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The Deleted World

Poems

Tomas Tranströmer; Versions by Robin Robertson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374533539
ISBN13: 9780374533533

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64 Pages

$19.00

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Tomas Tranströmer can be clearly recognized not just as Sweden's most important poet, but as a writer of international stature whose work speaks to us now with undiminished clarity and resonance. Long celebrated as a master of the arresting, suggestive image, Tranströmer is a poet of the liminal: drawn again and again to thresholds of light and of water, the boundaries between man and nature, wakefulness and dream. A deeply spiritual but secular writer, his skepticism about humanity is continually challenged by the implacable renewing power of the natural world. His poems are epiphanies rooted in experience: spare, luminous meditations that his extraordinary images split open—exposing something sudden, mysterious, and unforgettable.

Reviews

Praise for The Deleted World

"Even before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer had devotees in America: His haunting coastal scenes, sad quips, quick cuts and sudden silences came to these shores in the 1960s, when Robert Bly and others began to translate his unsettling, compact poems. At least five other English-language poets have tried to render Tranströmer since. The Deleted World, translated by the Scottish poet and publisher Robin Robertson, is the latest, and it sounds great . . . The Deleted World stands out for its attention to Tranströmer's northerly forest and sea, and for the balance and nuance in its lines: Robertson's ‘relatively free versions' feel and sound like English-language poems . . . The Deleted World is a fine introduction to a poet whose work will endure, and who sounds good—as so many poets cannot—in a language not his own."—Stephen Burt, NPR

"[Robertson's] renderings are more fluid when it comes to English syntax than some translations I've read that may be more accurate but are somewhat stilted . . . Robertson has done justice to the greatest qualities of Tranströmer's poems: their evocative, striking imagery and uncanny metaphorical resonance . . . Tomas Tranströmer is a great poet, and it's about time he received what is arguably literature's greatest honour. In one poem, Tranströmer writes: ‘I stand under the starry sky / and feel the world thrill / through me / like the pulse / of ants in an anthill.' The Deleted World allows a reader to share in that thrill: it's a collection that sparks with an exquisite, awakened awareness of the world."—Barbara Carey, The Toronto Star

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Tomas Tranströmer; Versions by Robin Robertson

Tomas Tranströmer (1933-2015) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. His books of poetry, which have been translated into sixty languages, include The Deleted World and The Half-Finished Heaven, and he received numerous international honors during his lifetime. Tranströmer, a trained Swedish psychologist, worked for years in state institutions with juveniles and the disabled, and his work was often praised for the inventive ways in which it examined the mind. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy stated that "through his condensed, translucent images, he gave us fresh access to reality."