The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature: It’s Tomas Tranströmer

By Susan Harris

The Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Sweden's great Tomas Tranströmer. The Swedish Academy said it recognized the eighty-year-old poet "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality." From his "Prelude," translated for us by Rika Lesser:

In the first hours of day consciousness can embrace the world
just as the hand grasps a sun-warm stone.

Tranströmer's poetry is available in a number of collections, rendered by translators including Malena Morling, Robin Fulton, and Robert Bly and published by Green Integer, Ecco, New Directions, and Graywolf, and (of course) in WWB's Ecco Anthology.