Words but No Language

Tired of all who come with words,
words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread out on all sides!
I come upon the tracks of a roe deer in the snow.
Language but no words.

~ Tomas Tranströmer

I absolutely love this little poem for its directness and depth of meaning. The crisp writing is characteristic of Tomas Tranströmer (1931 – 2105). who was one of Sweden’s leading poets of his generation. Tranströmer’s poetry builds on Modernism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. They contain powerful imagery that speaks to fragmentation and isolation, which is so apt for our times.

“He has perfected a particular kind of epiphanic lyric, often in quatrains, in which nature is the active, energizing subject, and the self (if the self is present at all) is the object,” notes poet-critic Katie Peterson in the Boston Review. The poet Tom Sleigh observed that “Tranströmer’s poems imagine the spaces that the deep then inhabits, like ground water gushing up into a newly dug well.”

Transtromer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011 for his “condensed, translucent images [that] give us fresh access to reality,” according to the citation of the Nobel Prize Committee. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he received many other honors, including the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry and the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum, among others.

Transtromer’s work has been translated into more than 50 languages. His numerous collections of poetry include Windows and Stones (1972), The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (2006, 2011), translated by Robin Fulton and his last collection Sorgegondolen (Grief Gondola) which was translated into English by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl as The Sorrow Gondola (2010). He died in 2015.