Biographie de l'auteur :
Tomas Tranströmer won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in 1931 in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmarö in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences. He is Scandinavia's best-known and most influential contemporary poet. His books sell thousands of copies in Sweden, and his work has been translated into 50 languages, with substantial or complete editions of his work published in 19 languages. Tranströmer started writing poetry while at the oppressive Södra Latin Grammar School (its atmosphere caught by Ingmar Bergman in Alf Sjöberg s Frenzy, which was filmed there, the young Tomas amongst the pupils). But he was devouring books on all subjects, especially geography, with daily visits to the local library, where he worked his way through most of the non-fiction shelves. However, this bookish adolescence was shadowed by the war, by his parents' divorce and the absence of his father, and at 15 he experienced a winter of psychological crisis. He published his first collection, 17 Poems, in 1954, at the age of 23. After studying psychology at the University of Stockholm, he worked at its Psychotechnological Institute, and in 1960 became a psychologist at Roxtuna, a young offenders institution. From the mid-1960s he divided his time between his writing and his work as a psychologist, and in 1965 moved with his family to Västerås, where he spent the rest of his working life. In 1990, a year after the publication of his tenth book of poems, Tranströmer suffered a stroke, which deprived him of most of his speech and partly inhibited movement on his right-hand side. Swedish composers have since written several left-hand piano pieces especially for him to play. Since his stroke, he has published a short book of 'autobiographical chapters', Memories Look at Me (1993) and a new collection, The Sad Gondola (1996), both included in Robin Fulton s translation of his Bloodaxe New Collected Poems (1997). In 2004 he published The Great Enigma, a slim volume containing five short poems and a group of 45 even smaller haiku-type poems. These were added to Robin Fulton's authoritative edition New Collected Poems to form Tranströmer s first collected edition to appear in the States, published by New Directions in 2006 under the title The Great Enigma: New and Collected Poems, which is the same book as the expanded 2010 UK reprint of New Collected Poems. Tranströmer has also translated other poets into Swedish, including Robert Bly and Hungary s János Pilinszky. In 1990 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His other awards include the Bonner Award for Poetry, Germany s Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy s Nordic Prize, and the August Prize. In 1997 the city of Västerås established a special Tranströmer Prize.
Présentation de l'éditeur :
Winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Tomas Tranströmer is Sweden's most important poet. This book includes all the poems he has written during the past fifty years, including those from the Bloodaxe COLLECTED POEMS of 1987, as well as two later collections, FOR LIVING AND DEAD and THE SAD GONDOLA, and his prose memoir MEMORIES LOOK AT ME. The 2010 reprint has been expanded to include his most recent collection, THE GREAT ENIGMA (2004), making this the definitive English edition of Tranströmer's work, a complete translation of all his Swedish collections. In his early work Tranströmer drew on the aesthetic traditions of Swedish nature poetry. His poetry then became more personal, open and relaxed. In Sweden he has been called a 'buzzard poet' because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brings every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states. Tranströmer was born in 1931 in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmarö in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences. Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control. Robin Fulton has worked with Tomas Tranströmer on each of his collections as they have been published over many years, which has involved detailed exchanges between translator and poet on the meaning and music of numerous poems. There have been several translations as well as some books of so-called "versions" of Tranströmer's poetry published in English, but Fulton's is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.
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