The Sorrow Gondola

A Page from the Nightbook

from The Sorrow Gondola

By Tomas Tranströmer

One night in May I stepped ashore
through a cool moonlight
where the grass and flowers were gray
but smelled green.

I drifted the slope
in the colorblind night
while white stones
signaled to the moon.

In a period
a few minutes long
and fifty-eight years wide.

And behind me
beyond the lead-shimmering water
lay the other shore
and those who ruled.

People with a future
instead of faces.

–From The Sorrow Gondola, by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl, Green Integer Books, 2010. Click here for Green Integer’s ordering information on this title.

*

Translator’s Note:

I first encountered Tomas Tranströmer’s work through Samuel Charters’ translation of the book-length poem Baltics (Oyez, 1975). For me, Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry is uncontainable, organic, apparitional, and wrought with simultaneities. His work is stripped down to an acute, essential lyricism that he finds in the natural world and the wilderness of the imagination. He has always been outside of academic circles and has never belonged to an aesthetic movement. His background is in psychology, the piano, and entomology. He writes with spiritual overtones yet avoids the trappings of religious poetry. He alludes to political peril and the great human failings of our recent history yet he does so without pandering to didacticism. His allegiances are to liminal spaces, hinterlands, intersections, border crossings, and the images that take us there.

–Michael McGriff