over the world goes a graver storm. / It sets its mouth to our soul / and blows to produce a note. We dread / the storm will blow us empty” (68). We’re at an intersection of music and terror here.

I’ll offer commentary on one last poem, “After Someone’s Death.” It’s a cosmic opening: “Once there was a shock / that left behind a long pale glimmering comet’s tail” (85). In that comet’s tail, “It contains us. It blurs TV images. / It deposits itself as cold drops on the aerials” (85). Tranströmer has a knack for leaves and words: “You can still shuffle along on skis in the winter sun / among groves where last year’s leaves still hang” (85) but moreover “They are like pages torn from old telephone directories— / the names are eaten up by the cold” (85). Wow. Then we delve into the classic trope of appearances not measuring up to reality: “It is still beautiful to feel your heart throbbing. / But often the shadow feels more real than the body. / The samurai looks insignificant / beside his armor of black dragon scales” (85). This is one instance where I actually favour the penultimate couplet to the concluding ones. I like the juxtaposition of how beautiful it is to feel your heart throbbing and how the shadow feels more real than the body. It’s a gorgeous turn.

The Great Enigma holds one final surprise, though. Following all of the poems, there are some excerpts from Tranströmer’s prose memoir, Memories Look at Me. The prose is just as lush and poetic as the poems. It reads elegantly and offers itself as an enticing preview of the memoir. I know very little about the poet’s life. The excerpts provided are about his youth and his early interest in Africa and lepidoptery (I wonder if he was friends with Nabokov, or if they would’ve been friends). I’ll have to read more sometime.

Happy reading!