The Sorrow Gondola

( 3 )

Overview

The Sorrow Gondola was the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer's first collection of poems after his stroke in 1990. Translated by Michael McGriff, Tranströmer's great work is available in its first single-volume English edition.

Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011.

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Overview

The Sorrow Gondola was the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer's first collection of poems after his stroke in 1990. Translated by Michael McGriff, Tranströmer's great work is available in its first single-volume English edition.

Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
There is no explicit mention in these pages of the devastating recent stroke that severely impaired the ability of Transtrmer, one of Sweden's most distinguished poets, to speak, read and write. Nevertheless, this slender volume, published in Sweden in 1996 and the first new collection to appear there since Transtrmer's illness, centers unmistakably on the controlled anguish that the 66-year-old poet's physical conditionand encroaching mortalityimposes. "I am carried in my shadow/ like a violin/ in its black case," he writes in "April and Silence": "The only thing I want to say/ glitters out of reach/ like the silver/ in a pawnbroker's." What saves the collection from morbidness is the formal beauty and remorselessly compressed clarity of the writing. Indeed, the almost telegraphic brevity of the poems is the volume's only concession to Transtrmer's handicap. With the exception of the four-page title poem, a meditation on Wagner's final months, most of the pieces are only a few stanzas long, yet they retain all the force of the poet's earlier work. Fulton's translations, while able, are marred by occasional inaccuracies. Alternate versions of some of the poems can be seen in Ecco Press's 1995 Transtrmer collection, For the Living and the Dead. (Sept.)

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780802390707
  • Publisher: Dufour Editions, Incorporated
  • Publication date: 12/31/1997
  • Pages: 52
  • Series: Poetry Europe Series

Meet the Author

Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer is one of Sweden's most noted authors, and his several collections have been translated into several languages, including English.

Table of Contents

April and Silence 5
National Insecurity 7
A Page from the Night-Book 9
The Sorrow Gondola 11
Landscape with Suns 19
November in the Former DDR 21
From July 1990 25
The Cuckoo 27
Three Stanzas 29
Like being a Child 31
Two Cities 33
The Light Streams in 35
Night Journey 37
Hail 39
From the Island, 1860 45
Silence 47
Midwinter 49
A Sketch from 1844 51

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