Poetry
Baltics
Östersjöar
Tomas Tranströmer · 1974
Synopsis
Six sections, and a single breath. The poem starts from the Stockholm archipelago, from an island where the maternal grandfather was a pilot: we see him climb aboard foreign ships, we read his logs, we count the boats he guided. Around him the Baltic Sea, the reefs, the lichens on the stone, the wars that have passed over these waters, a grandmother who loses her speech, a church organ on the opposite shore. The fragments of a family and those of a sea answer one another without anything stitching them back together.
Context
The island is Runmarö, where the author spent all his childhood summers, in the pilot's house of his maternal grandfather; the poem starts from the papers the latter had left. Its author said that its central word was the border: between present and past, between east and west, between the living and the dead, between silence and what can be said. He recorded a twenty-four-minute reading of it in 1990, a few months before the stroke that took away his speech.
Who it is for
A long poem in six parts, short to read and slow to understand. It helps to know that a pilot is the person who boards a foreign ship to guide it between the reefs.
Prizes and reception
The Swedish Academy named it in its citation for the 2011 Nobel Prize.