Tranströmer, << TRAWN stroh muhr, >> Tomas (1931-2015), a Swedish poet, received the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature. At the time he received the award, Tranströmer was considered Sweden’s greatest living poet. He was also regarded as one of the most influential Scandinavian poets since the mid-1900’s.
Tranströmer’s poems are direct, accessible meditations on nature and life. His imagery is vivid and often startling in the connections he made between exterior settings and interior thoughts, and between things and events. He wrote in a variety of poetic forms, including blank verse, free verse, haiku, and lyric. Some of his most highly praised works are long prose poems. A prose poem is a work printed as prose but having elements of poetry in it, such as rhythm and poetic imagery. Perhaps the best known of Tranströmer’s prose poems is Baltics (1974).
Tranströmer become friends with the American poet Robert Bly, who translated some of Tranströmer’s poetry into English, including the collections 20 Poems (1970) and The Half-Finished Heaven (2001). Tranströmer’s other major collections in English include Collected Poems (1987), New Collected Poems (1997), The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (2006), and Bright Scythe: Selected Poems (2015). The 1997 collection includes a prose memoir, “Memories Look at Me.” Tranströmer also translated poetry from a number of languages into Swedish.
Tomas Gösta Tranströmer was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 15, 1931. He graduated from the University of Stockholm in 1956 with a psychology degree. Beginning in the 1960’s, Tranströmer spent several years as a psychologist in a prison for boys. He also worked with drug addicts and people with disabilities. Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed. He died on March 26, 2015.
